Lisa, great insights, as always. I especially liked your observation that “showing up for work after 3 days was clearly a way to reassure voters that she would manage the conflict without short-shrifting them. Not every new mother can do that. Palin could do it and Swift could not.” It reminded me of that Camille Paglia Salon article that K-Lo linked to yesterday. The abortion excerpt is rightly getting a lot of attention, but I love Paglia’s discussion of women of the frontier, especially this story:

Perhaps Palin seemed perfectly normal to me because she resembles so many women I grew up around in the snow belt of upstate New York. For example, there were the robust and hearty farm women of Oxford, a charming village where my father taught high school when I was a child. We first lived in an apartment on the top floor of a farmhouse on a working dairy farm. Our landlady, who was as physically imposing as her husband, was an all-American version of the Italian immigrant women of my grandmother’s generation — agrarian powerhouses who could do anything and whose trumpetlike voices could pierce stone walls.
Here’s one episode. My father and his visiting brother, a dapper barber by trade, were standing outside having a smoke when a great noise came from the nearby barn. A calf had escaped. Our landlady yelled, “Stop her!” as the calf came careening at full speed toward my father and uncle, who both instinctively stepped back as the calf galloped through the mud between them. Irate, our landlady trudged past them to the upper pasture, cornered the calf, and carried that massive animal back to the barn in her arms. As she walked by my father and uncle, she exclaimed in amused disgust, “Men!”
Now that’s the Sarah Palin brand of can-do, no-excuses, moose-hunting feminism — a world away from the whining, sniping, wearily ironic mode of the establishment feminism represented by Gloria Steinem, a Hillary Clinton supporter whose shameless Democratic partisanship over the past four decades has severely limited American feminism and not allowed it to become the big tent it can and should be….

Along the same lines, not to be missed is Michael Ledeen’s wonderful ode to the frontier here on NRO.

I feel like such a wimp when I read this stuff and think back. My mom had six kids in seven years — the last two being “Irish twins” (they are only 50 weeks apart). I am the oldest, and all I remember is boundless energy and her never uttering a single complaint. We really have gone soft, and Palin is a welcome reminder that we don’t need to be.