Of all the things about Sarah Palin, John McCain’s running mate, that bother me, her identification as a “feminist” is not one of them.

Yes, I realize she is not a feminist in any authentically enlightened sense of the term and her feminism doesn’t make conservatives flinch even a little bit.

But I’m so tired of “feminism” being a dirty word, that I don’t mind a little misappropriation.  It’s just too much fun to see Pat Buchanan defending McCain’s choice on MSNBC Friday night by gleefully shouting, “But she’s a feminist!”

On a serious note, however, I agree with Tanya Melich, writing for Women’s Media Center, that the choice of Palin is actually a continuation of the Republican backlash against women.

Melich admits that, at Friday’s announcement, “Palin was energetic, warm and reminded me of all those earnest young women we feminists have been recruiting into the women’s political movement since the early l970s.”

But she sees McCain’s choice of her as simply a political “disguise”:

McCain hopes that by picking a woman he can show he’s open to doing things differently, but his selection is window dressing and insulting to anyone who knows that he opposes equal pay for equal work legislation and opposes a woman’s right to choose.  And this is just part of the list of issues of concern to women that he doesn’t champion.

Most importantly, McCain is not disentangling himself from the anti-woman backlash GOP strategy adopted many years ago to elect Reagan and then the two Bushes. One of his closest advisors, Charles Black, has for years been an enforcer of this strategy. This Republican War Against Women approach adopted first in 1980 is still very much in place.  The strategy has nothing to do with running women for office.  It has always been about the party’s antagonistic policies toward issues of specific concern to women.

To win the presidency, Reagan and the two Bushes played on the fear of women’s potential power. It is because of this strategy that women have been leaving the Republican party for years, and it is why more American woman are Democrats and vote Democratic.

This backlash strategy born in the passionate times of the 1970s, when many Americans were afraid of women’s power, will no longer work. How insulting to American women that the McCain camp thinks it can disguise it.

Of course, the attitudes and policies that Palin herself champions are clearly part of the backlash as well, however “feminist” she might claim to be.  For an example of how palatable her brand of feminism is to the right, you might wander over to the Democracy Project’s “Top 10 Reasons” why Palin should be McCain’s VP choice (posted, to their credit, a day before the announcement):

REASON #6:  PALIN IS A FEMININE FEMINIST, WITH HOMETOWN, NOT HOLLYWOOD, VALUES
1960s feminists regarded men as oppressors, and considered marriage a state akin to slavery or rape. They struggled to convince each other, and often themselves, that “a woman needs a man, like a fish needs a bicycle.” They treated with contempt women who married, had children, or violated their strict dress code (no heels, no makeup, no dresses, no color that mud doesn’t come in).

Palin’s is a feminism of a different, newer sort – call it ‘Feminism 2.0’ – a feminism that is not hostile to men, and that respects and honors women who work hard to balance a traditional home life with professional ambitions. Palin works hard to achieve such a balance:  three days after giving birth to her fifth child, for example, she conducted a meeting concerning a proposed natural gas pipeline.

Palin met her husband, Alaska’s First Gentleman Todd Palin, at Wasilla High School, where she was point guard for her basketball team, the year they won the championship.  A feminist who also enjoys being feminine, she ran for, and won, the “Miss Wasilla” beauty pageant, a race in which she also won “Miss Congeniality,” an award unlikely to be awarded to many feminists of earlier vintage.  She is, similarly, a member of Feminists for Life, an organization whose mission would have been inconceivable twenty years ago.

This misuse and abuse of the idea of feminism is scary — and I’m not even going to deal with its stereotyping of feminists themselves.

And “Feminists for Life” — as Ruth Rosen explains on Alternet today — are crassly appropriating the empowering language of feminism to support an anti-feminist agenda.  In her interview with Serrin Foster, the group’s leader, Rosen exposes their hypocrisy, especially around their supposed championing of high-quality child care options for women in the workplace:

Foster is cleverly disingenuous. When I asked what she does to promote child care, her answers were vague and evasive. When I read the organization’s brochures aimed at campus physicians and psychologists, I found nothing about campaigning for child care. The real goal is to convince professionals to persuade young women to “choose” to bear a baby.

Despite its protestations, Feminists for Life is not really about choice. You can see this on its Web site, where the slogan “refuse to choose” appeared repeatedly. Nor does the organization challenge the real difficulties working mothers face. Instead, it cleverly appropriates the words “feminist” and “choice” to convince young women that abortion is always an unacceptable choice.

So, while it’s refreshing to seem feminism back in the mainstrem political conversation, the work of defining a truly empowering feminism never ends.