When Everything Changed (55 page)

Palin had been able to mix her two roles, unlike most working mothers, whose employers preferred not to be reminded that there were competing demands on their time. One of the most infamous cases of how complicated and stressful things could get in the Lower 48 involved Jane Swift, a Massachusetts Republican who was elected lieutenant governor in 1999 when she was pregnant with her first child.
Swift got into trouble
when capitol staff complained they were being dragooned into babysitting, and she made things much worse by claiming that nobody could possibly object to taking care of a baby as adorable as her Elizabeth. When the governor resigned and Swift became acting chief executive, she was pregnant again, with twins, and the hostility toward her was so intense that her opponents tried to keep her from doing state business over the phone when she was confined to bed rest. There was another controversy when she commandeered a state helicopter to fly her home when her daughter was sick. In the end Swift decided to drop her plans to run for governor and retired to private life. “
The feeling that
I let down my staff, my family, and the public by my actions… continues to nag at me,” she wrote years later.

“S
HE IS
P
HYLLIS
S
CHLAFLY, ONLY YOUNGER
.”

Palin, on the other hand, presented a picture of an almost effortless mix of work and family. (
A reporter who followed her around
after she was elected governor watched her juggle “two BlackBerrys and a cell phone with one always buzzing” yet appear to be unfazed, “indeed to be having fun,” even when she locked her keys in her car and had to borrow her son’s jalopy to drive off with her children to the next engagement.) It charmed some women and irritated others. Veterans of the women’s movement looked at her and remembered another superachieving Republican wife and mother who had used her extraordinary skills to undermine their feminist agenda. “
She is Phyllis
Schlafly, only younger,” wrote Gloria Steinem in the
Los Angeles Times.
Palin was, by Steinem’s lights, wrong on all the issues that mattered most to women, from the right to abortion, to funding for education, to the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which the Republican ticket opposed. If she’d thought even for a millisecond that Palin was the end product of all the battles of the 1970s, Steinem told a friend, “I’d shoot myself.”

Hillary Clinton declined to say much about Palin except vague congratulations on her nomination, but the sudden ascent of another very different female politician must have been a torture piled on the already enormous disappointment of losing the Democratic nomination.
Saturday Night Live
aired
a hilarious sketch that depicted Clinton and Palin issuing a joint statement against sexism in the campaign. “You know, Hillary and I don’t agree on everything,” began Tina Fey, playing Palin.

“Anything,” interjected Amy Poehler, playing Clinton.

The skit ended with Palin sweetly stating that, whatever their politics, everyone agreed “it’s time for a woman to make it to the White House,” and Hillary shouting, “I didn’t want a
woman
to be president!
I
wanted to be president!”

“T
HESE GUYS ARE JERKS
.”

As the campaign moved into its final stretch and voters became frightened by the collapsing economy, Palin’s appeal dwindled. Her interview with CBS’s Katie Couric may have marked the beginning of the end for the Republican ticket—as well as the resurrection of Couric’s reputation as a great television interviewer. People began to notice that the Republican vice presidential candidate had a penchant for run-on sentences that trailed off into incomprehensibility. And the sentences, when deconstructed, suggested a minimal grounding in major issues. On the famous question of why she felt Alaska’s proximity to Russia counted as foreign-policy experience, Palin told Couric, “As Putin rears his head and comes into the airspace of the United States of America, where do they go? It’s just right over the border, it is from Alaska that we send those out to make sure that an eye is being kept on this very powerful nation, Russia, because they are right there. They are right next to our state.” The McCain campaign’s insistence that Palin’s strength lay in her connection to average voters began to look patronizing.
When she was unable
to name any Supreme Court decision she had ever disagreed with except for
Roe v. Wade,
a McCain adviser told
Newsweek,
“The Court is very important, but Palin is on the ticket because she connects with everyday Americans.”

In the end, women voters stuck to their old pattern of voting the candidate, not the gender. There was no Palin Effect: Obama won with a 7 percent gender gap, as women favored the Democratic ticket 56 to 43, while men gave McCain a narrow edge. Some of the McCain staffers angrily leaked stories intended to blame the defeat on Palin: She had spent $150,000 of the party’s money on clothes for herself and her family. She had refused to prepare for the Couric interview. She was so uninformed she thought Africa was a country, not a continent.
Palin, back in Alaska
, said the leaks were “cruel and it’s mean-spirited, it’s immature, it’s unprofessional, and these guys are jerks.”

The clothes issue was always a tender point for female politicians. (Reporters on Hillary Clinton’s plane had posted a chart tracking the color of her pantsuits, which some claimed became almost as reliable as a calendar.) But the treatment Palin got for the wardrobe story wasn’t much worse than the scorn heaped on John Edwards, a liberal Democrat, for his expensive haircuts. On the other hand, it was hard to imagine a campaign trashing any male vice presidential candidate the way Palin was vilified, with complaints about “diva” behavior, “wacko” comments, and the anecdote about her letting male aides into her hotel room wearing nothing but a bath towel.

“M
AYBE IT’S TIME WE LET A WOMAN LEAD US
.”

