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The F-card won't wash

"The New York Post calls her "a feminist dream". National Public Radio asks if she's the "new face of feminism". And The Wall Street Journal, ever subtle, calls it "Sarah Palin Feminism". I call it well-spun garbage. (Yes, I'd even call it a pig in lipstick.)

It seems you can't open a newspaper or turn on the television without running across a piece about how the Republican vice-presidential candidate, Sarah Palin, is not just a feminist, but the feminist — a sign that all is right in the US when it comes to gender equality.

Palin's conservative cohorts are claiming her candidacy as a win for women and proof that it's Republicans who are the real agents of change. After all, what more could American women want in a vice-presidential candidate than a well-coiffed "hockey mom"?

Never mind that Palin talks about her teen daughter's decision to keep her child while awaiting the chance to take that choice away from American women. Don't worry about how Palin cut funding for a transitional home for teenage mothers. And forget that, under Palin's mayoralty, women in Wasilla, Alaska, were forced to pay for their own rape kits to the tune of up to $US1200."

So begins a piece by Jessica Valenti [an author writing an op-ed in The Guardian] who poses more than a reasonable question. Is Palin good for women, let alone America?

Read the full piece here.

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