What exactly is a hockey mom? Despite my obsessive viewing of PalinTube clips, bingeing on Palin blogs and gazillions of Palin words, watching and rewinding the actual Palin speech for two hours just to see that cute bit again where PalinChild4 uses her spit to smooth down the hair of PalinBaby, I still require transatlantic clarification. “A pitbull with lipstick,” says Sarah Palin herself, which judging from the whooping and waving of carefully placed, faux-naïf placards in the convention hall is somehow an admirable type of woman to be.

An American friend tells me that the hockey moms of his youth were so loud, aggressive and partisan that his own mild-mannered mother rarely dared to enter the rink. I know who I'd back in a face-off between hockey moms and Britain's raucous, competitive, are-you-blind-ref, sporadically violent football dads.

Hockey moms don't sleep because most of the stadiums are half a state away and kick-off is at 5.30am. Hockey moms don't take holidays - certainly never lovely weekend mini-breaks - as their kids are welded year-long to the league. Hockey moms watch the soft, tender bodies of their tiniest darling children thumped with wood and pounded on ice without ever tearfully bundling them from the rink. Hockey moms certainly don't slope off to Starbucks for a shifty latte - as I would - but sit through every minute's practice in the miserable stadium half-light, clad in unflattering polar fleece.

Mrs Palin might seek to deny abortion even to a girl raped by a relative, but she has done one thing for women - she has unearthed a strong and powerful female archetype that wasn't immediately showered in misogyny and derision. Perhaps a hockey mom looks better placed for vice-presidential office than the big job, as she is essentially a helpmeet and enabler, cheerleader and washer of others' dirty linen. Then again, she sends the team into battle, rallying them through victory and defeat and, whatever the weather, is up front driving the bus.

Clearly Mrs Palin and her advisers thought it better to dub her “hockey mom” before others sought to affix less palatable labels. With her pantsuits and peerless intelligence, Hillary Clinton tried to transcend her gender only to be dragged down by male comparisons with their first wives or second-grade teachers. There is a stinking soubriquet for every type of woman who dares to seek power: ice queen, bitch, ball-breaker, even. Disgracefully in this very paper yesterday, Rachida Dati, the French Justice Minister, was sourly referred to as a “glamourpuss” for the crime of being chic, something that we perpetually nag our own women MPs to be.

As female stereotypes go, hockey mom is useful in implying love with discipline, pre-menopausal fecundity without overt sexiness. But in her parlaying of domestic power into suitability for political office, Mrs Palin reminds me of the TV series The Amazing Mrs Pritchard, in which Jane Horrocks played a small-town mother fed up with the corruption of government who becomes Prime Minister on a platform of plain- talking maternal common sense.

Putting the Governor of Alaska's personal jet on eBay was pure Mrs Pritchard. Mrs Palin's version is more Mr Smith Goes to Washington crossed with Roseanne Barr, as she leant an elbow on the podium in let-me-tell-you mode, attacking Barack Obama with a down-dirtiness no male politician has yet dared.

American women such as Mrs Palin - whatever their politics - exhilarate with their sense of limitless opportunity, their unquestioning can-do. Not overburdened with self-doubt or introspection, they plough on, wholly disinclined to whinge or blame.

Interviewing Martha Stewart a few years ago I was agog at how, when serving a prison sentence, she organised workshops to teach other inmates how to set up small businesses, revolutionised the prison diet by growing vegetables and writing a microwave cookbook. When life gives you lemons, make lemonade, they say in America. In Britain we suck them and look sour.

Doubtless fewer women are taking top positions in Britain because, on the whole, we are reluctant to commit to the punishing hours and ordeals of top management. Mrs Palin, with her breast pump and BlackBerry, back in the Governor's chair three days post-partum, seemed a gleeful throwback to those 1980s shoulder-padded feminists who had fax machines installed in labour suites, before new mothers were guilt-tripped into believing that they were damaging their baby or would fail to “bond” if they were selfish enough to retain their drive and lifelong ambitions.

In the Mrs Pritchard saga it was the effect of the media spotlight on her family that eventually prompted her downfall. And Mrs Palin has brought her children into the campaign more deliberately than any politician in history. A candidate's family can soften a stern mien (Gordon Brown), domesticate exoticism (Mr Obama), pretty daughters can add a spritz of glamour (George W. Bush) or children can bespeak a connection with voters' own families. Only through his disabled son, Ivan, can David Cameron truly evince his commitment to the health service.

But as they were called upon to stand up one by one in their brand new court appearance clobber, the Palin children were manifest proof that she walks the walk as well as talking the talk. Her commitment to the war in Iraq is demonstated in her soon-to-serve son Track, through whom she claims the votes of military families. Trig, her baby with Down's syndrome, gives her the right to the vast constituency of parents with special-needs children. “You will have a friend and advocate in the White House,” she pledges, though, of course, no mention of funding.

If it were not her avowed intent to deny fertility rights to the women of America, to endow high-school abstinence programmes rather than sex education, the pregnancy of her teenage daughter would be no one's damn business. But Mrs Palin is not saying that this is the way my family has chosen to deal with this “challenge and joy” but that it is the only way a family should be allowed to deal with it. She is giving voters - and the media - every right to peer into the cradle, to pass judgment on the outcome of this shotgun affair.

And this is a dangerous, high-stakes game, even for a fearless hockey mom.

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