Note: I am not a working mother but I still really liked this article from The New Republic.

By the way, PUBLIC POST

The day of the Sarah Palin announcement, I called the small cadre of senior female writers and editors who work at The New Republic to see if any of them wanted to write a piece about their reaction. Not surprisingly, the women of TNR had a lot to say. But it was also the eve of a holiday weekend, and, with seven small children and one full-time staffer among the four of us, we had to scramble to find the time.

Sarah Palins we are not. Central to the narrative that the McCain campaign is selling about Palin is that, in addition to being the reformist governor of Alaska, she's a supermom, too. During his announcement, McCain referred to Palin as a "devoted wife and mother of five," while Palin, who began her speech by introducing her children, referred to herself variously as "just your average hockey mom in Alaska," "the team mom," and "the mother of one of those troops" (her son Track heads to Iraq this month). And she does all that mothering in addition to running a state.

Stories of Palin's working-mom feats abound: She gave birth to her daughter and was back at work the very next day! She flew to a Texas meeting of governors while eight months pregnant with her son, laboring on the plane home! She brought her newborn with her to the office, reportedly nursing through a meeting! How can you feminists not love her? the GOP seems to say. OK, so there's that little thing about Roe v. Wade, but, surely, Palin proves women can have it all. And she makes it seem so achievable. You just do it. As Palin recently explained to People magazine, "What I've had to do, though, is in the middle of the night, put down the BlackBerries and pick up the breast pump. Do a couple of things different and still get it all done."

It's a distinctly Republican vision of feminism: If you can't do it all, you're just not working hard enough. And, if you want more societal or governmental support, Palin's ideology has a word for that: whining. That's how she described Hillary Clinton's reaction to sexism on the campaign trail (that is, before Clinton became her personal hero), advising her in a Newsweek interview to "work harder."

But the reason most of us are not Sarah Palins has nothing to do with lack of effort or of desire. We also want it all. It's just that we have less to work with. Palin not only has the type of office (namely, her own) where you can bring your daughter to work more than one day a year; she has a large and supportive family network (her husband is currently devoting himself full-time to the kids) and plenty of financial resources. The deepest insult is that Palin's brand of up-by-your-bootstraps feminism allows the McCain campaign to appear to support working moms--plus hockey moms, team moms, soldiers' moms--while rejecting the policies that would actually make their lives better.

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