Palin wound up the only
one of the four national candidates of whom the majority of voters said they had an unfavorable view. But the failure of her candidacy was not a failure for women. At the very minimum, it was a triumph that voters did not seem to regard her floundering as a commentary on anything but Palin herself. On a more positive note, she won over many voters who had tended in the past to be hostile to the whole concept of a woman in the White House. She had a special affinity with younger working-class men. They liked the way she talked about hunting and hockey, and introduced her husband as first dude. They saw her as one of their own, rather than as an outsider parachuting in to tell them how to behave. Younger men with no college education were the people who had always been most threatened by women in the workplace and often the ones most resistant to any idea of being bossed by a woman anywhere. In a somewhat roundabout way, Palin made many of them converts to a new way of thinking. “
They bear us children
, they risk their lives to give us birth, so maybe it’s time we let a woman lead us,” a former truck driver told a reporter during a Palin rally in North Carolina.

People spent nearly two years talking about Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin, and while both women lost, their races had transformed the political conversation. By the time the campaign was over, the idea that women could hold any governmental post, no matter how powerful, was so ingrained that people hardly bothered to take note of the fact that in 2009 the Speaker of the House of Representatives, second in line of succession after the vice president, was a woman, Nancy Pelosi. And the secretary of state, fourth in succession, would turn out to be Clinton herself. Forty years after the Nixon administration had been so deeply unenthusiastic about the idea of trying to put a woman in the cabinet, the country had seen women running virtually every segment of the federal government. When Barack Obama began selecting his administration, there was no speculation about whether it would include any women in the most powerful posts because it was inconceivable that it would not.

“Y
OU WEAR SLACKS EVERYWHERE NOW
.”

Meanwhile, Tahita Jenkins
, 33, was fired from her job as a New York City bus driver because she refused to wear slacks. “I said, I’m not going to change my religious beliefs just to be a bus driver,” she told the media. Jenkins, a single mother, was a member of a Pentecostal church that prohibited women from wearing men’s clothing. She brought in a note from her pastor, but transit officials insisted that wearing pants was a safety matter. There was, they said, a danger that a skirt “could get caught on something.”

It seems only fair to finish where we started. It had been half a century since American women were publicly humiliated for offenses such as trying to pay a traffic ticket while wearing slacks, and Jenkins is a good reminder that there’s no one story to show what that journey meant. So is Edna Kleimeyer, the Cincinnati housewife who had never managed to break her twelve-minute record for ironing a shirt. Kleimeyer was moving on to a retirement home in 2007 when she went through her pile of clothing and realized she owned only one skirt. “You wear slacks everywhere now,” she mused.
“Everywhere.”
If the changes in women’s lives over the last century had gone no farther than the right to wear pants, it would still have made a practical day-to-day difference. And some people would still have felt things had gone too far.

So there you are. American women had shattered the ancient traditions that deprived them of independence and power and the right to have adventures of their own, and done it so thoroughly that few women under 30 had any real concept that things had ever been different. The feminist movement of the late twentieth century created a new United States in which women ran for president, fought for their country, argued before the Supreme Court, performed heart surgery, directed movies, and flew into space. But it did not resolve the tensions of trying to raise children and hold down a job at the same time. Women demolished the sexual double standard and reared new generations of men who appreciated the concept of equal rights for both sexes, even if they did not always act on it. But women did not figure out how to keep marriage from crumbling into divorce, and they were not particularly successful in making their lovers grow into dependable husbands. They had not remade the world the way the revolutionaries had hoped. But they had created a world their female ancestors did not even have the opportunity to imagine. And they still wore silly, impractical shoes.

EPILOGUE

S
upreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor moved into the new century at the peak of her power and influence. At 75, she was healthy and energetic, and in love with her work, which she pursued with a vigor that continued to exhaust her youthful clerks. When the nation’s highest court took up a critical constitutional issue, the outcome depended, more often than not, on her opinion. But her husband, John, was failing. A victim of Alzheimer’s disease, he had been stable for a number of years, continuing to accompany his wife on their nightly rounds of the Washington social scene and spending his days in her office, chatting with the staff and visitors. Then in 2005 he began to decline. Determined not to turn his care over to outsiders, Justice O’Connor resigned at the end of the court term in June, going overnight from the most influential woman in the nation to a retiree, alone with a husband who was slipping away. “
In those first days
after her announcement she didn’t answer the phone too often,” reported Jeffrey Toobin. “She sat in her office and cried.”

Her sacrifice could not save John from the curtain that was falling on his mind. In 2007 she was no longer able to care for him.
He was moved into an assisted-living
center, where he was miserable and talked of suicide—until he met another Alzheimer’s patient and fell in love. It was not unusual, doctors said, for people whose memories of their former life had vanished to suddenly find romance with someone new, and it was often a terrible trauma for the loved ones they had forgotten. But O’Connor regarded it as a blessing. Her son told a Phoenix television station that his mother was “thrilled” that his father was happy, and would visit with John while he sat on the porch swing, holding hands with his new love, blissfully unaware that the stranger he was chatting with was his wife of fifty-five years, and the woman who had given up a Supreme Court seat for him.