Emily, Hanna, Jess, Rachael, if Sarah Palin were Sam Palin, would anyone still be interested in her? Dan Quayle was a good-looking, young, conservative, politician who, in his roll-out as a vice-presidential candidate, impressed everyone as being a dope who was in over his head. Yes, he got to serve as vice president, but beyond his spelling of “pototoe” and denunciation of Murphy Brown (and I agree with him that unwed motherhood should not be glamorized), he is little remembered and has blessedly slipped out of public life. I had no idea who Sarah Palin was until her convention debut. It was a corker of a speech (written, of course, by someone else) and it showed that she had magic before a crowd, which is no small thing. However, what she has demonstrated ever since is that she is nothing but a personality. She apparently in her book tries to make a virtue of her ordinariness as a qualification for office. But who cares whether you come from a modest or privileged background if you think you can be president of the United States without the vaguest understanding of—or willingness to study(!)—the issues of the day. So after she was unable to finish out a single term as governor of Alaska, here we are talking about her and what her political future holds. Oblivion, I hope.

Tags: going rogue, Sarah Palin

After some deliberation, we have decided to fold DoubleX back into Slate. The site will now become its own section, with our XX Factor blog, articles, and special projects already in the works. Our aim is to create a more intimate version of the community we have built, with many of the same voices and passions.

For many of you, this won't much change your experience of reading us. We will have many of the same bloggers and writers, and Hanna and Emily will continue to run the project. The decision is being made for business reasons rather than as an editorial judgment. In fact, it's the editorial quality of the site, and the way in which it so perfectly embodies the Slate DNA, that makes this a natural next step. This is a new phase, not an ending—since we came out of Slate, where we started XX Factor, it's a return to our roots.

To give us time to map out the details, the site will live in its current form until sometime around the end of the year. We will tell you when we're ready to pack up our virtual boxes and move back into Slate. When we do, we will have a new commenting feature on Slate that will allow us to improve on the thoughtful and smart commenting many of you have been doing. It's been an absolute pleasure, and we look forward to continuing it.

Tags: DoubleX, Slate

If you're interested in reading a refreshing burst of honesty today, you could do worse than Aaron Traister's piece about the different reactions he received from people when he told them he was expecting a son and when he told them, a couple years later, that he was expecting a daughter. Americans tend to think we're above the prejudices that drive people in China and India to use sex-selective abortion, but, as Traister's piece shows, we're far from the angels we'd like to pretend we are. In fact, it seems we start the process of giving little girls an inferiority complex before they even have a chance to be born.

Reading Traister's piece, I was never so glad that I never had a brother. I recall, as a small kid and even as a teenager, feeling like I benefited from not having a boy around to suck all the oxygen of adult attention out of the room. My father never seem resigned to having girls, but he did do stuff with us that I feel we wouldn't have had a chance to do if a boy had been there to do it instead. I was put to work in the woodshop, in the yard, on the car. The seeds of a budding feminist were planted in the boy vacuum. Being able to do son things because there is no son means learning that you can do all sorts of things our society generally discourages in women. It doesn't seem to me an accident that now I can find myself in my backyard with a female friend (also brotherless), building garden structures on a Saturday without feeling even the slightest need to call my boyfriend out to do the hard work.

Traister's article only confirmed some of my suspicions. He relates how, compared with the reactions when he announced his first-born's maleness, people reacted to the news about his soon-to-be-born baby girl on a range from muted enthusiasm to open contempt for girls. Nothing he relates will be foreign to most readers; we're all aware of stereotypes about how girls are harder, girls are more shallow, girls are just a disappointment. But I found it revelatory the way that Traister cheekily reminds us how these messages seep into the minds of girls, so that they know how much less wanted they really are. And how damaging that message really can be.

Growing up brotherless, I think I can see why people view girls as a disappointment. Having no boys to focus on, male father figures in my life went out of their way to put male expectations on me. I was told, by male adults, to delay marriage and childbearing until I had a career under way, and that I should bust my ass at school and not let anyone tell me that I was less than. In India and China, part of the hostility to daughters is the sense that you are raising someone else's family. In India, the dowry system even means you have to pay someone else to take the girl off your hands. But in a muted way, perhaps Americans still think having a girl means running the risk of raising someone else's wife. Perhaps with boys, we feel more assured that the child in front of us could grow up to be a doctor or a scientist or a famous athlete.

Or course, girls can grow up to be all those things, can't they? It's true, but also true that we're far from expressing equal enthusiasm, as Traister discovers when a friend of his who has gone through the hell of keeping a baby with a birth defect alive crows about how he at least doesn't have to put up with a girl. Everyone Traister spoke to talked about the other shoe dropping—oh, girls are good when they're young, but wait until they're teenagers. This sort of thinking reflects the ugly truth about diminishing returns for girls and women in our culture. Everyone knows about how girls make better grades on average than boys, and more women matriculate and graduate from college than men. But somehow, women still earn less coming out of college, and every year they work they fall behind their male colleagues doing the same jobs. Parents just get less return on their girl investment.

