Look, you can call something anything you want, but that doesn't make it true.  I can call my 1986 Saab 9000 a fixie, a Jeep, or a chocolate doughnut.  That doesn't make it hipster cool, appropriate for off-road driving, or good with sprinkles.

 And yet, some people have the gall to do just that: announce that "X is Y, and devil take the hindmost, it's the gosh-darned truth!  Why?  Because I said so, that's why!"  Sarah Palin is the latest example of this, as she continues to attempt to co-opt the term "feminist" to mean something other than, you know, FEMINIST.

The first thing Palin is doing is "taking feminism back to its roots."  Except that in this case, she defines "roots" as "pro-life anti-abortion twaddle."  Which is weird, because the roots of feminism lie in the suffragette movement of the early 1900s, when women fought and bled and died in order to earn the right to vote.  

When Sarah Palin says that "the earliest leaders of the women's rights movement were pro-life," she's just, well, wrong.  I mean, some of them MAY have been that.  They may have been in favor of black socks over gray, or chicken soup over vegetable beef.  It's hard to say, since none of those things had anything to do with what the earliest leaders of the women's rights movement were fighting for.   

One of the earliest leaders of the women's rights movement was Elizabeth Cady Stanton.  She essentially kicked off the women's rights movement in America, when she read her Declaration of Sentiments at Seneca Falls.  (Obligatory link to The Distillers' super awesome song, "Seneca Falls.")  Elizabeth Cady Stanton was in favor of reproductive rights for women - what we would now call "pro-choice."

I don't think it behooves us to spend time arguing about who is and isn't a feminist.  Third wave feminism is more about inclusion than exclusion.  If someone wants to call themselves a feminist, then I'm willing to sit back and hear what they have to say.  Particularly if that person is an outspoken member of the religious Right, a partisan group which has traditionally been, shall we say, very vocal about its hatred of feminists and anything having to do with feminism as a whole.  I have to admit: I'm intrigued.

The problem is that Sarah Palin's primary line of attack is on the abortion thing.  Now if you ask me, you're going to have a very hard time clinging to the term "feminism" while arguing AGAINST a woman's reproductive freedom.  The freedom to own and control our own uteruses is, if you ask me, a core belief that cannot simply be thrown aside because it's inconvenient.

No one is arguing "Yay!  Abortion!  Kill them babies!"  Everyone would like there to be fewer abortions in the world.  Why not talk up that angle?  There's a lot you can do to shore up that side of the argument before you get to the abortion line.  Advocating in favor of making birth control easier and cheaper to obtain is a great way to start.  

You know what isn't a great starting point?  Sending rape victims a bill for the cost of their own rape kit.

Creative Commons-licensed image courtesy of Flickr user geerlingguy