Larry Auster on Women in Politics: Yeats' Views

Sarah in stilettos while running for office

In my post on Pamela Geller, I wrote under a collage of her head shots titled Glamour Woman for the Anti-Jihad movement:

[T]he Sun News graphics team shows a thirty-five second animated slideshow of Geller in various poses, from glamour shots to dramatic gestures. Thirty-five seconds is a long time especially if the images are head shots of one person. But there is no lack of photos of Geller to fill the time.

I conclude my commentary with:

These are examples of how women are unsuited to public and political lives.

In a similar vein, Lawrence Auster corresponded with me last December 2012, linking to a post he had written on Yeats at View From the Right:

This may be of interest. It is from A Commentary on the Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats, by A. Norman Jeffares, p. 246. (However, that's a ridiculous title, it's not a commentary on the poems at all, it's an explanation of the references in the poems.)

The poem being discussed is "A Prayer for My Daughter," the line being explained is "An intellectual hatred is the worst, / So let her think opinions are accursed."

Here is the whole passage from Jeffares, quoting Yeats:

Yeats wrote in a diary in 1910:

Women because the main event of their lives has been a giving of themselves give themselves to an opinion as if it were a stone doll ... women should have their play with dolls finished in childhood for, if they play with ideas again, it is with hatred and malice.

In 'The Death of Synge' this appears in a different guise:

F____ is learning Gaelic. I would sooner see her in the Gaelic movement than in any Irish movement I can think of. [LA notes: What Yeats means is he approves of efforts to bring back old Irish language and literature, not of the demagogic political movements for Irish nationalism. He consistently opposed such movement for his whole life, feeling that involvement with them had ruined friends of his such as Maud Gonne and Constance Markewitz by turning them into fanatics.] I fear some new absorption in political opinion. Women, because the main event of their lives has been a giving themselves and giving birth, give all to an opinion as if it were some terrible stone doll ... to women opinions become as their children or their sweethearts, and the greater their emotional capacity the more do they forget all other things. They grow cruel, as if in defence of lover or child, and all this is done for 'something other than human life'. At last the opinion is so much identified with their nature that it seems a part of their flesh becomes stone and passes out of life.... Women should have their play with dolls finished in childish happiness, for if they play with them again it is amid hatred and malice. (Autobiographies, 504)

I don't remember the context of this discussion. I think it was related to my general critique of women in politics, and specifically regarding Sarah Palin, about whom I wrote an article which was published in American Thinker as Sarah Palin: Whose Family Values?

My original article, which I posted at Camera Lucida, Sarah Palin's Lost Opportunity, was slightly harsher towards Palin. The lost opportunity is not her loss of the Vice Presidency, but that of getting closer to her family as she bulldozed through with her political agenda. I concluded in my article:

[R]ather than face up to her failures as a mother, Palin readily took on the “victim’s” role, and entered the world of new wave feminism. She took no responsibility for her daughter’s condition, a situation which only a few decades ago would have brought shame to such a family, and especially the mother. She sacrificed the harmony of her family for an ambitious political life, with no guarantees that she will get the prize of presidentship. After all, her RNC debacle didn’t earn her anything but the airing of her family’s secrets.

To give her credit, Palin didn't glamorize herself, except with her trade-mark eyeglasses and school-marmish/movie star hairstyle which got a lot of attention. And these red shoes which she wore when John McCain announced her as his Vice Presidential running mate didn't hurt.



But Larry's take goes further than mere appearances. More from his quote from Yeats:

...to women opinions become as their children or their sweethearts, and the greater their emotional capacity the more do they forget all other things. They grow cruel, as if in defence of lover or child, and all this is done for 'something other than human life'.

There was a line in Palin's 2008 Repubican National Convention speech which spread like wildfire in the media:

What’s the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull? Lipstick!

Palin brought her whole family on the stage after her speech: husband Todd; daughter Willow carrying Sarah Palin's infant Down Syndrome son Trig; unmarried, pregnant Bristol; and fearless little Piper. She showed us a glimpse of how she would be as relentless as a pit bull to defend her dysfunctional family. Here is the glamorized, feminized, Palin, defending her position with the viciousness that Yeats described.

There was a brief moment when Palin was rumored to run in the 2012 presidential race, and she recently entered the political news through her defense of the National Rifle Association. She make a speech at the 2013 Conservative Political Action Conference. That looks like the extent of her political career. Our only contact with her now is through her twitter page, which is more of an embarrassment than anything else, coming from a former Vice Presidential candidate. Perhaps one can say of the varied and haphazard life of Sarah Palin: such is the frivolity of women who think they can do whatever they want.
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Posted By: Kidist P. Asrat
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