But disparaging female children is exactly the wrong way to fix the problem. The reason women work harder and get paid less is partially sexism, and partially women's lack of entitlement due to lower self-esteem. We put our noses to the grindstone, never try to draw attention to ourselves by asking for more, and suffer from imposter syndrome. Many of us are easily convinced that our jobs are less important than our husbands', so if someone has to cut back for family reasons, it's almost always a woman. And part of the reason probably goes back to what Traister observed—when you're told that you're less valuable than boys from the day you're born, you begin to believe it.

Tags: children, feminism, sexism

Emily, I think Palin means this as one of her folksy nuggets of wisdom, and you are supposed to chuckle as you imagine her mediating toddler disputes over frozen moose pops. And of course it's not that. But you have to admit that this is a thoroughly radical and maybe even weirdly feminist notion, particularly coming from a conservative woman.

Palin is part of a movement of Christian-mom types who emerged during the Gingrich years. The Republicans were on a mission to feminize then and recruited women who had been stay-at-home moms or involved in schools. Andrea Seastrand was an elementary-school teacher elected to Congress in California in those years. Linda Smith, of Washington state, kept a blown-up picture of her granddaughters in her congressional office.

They were the party’s much-needed symbols of traditional values. Only no one much thought about what life as a symbol would actually do to their personal lives. I interviewed Smith back then while her husband, Vern, sat in a hard chair in a corner: "One of the reasons we got into politics, we wanted to preserve some of the traditional lifestyle we'd grown up with," Vern told me. "It's funny, with Linda away, we end up sacrificing some of that traditional family life to pass some of that heritage to our children."

Here’s how I explained it in Slate when Palin was chosen:

If a conservative Christian mother chose to pursue a full-time career in, say, landscape gardening or the law, she was abandoning her family. But if she chose public service, she was furthering the godly cause. No one discussed the sticky domestic details: Did she have a (gasp!) nanny? Did her husband really rule the roost anymore? Who said prayers with the kids every night? As long as she was seen now and again with her children, she could get away with any amount of power.

We all remember Palin’s quote about how only a Neanderthal thinks a woman “can’t think and work and carry a baby at the same time.” But in every way she’s behaved as if she is more conflicted. She hid her pregnancy with Trig until the very end, continued a press conference after her water was leaking, and took three days of maternity leave. All that suggests a woman who is defensive about appearing as if motherhood is stealing time from her work. It’s hard to imagine she’s spent her life in evangelical churches without internalizing some guilt about being a working mother.

There’s one other possible interpretation of her quote. Palin could be expressing the feeling that motherhood is difficult, unnatural, and full of unpleasant surprises. One day you’re the vice presidential candidate and the next day you’re at the center of political scandal. One day you’re a proud matriarch and the next day you’re sheltering your pregnant teenage daughter and wondering why her ex-boyfriend is posing for Playgirl.

This notion is a great departure from the usual Christian conservative line that motherhood is a woman’s natural duty and the hallowed opposite of the man’s tainted world of politics. If that’s what she meant, then it’s equally radical. But it is at least approaching honest.

Tags: going rogue, Sarah Palin

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I would really like to drive a stake in the heart of the argument, repeated once again by Sarah Palin in her book, that “there’s no better training ground for politics than motherhood." At first glance, it’s oh-so unobjectionable. Sure, let’s recognize that all the planning that goes into running a household translates into marketable and professional skills. One day you mastermind a school auction with umpteen moving parts and egos, the next you shepherd through a state budget. Right, except that in Palin's hands, the demands of motherhood aren’t a form of preparation that complements other kinds, like learning about the rest of the globe before you run for vice-president. Nope, the motherhood version of the can-do ethic makes it OK to have a know-nothing ethic as well. Hell, if you've got enough mommy moxie you can celebrate your lack of intellectual know-how. And you can spit on feminism every step of the way.

In her review of Gail Collins' new book, Ariel Levy recounts that when Cindy McCain asked Palin how she'd handle joining the McCain ticket, Palin “looked me square in the eye,” Mrs. McCain recounted, “and she said, ‘You know something? I’m a mother. I can do it.’ ” Levy continues:

It used to be that conservatives thought motherhood disqualified women for full-time careers; now they’ve decided that it’s a credential for higher office. All of this raises a question: why has feminism, which managed to win so many battles—the notion of a woman with a career has become perfectly unexceptionable—remained anathema to millions of women who are the beneficiaries of its success?

Why? Because women like Palin raid feminism for all the benefits it’s given us without for one second acknowledging the debt. And this is honey for their conservative base. Which brings me to another question: Why oh why did Hillary Clinton say on TV on Sunday that Palin is a person she looks forward to sitting down and talking with? I know, I know, she was being magnanimous. And maybe she’s truly curious. But honestly, why should the Secretary of State waste her time?

Photograph of Sarah Palin by David McNew/Getty Images.

Tags: ariel levy, going rogue, Hillary Clinton, sarah palin's book