Who Do We Think She Is?

By DeNeen L. Brown
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, September 12, 2008

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin's nomination as the Republican vice presidential candidate has stirred the hypocrite within us. Women judging women.

We watch the polls while examining her stockings. We listen to her speech while calculating how many bobby pins hold up her hairdo. We parse her record while commenting on the shade of her lipstick. We measure our child-rearing skills against hers. She's a hockey mom. We are soccer (or swimming or softball) moms. We can give a pretty good PTA pep talk, and nobody asked us to be vice president.

But wait. In her circumstances -- five children, one a baby with Down syndrome, one a pregnant, unmarried teenager -- would we want to be vice president? We gather at the playground or in office cubicles and question her choices, knowing that to do so is sexist, the very thing so many women have fought against. "We never have these conversations about men," said Kavita N. Ramdas, president and CEO of the Global Fund for Women, which promotes women's rights worldwide.

Still, women are debating, partly because Palin herself injected motherhood into the campaign.

For Sherma Farray, a Frederick mother of three young children, the internal argument went like this: "How is she going to run for vice president with five kids? . . . Then I said to myself, 'She is doing it already in Alaska, she can do it in the White House.' Then I saw the picture of that baby, and I thought, 'She is going to need a lot of help.' The vice president goes all over. Makes big decisions. Then she will have a grandbaby on the way. That's a big responsibility."

Finally, Farray concluded, "I just cannot see myself sitting around the meeting table when my family is going to need attention."

Maureen Carrington, a 40-year-old mother of three who runs a business from her Silver Spring home, came down on the other side of the question. "This lady seems to be a powerhouse. I don't think there's anything she can't do" -- including raising children and holding the nation's second-highest office.

Like many women, Carrington admires and identifies with Palin. "I'm not a member of the NRA," she said, "but I've had to do a lot by myself. I learned to be independent. I get up at 5 a.m. every day. I work my tail off like a lot of women. I see that in her. I think she works her tail off."

Heather Maurano, 35, is excited by Palin. "I'm a mom of three small daughters," said Maurano, who lives in Silver Spring. "I think it is great to have a role model for them. At this point, I'm staying home with them. I respect the fact she is doing it all, and it's great."

So it appears that we have a superwoman running for vice president, soaring above other mothers who are trying to balance work and family. Pro or con, the discussion about Palin's choices is a process of comparison for women, because that's what so many of us do: measure ourselves against other women, contrast our lives to theirs, compare our careers with her meteoric rise. Would we choose as she did? Could we do what she's doing? How does she do it?

But there is another component to the conversation. Palin has burst onto the political scene from a state far away, geographically and culturally. Suddenly she has become the symbol of Everywoman, the working mother who broke the glass ceiling that so many women have tossed stones at. Standing on their shoulders, she has emerged on the other side.

Now many women are trying to square Palin's sudden status as the most famous female politician since Hillary Clinton with her political views about women. On some level, we despise ourselves for judging the first GOP vice presidential nominee among us. On another, we feel entitled to scrutinize her choices because she would like to dictate many of ours.

"It's ironic that the party that tends to be less supportive of women has managed to get a woman in as their vice presidential candidate," said Linda M. Hahn, 49, a Potomac mother of four ranging in age from 8 to 25. "But her private views and her voting views hurt women. It's like she doesn't make sense to me."

But why should she have to? "We would never dream that a male candidate would have to reflect the fears and worries of all men," Ramdas says. "So now it's Sarah Palin. Before that, it was Hillary Clinton. What will she do for women? How will she represent women?" She says the term "women's issues" is misleading: "It is as if we don't care about war and peace. Or we don't care about education. Or we don't care about the environment."

Still, women's rights are at the core of the election for some women. Nancy Bagwell, 65, a retired nurse who lives in Arlington, sees Palin's candidacy unraveling everything her generation fought for. "She wants to impose her views about reproductive rights on everybody. She has this idea that . . . God says even with incest or a genetic defect, you have to have this child. I certainly wouldn't want to have that imposed on women. It doesn't affect me. I'm way over reproductive age. This is not my question. This is a question of women who are poor . . . and under the thumb of male dominance. All of a sudden, they get pregnant and have to have this child. It's about poor people. . . . Those are the women I'm speaking for."

While many women celebrate Palin's decision to have a baby with Down syndrome, and her daughter's decision to keep her baby and marry her boyfriend, as living proof of her anti-abortion position, others see a moral gap between her commitment to "family values" and the projected picture of her family.

