Horrific and systematic abuses of women occurring in other parts of the world demand our attention. In May, while British officials were preparing for the “expected” explosion of domestic battery from World Cup watchers, the Islamic Republic of Iran was granted a seat on the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women. Human-rights activists protested, pointing out Iran’s appalling record of tyranny, cruelty, and injustice to women. Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad shot back that Iranian women are far better off than women in the West. “What is left of women’s dignity in the West?” he asked. “Is there any love and kindness left?” He then declared that in Europe almost 70 percent of housewives are beaten by their husbands.
That was a self-serving lie. British women, with few exceptions, are safe and free. Iranian women are not. But the lurid posters of women’s beaten bodies and the bloody T-shirts (one with the legend “Strike Her” emblazoned above a big zero) and the bogus statistics give wings to such lies. How that helps women cope with real abuse in Britain, the United States, or anywhere else remains a mystery.
Maybe it’s because I’m from Alaska (state motto: The Last Frontier), but I have great reverence for the women of the American frontier. We forget how much the frontier is a part of our national character, even today. In my own childhood we grew vegetables out back, warmed our house with the wood we chopped, and hunted much of what we ate. Alaska breeds a kind of self-reliance that has gone out of style in much of the rest of the country. But the spirit of the frontier still lives in American hearts.
All of us know what this means. Whether you read the wonderful “Little House” books of Laura Ingalls Wilder, as I did as a kid, or watched Little House on the Prairie on television, or Hollywood epics such as How the West Was Won, you got a glimpse of the men and women who led the movement westward, and how they shaped the American character. The historian Frederick Jackson Turner believed that the frontier was the most important factor in shaping the American character and making ours an exceptional nation. In fact, as Turner wrote, the experience of the frontier produced a “new product that is American”; one that was different from Europe—freer, more democratic, and less focused on class differences. Even today, we tend to move around and change jobs and careers more frequently than people in any other country. It’s in our DNA. It’s a birthright shared by all Americans.
The frontier also produced a different kind of woman. Indeed, it is a largely overlooked fact of American history that it was on the western frontier that women first won the right to vote. In 1869, more than sixty years before the Twentieth Amendment gave all American women the right to vote, the territory of Wyoming extended the franchise to women. Motivated by both the need to attract marriageable women and the sheer force of the frontier women who worked, hunted, and pioneered alongside frontier men, other western states were the first to follow suit. This trend even reached the distant North. When the twenty-three men of the very first Alaskan territorial legislature convened in Juneau in 1913 (some arriving by dogsled), the first thing they did was give Alaskan women the vote.
The advance of women’s rights on the American frontier was the result of the hard work of many amazing women who have virtually been written out of modern histories of the women’s movement. Why? There are many, many stories of the grit and determination of these original suffragettes. Sometimes they had what today would be described as politically incorrect views; most times they wore sensible shoes. At all times they were as rugged and independent as the men they lived and worked beside—as rugged and independent as America itself. They could shoot a gun and push a plow and raise a family—all at the same time. Our frontier foremothers loved this country and made sacrifices to carve out a living. They literally went where no women had gone before!
Virtually whitewashed out of the history of the women’s movement are women like Caroline Nichols Churchill, a wife and mother who was widowed before she was fifty. In 1879 she founded the first women’s rights newspaper in Denver, called the Colorado Antelope, which was later renamed the Queen Bee. When the citizens of Colorado voted to give women the vote in 1893, it was Churchill who declared, “This shall be the land for women!” So why have feminist historians overlooked her? Perhaps because, in addition to being pro–women’s rights, she was pro–gun rights, seriously pro–gun rights.
Caroline Nichols Churchill was jolted from a sound sleep by a hammering on the door of her Georgetown, Colorado, boarding room.
“I paid for that room!” a man bellowed from the hallway. “You’ve got to get out of it.”
It was two in the morning and Caroline was exhausted after a long day selling newspaper subscriptions in the mining communities west of Boulder. But she quickly shook the grogginess from her head.
“You leave that door instantly or you will have a ball put into your carcass, if not more than one,” she called back.
“Fire away,” sneered the intruder.
Not one to be intimidated, Caroline snatched up her pistol, aimed, and pulled the trigger three times in quick succession. Three slugs tore through the door, but Caroline heard no cries of pain or thud of a body against the floorboards. She figured the man had ducked out of harm’s way and slunk quietly downstairs. She waited until morning to complain to the desk clerk about the intrusion, but instead of offering his sympathy, he demanded that she pay for the night’s lodging, however restless it might have been.
True to her nature, Caroline made sure she had the last word about the incident. When she got back to her Denver home that summer of 1879, she described the affair in her feisty feminist newspaper The Antelope. Six weeks later she learned that the inn had closed because business had plummeted.
“Such is the fate of tyrants,” she gloated.
