2008: A "really bad year" for women?

Jim Cunningham of The Examiner has written a pretty depressing list called "The Top 10 Political Train Wrecks of 2008"*.

At number two, sandwiched right in between "A poke in the eye for gay rights" and "The end of John Edwards' political career" is "The hijacking of feminism." Cunningham takes the time to hit all the standard targets, like the tendency of Hillary supporters to blame her primary losses on sexism rather than on her badly-run campaign, and of course, the selection of Sarah Palin, who couldn't put together a coherent policy position (or sentence) but had one hell of a set of ovaries, as well as Hillary's supporters' claims that they would support the McCain-Palin ticket, "apparently willing to overlook all else to see a woman in the Executive Branch of government." He then concludes:

I may have a penis**, but even I know that Feminism is about rights and equality, and not something that should be used as a crutch, bludgeon, or marketing tool whenever it’s convenient. This year we saw a lot of opportunism dressed up as feminism. Ultimately, such things hurt the movement and I believe history will show that, for women, 2008 was a really bad year.

So if 2008 was a year of dressing up opportunism as feminism, does this mean that feminism has finally become palatable to the general public? If we've arrived at the point where more sinister motives are being disguised as feminism, wouldn't it suggest that feminism, and feminists, are considered admirable? If that's the case, then half our work is done: "feminism" is no longer a dirty word. Far from it, a feminist is what you want people to think you are while you're actually being brazenly sexist by replacing one set of ovaries with another.

Unfortunately, while I think that Cunningham is absolutely right about opportunism in feminist clothing, I don't think that we've arrived at a place where feminism - equal rights, opportunities and access for both genders - has become palatable and admirable to the general public. Rather, I think that "feminism" been redefined so that any woman who's "strong-willed" and "confident" gets to call herself a feminist. Unfortunately, there are plenty of strong-willed and confident anti-feminists out there too (Phyllis Schlafly, anyone?), so it takes more than a strong will to make a woman a feminist. As for Palin, in the words of Feministing's Ann Friedman, a woman candidate is not the same as a women's candidate: if you're not going to stand up for the rights of women, you don't get to wear that label, no matter how strong-willed you might be.

Cunningham's conclusion is that 2008 was a bad year for women, but there were glimmers of (watch out, here comes the h-word) hope. Many women rejected Palin, with some viewing her selection for the ticket as an insult to their intelligence. Many women saw through her "folksy" charm to her anti-woman record.
And many women were intelligent enough to say to themselves, "if this candidate were named Sam Palin, he'd be laughed off the ticket for his complete lack of knowledge about politics, to say nothing of basic geography" (to any Sam Palins out there, no, Africa is not a country). In other words, while a lot of voters, male and female, were rightfully upset by the sometimes sexist treatment that both Clinton and Palin received at the hands of the media, they were intelligent enough to notice that, politically, Palin was being held to a much lower standard than she would have been were she a male candidate. And feminism that is not: the idea that we should expect anything less from women than we expect from men, especially when they're running for the second most powerful position in the country, is straight up, no-two-ways-about-it sexism.

As 2008 showed us, women have come a long way, and we have a long way yet to go. But all is not lost. Despite a serious hijacking of feminism by people who wouldn't even rank women's wellbeing on their Top Ten list of priorities, people who put "women's health" in derisive air quotes, this year hasn't been all bad news. We don't have a President McCain or a Vice President Palin, and with any luck, we'll see a smooth transition into the administration of Barack Obama and into an effective, diplomacy-centered State Department headed by Hillary Clinton.

And, because it's possible that Cunningham is right, and that 2008 was indeNew Year's Eve:
My wish for 2009 is that this time next year, we can look back over a year full of more remarkable achievements and glass-ceiling shattering both here and abroad, in the public eye and in our everyday lives.

*Ugh, we're all so list-happy this time of year, it's like one big month-long episode of Letterman. I mean, honestly, it makes me want to write out all the things I hate about Top Ten lists, numbering each complaint in a way that indicates the descending severity with which I hate each item. Oh, wait...

**This kind of makes me want to start every sentence I write about men with the precursor, "I may have a vagina, but..." Just to clear up any ambiguity.