"She does have a child who is about to have a child," said Tonda Bean, a Silver Spring mother of two, who stays home with her daughters, 11 and 15. "There is attention that could have been paid. . . . The research I've read says you can circumvent some problems if you are with them enough. You can keep them out of certain activity."

In view of Bristol Palin's pregnancy at 17, Bean is concerned by Sarah Palin's stance favoring abstinence-only sex education. "What is missing," Bean said, "is to tell them about contraceptives. I wonder whether she will reform her position on that."

So while we probe Palin's conservatism, we also question how she could expose her daughter to national scrutiny, and wonder whether somebody else's pregnant daughter would be similarly embraced by a religious right that has not hesitated to criticize other famous unwed mothers, real (teenage pop star Jamie Lynn Spears) or imagined (TV sitcom character Murphy Brown).

"If it was the other way around, and it was Barack Obama's daughter," Farray said, "you would not hear the end of it."

Three women sat in an Indian restaurant in Gaithersburg last week, talking business, talking about Palin.

"The fact she has a pregnant teenage daughter when preaching abstinence, why is that okay?" asked Laura Levengard, a personal trainer who has two children.

"Some would say putting herself in the public eye was not fair to her daughter," Linda Hahn said. "That subjects her daughter to public shame."

"Why does a 17-year-old have to be married?" Levengard wondered.

The conversation turned inward and became an examination of their own lives.

"I've always done what I wanted to do: stayed home and watched the kids Monday through Friday and run my business on the weekend," Levengard said, recalling her former occupation. "I think you can do it all."

Then she told a story about mentioning to her brother that she had an out-of-town business opportunity. Her brother's response caught her off guard: "But who will watch the kids?"

"The same question wouldn't be asked of your husband," said Hahn, who has a business training company. "Who's going to watch the kids?"

"The personal choice we make -- our choices are because our lives are what they are," said Sylvia Henderson, another business owner. "That's life. We choose to be married or single. We choose to have kids or not. They are personal choices I've had to make whether someone likes them or not. My personal choices are made to feel comfortable with me. In my skin. I resent the fact we have to explain our choices."

But we want Palin to explain hers.

On Urbanmamas.com, a Web site for mothers, one posting absolved us of our curiosity: "It's ok to judge the mothering decisions of a vice presidential candidate," this mother wrote, "as it opens a window to her decision-making process (and after all, we're supposed to judge her as she's a politician and we get to vote)."

Then she raised The Question: "Would you run for a major office while your children were young?"

Palin has reignited the never-resolved mommy wars -- not the old ones between mothers who stay home and those who work, but the ones inside every mother who has a choice. Should a woman nourish her personal ambitions to succeed at her career while trying to raise a family? Was it selfish or superhuman of Palin to go back to work almost immediately after her son's birth? Was it fair to her constituents, the residents of Alaska? After all, most mothers remember barely functioning from lack of sleep when they had new babies. Is it anybody's business?

"The recent debate about Sarah Palin's choice to go back to work three days after her fifth baby was born (and what that means for the 'little' people's parental leave rights) . . . have got me thinking about selfishness," a mother said on Urbanmamas.com. "When do we cross the line between caring for ourselves (whether that be reading a good book or furthering our career) and giving our children appropriate attention? Must good parenting be about entirely sublimating our own interests to focus every moment on our progeny? I think most of our behavior rides the line, not entirely healthy for our kids, but not entirely servicing our sanity either."

Jill Miller Zimon, 46, mother of three and a contributing editor at BlogHer.com, wants to know how Palin rides that line.

"There is no evidence in how she does the juggling," Zimon said. " . . . There's no way to know how she does it all. We don't know how she juggles. I want to know, because I juggle. . . . I would love to see inside Sarah Palin's house because I know what my house looks like at 6:15 in the morning when I'm trying to get my kids off to school."

We think about this as we fly from our downtown office to pick up the kid from day care, fry up some chicken, fold a load of laundry, clear the dining room table, wash the dishes, scrub the frying pan, get the kid to bed, finish our office work by midnight and drag the body to bed. And get up to do it all again another day. Can women do it all?

Levengard has decided: "We can do it all."

Hahn disagreed. While other mothers hurried off to get their children from school, she and Levengard remained at the table, picking over the question of Palin and the election and the choices women make.

"You literally can't do everything," Hahn said. "We can say we can do it all. We've had to say that to break in and have careers. But in reality at a certain point, no matter how smart or intelligent you are, you max out. There are only so many hours in a day."

Levengard pressed her point: "Did you ever not feed your kids dinner [or] bail on the fundraiser?"

"No," Hahn said, "but sometimes they had crummy dinners."