Palin Gets Some History Right

The Geek likes Sarah Palin. It's not as if he would vote for her should she run for president. He wouldn't. The reason is not that she is a woman. Nor is it her position on abortion. It is not even that she went to a no-name, generic university.

Rather it is her lack of experience relevant to the office of president. Having been the gov of Alaska just doesn't cut it.

Sometimes lack of experience matters as the less than spectacular presidencies of such under qualified occupants of the Oval as Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and the current incumbent demonstrate all too well. Ms Palin belongs in the same category.

She does have some truly admirable qualities. Chief among them is her often demonstrated ability to jump back into the fray after one more undeserved attack by members of the self-appointed elites, the hoi oligoi of our country. Anther is her capacity to have unadulterated fun before an audience. With this comes her unmatched skill at turning attacks back on those who berate her. (Remember the billingsgate which came after a photo showed she had written notes to herself on the palm of her hand?)

Many of these features she shares with the Republican icon, Ronald Reagan. She also holds a deep seated faith in both herself and the American people in common with Mr Reagan. That is a very important and vastly underrated factor in her successes to date as it was thirty years ago when Reagan bested the dour, pinched, think-small Jimmy Carter.

Now, Ms Palin has added yet one more aspect to her public persona which gets the thumbs-up from the Geek. She can actually get aspects of American history right. Better, the getting-it-right is on an area of our history too often overlooked or willfully ignored by the proponents of feminism over the past forty years.

In her speech to the Susan B. Anthony List convention over the weekend, Ms Palin correctly noted the existence of an older, more robust form of feminism which was a hallmark of the American frontier, the American West, the farmlands of this country for many, many, generations. She characterized this earlier American feminism as "gun-toting" and "tough."

Her word choice is accurate. So also was her observation that the men of the frontier, the West, and the more-than-slightly demanding grain-belt-to-be, so appreciated the fact that the women in their lives were tough, competent, and quite willing to carry their end of the log that the right of women to vote and hold public office came first to the states of the West.

During the Nineteenth Century the status and role of women were sharply demarcated between the urban based "cult of domesticity" which characterized the civilized, long-settled regions of the East Coast, tidewater South, and portions of the Midwest and the callus-handed, sunburned women behind plows, wagons, and guns on the frontier and in the West.

In the East the rise of industrialism, the splitting of work from home, and the relative peace and prosperity meant that society, particularly the overly polite society of the new middle class, could afford the luxury of putting half the population into comfortable purdah. In the West, on the frontier, and in the very hard pressed urban working class, the consigning of women to a segregated pedestal, a civilized sort of harem, was prohibited by the stern demands of life, of survival.

While Ms Palin, unfortunately, does not include the legions, the generations of immigrant and working class women who lived lives of a rigor which can be scarcely imagined today from her ode to "pioneer" women, she at least properly gives credit to the rugged women who raised families, spent hours staring at the south end of north bound mules, chopped wood, drew water, and, on more than a few occasions, fought Indians. From the days of earliest settlement, when the "frontier" was found only a couple of miles in from the Atlantic Ocean on to the years just before World War II, women carried their end of uncountable logs along with the men in their lives. Life, not just its quality but its very continuance demanded equality of effort, equality of sacrifice, equality of ability.

Raised as he was in the lingering culture of the Apache as well as the far from dead frontier ethos of New Mexico, the Geek has always been very well aware that success of the most basic unit of society--the committed relationship of man and woman--depended upon fundamental equality. It is only by the meshing of complementary capacities that individual weaknesses can be countered for the benefit of the unit. The more demanding the context of life becomes, the recognition of essential equality likewise emerges as ever more critical.

Ms Palin makes specific reference to the sort of feminism found in the faculty lounges of Eastern universities and compares it with the more blunt, more robust sort imposed by the nature of life in the West or on the frontier. Her comparison was both apt and amusing.

As the Geek listened to the plaints and wails of his feminist co-workers at a couple of different universities back East he always made a mental comparison of just how little basis existed for the lamentations of these successful albeit spoiled products of the suburban middle class when considered in conjunction with the routine "sufferings" of women in the New Mexico Territory only a century earlier. How many of these damsels in distress could have done what women of the New Mexico Territory did after the Apache had burned down the house, wounded, or killed their man, despoiled the crops, run off with the cattle and other indigenous amusements?

Or, how real were the complaints and resentments of the faculty feminists faced with the purported abuses of the pale penis people in comparison with those undergone by the wives of miners as the Pinkerton agents and state militiamen opened fire to break the strike? It is all well and good to end the lingering disabilities imposed primarily on the women of the more civilized eastern US as part of the "cult of domesticity," but at the same time it must be acknowledged that these disabilities were accepted by women of an earlier day as a sign of the stability, prosperity, and security of urban middle class existence.

In the ruder, cruder, far more raw life of the urban working class, the new immigrant, the sod-busting farmer of the Great Plains, the Western miner, rancher, logger, the degree of inequality inherent to life was far, far less because inequality like the failure of a man to cherish, respect, and celebrate the woman in his life would be tantamount to a collective suicide note. Coming as she does from Western roots and an Alaskan context, Ms Palin intuitively understands and appreciates this as she does the vast historical gulf between the ladies of the eastern urban middle class and the women of the West.

Congratulations to you, Ms Palin. It is easier now to understand why you have been repeatedly viewed and described as "the wrong sort of woman" by the Ladies of the Lounge. The Geek won't vote for you, Ms Palin, but he appreciates your valuable history lesson.