One of the frontier feminists closest to my heart was the first female member of the Alaska Territorial House of Representatives, the wonderfully named Crystal Brilliant Snow Jenne. Jenne first came to Alaska when she was just three years old, in 1887. Her family was part of a small troupe of actors who wanted to bring some culture to the miners who dominated the territory. When her father caught the gold bug himself, Crystal and her family made a harrowing trip through the infamous Chilkoot Pass en route to the Yukon Territory near the Alaskan border. They survived a surprise blizzard by digging in a snow cave and living there for three days before a rescue party found them.
After spending some time Outside (as Alaskans term the Lower 48), Crystal returned to Juneau in 1914 and, when the youngest of her three children was thirteen, became the first woman to run for the Territorial House of Representatives. She lost her first race, then her second, her third, and her fourth. Finally, in 1940, she was successful. At a time when she could have, with great justification, considered herself a victim of anti-female bias, Jenne regarded herself as anything but. And at a time when she could have appealed to the shared resentment of other women in order to win votes, Jenne appealed to them as citizens, no more and no less. Here’s how she described herself to the voters of southeastern Alaska in 1936:
I firmly believe that what is needed in our Legislature today is a real representative of the people whose qualifications are honesty, common sense, knowledge of conditions, aggressiveness, independence, and fearlessness, together with business ability and experience. . . .
On her first day as the lone woman in the Alaska Territorial Legislature, Jenne jotted down some notes to herself, which she entitled “Idle Thoughts of a Woman Legislator, by the Honorable Crystal Snow Jenne, member, 15th session Territorial Legislature”:
Dear, dear, I’m the odd one again . . . I vote “no” to spending the Territory’s money for nothing.
I am “invited” (with apologies) to remain away from the American Legion dinner for legislators! No offence, I’m sure. The stag oratory will have little or no bearing on legislative matters, I imagine. Far be it from me to cramp the boys’ style! I feel justly prou
d that these men all know I shall neither weep nor faint if they notify me that my presence is unwelcome.
Watch your step, Jenne. Fight for your convictions, but don’t be a wind-bag. It gets you just nowhere. With honorable colleagues facts win—and with the other kind, know your opponent and trump the trick.
My hero(ine)!
Judging by the emergence of the mama grizzlies, it’s becoming more acceptable to call yourself a pro-career, pro-family, pro-motherhood, and pro-life feminist. But judging from the reaction among liberal feminists, you would think these emerging conservative feminists had stolen their copyright on the word. Feminist icon Gloria Steinem even declared that no woman who believes abortion is wrong can call herself a feminist. A writer in the Washington Post hyperventilated that the women of the emerging conservative feminist identity represented by the mama grizzlies “don’t support women’s rights, [so] how can they paint their movement as pro-woman? Why are they not being laughed out of the room?” The liberal Daily Kos website simply harrumphed: “Republicans have some nerve.”
Some nerve, indeed. Modern feminism has for decades equated being pro-abortion with being pro-woman. In the years following Roe v. Wade, we were told that the issue was no longer open for debate and that we should just get over it and move on. But Americans, including American women, haven’t simply “moved on” and ignored this issue of conscience. According to a 2009 Gallup poll, more Americans consider themselves “pro-life” than “pro-choice” today—including more women. The pro-abortion orthodoxy of liberal feminists has been shattered by the ultrasounds that now allow us to see a human life forming and a heart beating as early as six weeks into a pregnancy. Despite the Supreme Court’s 1973 ruling, American women and men haven’t been able to get over the stirrings of their consciences or move on from an issue that cuts to the heart of who we are as a people. Affirming the dignity and worth of every innocent human life and defending the defenseless are fundamental American values.
Liberal feminism tells American women that they can’t value life and call themselves women. But more and more women are rejecting this cynical message. I came across a remarkable piece on the Washington Post’s “On Faith” blog by columnist Colleen Carroll Campbell that revealed the liberal feminist argument for what it is: a false choice. Campbell explained that growing numbers of women today “reject the false dichotomy of abortion-centric feminism that says respect for human dignity is a zero-sum game in which a woman can win only if her unborn child loses.”
For many American women, the feminism that once attracted them with its lofty goal of promoting respect for women’s dignity has morphed into something antithetical to that dignity: a movement that equates a woman’s liberation with her license to kill her unborn child, marginalizes people of faith if they support even modest restrictions on abortion, and colludes with a sexist culture eager to convince a woman in crisis that dealing with her unplanned pregnancy is her choice and, therefore, her problem.
Many women are not buying it. They are attracted instead to the message of groups like Feminists for Life, which tells women facing unplanned pregnancies that they should “refuse to choose” between having a future and having a baby. They believe that the best way for a woman to defend her own dignity is to defend the dignity of each and every human person, including the one that grows within her womb. . . . This rising pro-life sentiment among women has begun to surface in public opinion polls. A 2007 study from Overbrook Research tracked the abortion views of women in Missouri, considered to be a bellwether state on such issues. Researchers found that the share of Missouri women identifying themselves as “strongly pro-life” rose from 28 percent in 1992 to 37 percent in 2006, with the ranks of the “strongly pro-choice” shrinking from about a third to a quarter of Missouri women. This pro-life shift was even more pronounced among young women.
