TalentTuning

It’s just about the lamest card in the pack of criticisms leveled at powerful women: you must be a Bad Mother. Just when you think we’ve accepted that a woman can have a job and still love her children, along comes another piece of reporting to remind us that some people still think it’s fair to judge a female public figure on the basis of what kind of parent—and wife—she is. This is something male politicians, who have long perfected the role of absent father, deal with very, very rarely.

The target of this most recent slur, in a new feature in Vanity Fair, is Sarah Palin. Journalist Michael Gross opens the piece with a story of Palin manipulating crowds by arranging for her undeniably cute young daughter Piper to walk onstage once she has finished: “As the child appears, a loud and doting ‘Awwww’ melts through the crowd.”

Hardly a novel approach for a politician wooing an audience. Yet the piece goes on to count the ways in which Palin is a neglectful and selfish parent, and an abusive spouse. Imagine, politicians who let their spouses pick up the slack on the home front and encourage their kids to campaign with them. Who doesn’t? When will women stop being made to feeling guilty about this? This is why feminists immediately rolled their eyes—and several, who despise Palin’s politics, grudgingly protested.

Monika Bauerlein, the coeditor of Mother Jones, wrote on Twitter: “I didn’t think anything could make me rear up in Sarah Palin’s defense, but this [Vanity Fair article] is close.”

Blogger Melissa McEwan wrote: “I remain constantly infuriated at the number of pieces written about Sarah Palin that compel feminist/womanist women to come to her defense, or, at minimum, point out the absurdity of the coverage. I will continue to defend Sarah Palin against misogynist smears not because I endorse her or her politics, but because that’s how feminism works.”

Yet, while this may make many of us frustrated and angry with a persistent sexism in the media, it is not likely to soften people’s attitudes to Palin for long. Just as attacks on her credibility and intelligence are unlikely to sway her supporters, so sexist attacks on her parenting—or even snipes at her appearance (including an odd claim from a “friend” that she wore a push-up bra to a meeting “so I can get what I want tonight”)—are unlikely to shift her detractors. People tend to be far more tolerant of sexism—or, sometimes, entirely blind to it—when they dislike the woman it is leveled at, as Hillary Clinton experienced. Obviously, all politicians have flaws—gender bias is usually evident in how much weight we give those flaws, how worthy of dissecting we consider them to be, and for how long we think it pertinent to be discussing them. But in this case, it is a problem that Palin’s parenting is considered a flaw at all.

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