‘We don’t like this fundamental transformation, and we’re going to do something about it.” With that line, in her savvy “Mama Grizzlies” video, Sarah Palin may have captured not only the political mood of much of the country, but also why women seem to be getting ready to make tea — and political hay — this year.

Good advertising is not everything in politics. But it sure doesn’t hurt. Kellyanne Conway, president of the polling company, says the former governor of Alaska, with her bearish message, “is calling for a Moms’ Mobilization to encourage millions of women like her to tell Washington to tighten its belt the way they’ve done. Women make up a majority of the workforce and account for 83 percent of household purchases. Palin is encouraging them to become more active and demanding as political consumers. Some are enraged, others engaged, but most are coming to a ballot box near you. Palin is a good messenger for this mobilization because she is one of them. They may like her — or not — but they are like her: a working mom with no Ivy League degree who thinks Washington’s ‘new math’ does not add up.”

Many political observers thought the video was the opening salvo of — or at least the trailer for — the Sarah Palin 2012 presidential campaign. When, days later, her PAC issued impressive second-quarter fundraising results, that speculation only increased. But to focus on Palin is to underestimate what’s going on in American politics.

It’s not just Palin or even the cast of other attractive women who are running for office as Republicans. The “year of the conservative woman” is manifesting itself in a big way in the tea-party movement. The Sam Adams Alliance, which has done a series of surveys on people who identify themselves as tea partiers, reports that at least 45 percent of tea-party leaders are women, including some who have never had a career outside the home but feel the need to organize their communities. Quinnipiac similarly has found 44 percent of self-identified tea-party supporters to be women.

The Sam Adams Alliance’s Anne Sorock says she has seen women “empowered through the tea parties.” It’s the kind of movement the women’s movement would be if it weren’t really more about liberal politics than about representing women in America.

There’s a tumult in our society today. We see it in Washington and we see it in our churches and our schools and even, not infrequently, our own families. And Americans are increasingly not comfortable with it and, in my experience, are increasingly determined to take action.

Women do worry and may naturally be the arms to reach first to pull us back from this brink, to encourage a back-to-basics approach. “Attitudes about risk may partially account for their prominence in the movement,” John J. Pitney Jr., politics professor at Claremont McKenna College, offers. “Many studies suggest that women tend to be more risk-averse than men. In the past, this risk aversion helped liberals by making women more receptive to their arguments on issues such as environmental protection and nuclear proliferation. But now, a liberal administration is restructuring health care and running the federal debt up to the stratosphere — which a lot of people regard as scary and risky.”