Morals and Mores: FeminismUSA: Sarah Palin infuriates old-style liberal Feminism

This is the best overview treatment yet that i've found regarding Feminism USA, after the arrival of the Tea Party.

Hat Tip to Don McNally. Click it up and read it in its entirety, i suggest.

-- EconoMix

KAY S. HYMOWITZ, City journal

Sarah Palin and the Battle for Feminism

The ex-governor and her Mama Grizzlies argue that the real women’s issue is our country’s fiscal future.

DAVID HOWELLS/CORBIS

Palin has emerged as a favorite of the Tea Partiers, a majority of whom are women.

When Sarah Palin took the podium in St. Paul to accept her nomination for the vice presidency in September 2008, calm and collected feminists might have recalled the old saw: Be careful what you wish for. Here she was, an ambitious political woman with the sort of egalitarian marriage that would put the Swedes to shame. Here she was, a charismatic, working-class heroine who oozed folksy provincialism with the naturalness of Lyndon Johnson in the same breath as she cheered her Hillary Clintonesque assault on the “glass ceiling.” Yes, here she was—clinging to her guns, her religion, and her babies, and saying, and apparently believing, all the wrong things.

But “calm and collected” are not the words that come to mind to describe the feminist response to the governor from Alaska. The young feminist Jessica Grose, writing on the popular website Jezebel just after the Republican convention, was—well, we’ll let her describe it: “When Palin spoke on Wednesday night, my head almost exploded from the incandescent anger boiling in my skull. . . . What I feel for her privately could be described as violent, nay, murderous, rage.” Grose’s readers left more than 700 comments, according to the late New York Sun, including one from a reader who wanted to “vomit with rage.” Other haters damned Palin as a traitor to her sex or an “insult to women,” as Judith Warner spat in the New York Times. “Turncoat bitch!” the comedian Sandra Bernhard railed in a performance caught on YouTube. “You whore in your cheap fucking . . . cheap-ass plastic glasses and your hair up!” Writing on aWashington Post blog, Wendy Doniger, a Hinduism specialist at the University of Chicago Divinity School, topped them all: Palin’s “greatest hypocrisy is in her pretense that she is a woman.”

However excessive their frothing, feminists had good reason to be in panic mode. ...