Abortion-rights activists have noticed this trend, and it worries them. Recently, Newsweek published an article in which NARAL president Nancy Keenan described her fellow abortion-rights crusaders as members of the “postmenopausal militia.” She noted with concern that the youthful enthusiasm in the abortion debate seems to be on the pro-life side. Upon seeing the swarms of hundreds of thousands of participants at this year’s March for Life in Washington, D.C., many of them motivated equally by religious faith and concern for human rights, Keenan said: “I just thought, my gosh, they are so young. There are so many of them, and they are so young.”
Indeed, they are. They are young, their ranks are growing, and the girls and women among them are not buying yesterday’s orthodoxy about the inextricable link between abortion and women’s liberation. No matter how many times the feminist establishment tells them to sit down and shut up, they show no signs of doing so. Let the debate over the true meaning of feminism begin.
Together, the pro-woman, pro-life sisterhood is telling the young women of America that they are capable of handling an unintended pregnancy and still pursue a career and an education. Strangely, many feminists seem to want to tell these young women that they’re not capable, that you can’t give your child life and still pursue your dreams. Their message is: “Women, you are not strong enough or smart enough to do both. You are not capable.”
The new feminism is telling women they are capable and strong. And if keeping a child isn’t possible, adoption is a beautiful choice. It’s about empowering women to make real choices, not forcing them to accept false ones. It’s about compassion and letting these scared young women know that there will be some help there for them to raise their children in those less-than-ideal circumstances.
I believe this so strongly because I’ve been there. I never planned on being the mother of a son with special needs. I thought, God will never give me something I can’t handle. And when I found out that my baby would be born with Down syndrome, I thought immediately, Hey, God, remember you promised you wouldn’t give me something I couldn’t handle? Well, I don’t think I can handle this. This wasn’t part of my life’s plan, and I was scared.
I didn’t know if my heart was ready. I didn’t know if I was patient and nurturing enough. My sister Heather has a child with autism, and I always thought, See, God knows what he’s doing. He gave Heather an autistic child because she’s the more nurturing one. She can handle it.
But when Trig was born I understood that God did know what he was doing! What at first seemed like an overwhelming challenge has turned into our greatest blessing. All the time, it seems that God was whispering in my ear and saying, Are you going to trust me? Are you going to walk the walk or just talk the talk? But when they laid Trig in my arms and he just kind of melted into my chest, he seemed to say to me, See, Mom, God knows what he’s doing. He gave me to you and you to me and this is going to be a wonderful journey.
I want to help other women who are in the same situation. Women who may be thinking that these are less-than-ideal circumstances to have a child, and maybe I can just make this go away and we’ll pretend it never happened. I want to tell them that if you give this life a chance, your life truly will change for the better. Todd and I know that Trig will teach us more than we’ll ever be able to teach him. He gives us such awesome perspective on what really matters. Trig has been the best thing that has ever happened to me and the Palin family.
Bristol, too, didn’t expect to be pregnant at seventeen, but I’m proud that she chose life. She knew it wouldn’t be easy, and it hasn’t been. She now sees that what seemed like one of life’s greatest challenges is now her precious baby. Not an easy road, but the right road.
I am and always have been unapologetically pro-life. What Bristol and I both went through hasn’t changed my pro-life view, but it has changed my perspective. I understand much better why a woman might be tempted to take what seems like the easy way out and change the circumstances. I understand what goes through her mind, even if for a brief moment, a split second, because I’ve been there. What my f
amily has experienced in the last two years has reaffirmed and strengthened my support for life at every stage. Choosing life may not be the easiest path, but it’s always the right path. I’ve had that confirmation. The timing or the circumstances may not be perfect, but God sees a way when we cannot, and he does not make mistakes. Bristol and I both put our faith in that belief and we’re learning together that what can seem like life’s greatest challenge can turn out to be life’s greatest blessing.
What is hardest to take about liberals calling the emerging conservative feminist identity anti-feminist or even anti-woman is that this new crop of female leaders represents a return to what the women’s movement originally was. The women’s movement used to be about honoring for women the same God-given rights that our country honored for men. It used to be about dignity and hope. It used to be about respecting women by respecting their choices—whether it is to be a nuclear engineer or a stay-at-home mom—not denigrating them when they aren’t sufficiently like men. And it used to be about respecting women’s unique role in creating and sustaining life.
Founders of the American women’s movement such as Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton did not believe abortion was good for women. Quite the contrary, they saw the rights of the unborn child as fundamentally linked to the rights of women. Stanton, who had seven children herself, once wrote to a friend, “When we consider that women are treated as property, it is degrading to women that we should treat our children as property to be disposed of as we see fit.”
Susan B. Anthony saw the fight for the rights of the unborn as part of the broader fight for women’s rights. She wrote to fellow suffragist Frances Willard in 1889, “Sweeter even than to have had the joy of children of my own has it been for me to help bring about a better state of things for mothers generally, so that their unborn little ones could not be willed away from them.” And Alice Paul, the author of the original Equal Rights Amendment in 1923, said, “Abortion is the ultimate exploitation of women.”