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Pow! Wham! The Republicans unleashed one of the most stunning surprises that I have witnessed in my adult life. In a bold move I would never have thought him capable of, John McCain introduced Governor Sarah Palin of Alaska as his pick for vice-president. I had heard vaguely about Palin but had never heard her speak.

I nearly fell out of my chair. It was like watching a boxing match: this woman turned out to be a tough, scrappy fighter with a mischievous sense of humour.

Conservative though she may be, I felt that Palin represented an explosion of a brand-new style of muscular American feminism. At her startling debut at the Republican convention, she was combining male and female qualities in ways that I have never seen before. And she was somehow able to seem simultaneously reassuringly traditional and gung-ho futurist.

In terms of redefining the persona for female authority and leadership, Palin has made the biggest step forward in feminism since Madonna channelled the dominatrix persona of high-glam Marlene Dietrich and rammed pro-sex, pro-beauty feminism down the throats of the prissy, victim-mongering, philistine feminist establishment.

In the US, the ultimate glass ceiling has been fiendishly complicated for women. Our president must also serve as commander-in-chief of the armed forces, so a woman candidate for president must show a potential capacity for military affairs and decision-making.

As a dissident feminist, I have been arguing for 20 years that young American women aspiring to political power should be studying military history rather than women’s studies with their rote agenda of never-ending grievances.

The gun-toting Palin is a brash ambassador from America’s pioneer past. She immediately reminded me of the frontier women of the western states, which first granted women the right to vote after the civil war — long before the federal amendment guaranteeing universal suffrage was passed in 1919. Frontier women faced the same harsh challenges and had to tackle the same chores as men, which is why men could regard them as equals — unlike the genteel, corseted ladies of the eastern seaboard.

Despite the lurid allegations and half-truths about Palin in the liberal blogosphere, I am still waiting for evidence that she is a dangerous extremist. I am willing to be convinced, but now she seems to be merely an optimistic pragmatist like Ronald Reagan; someone who pays lip service to religious piety without being in the least wedded to it. I don’t see her arrival as portending the end of civil liberties or life as we know it.

One reason I live in the leafy suburbs of Philadelphia and have never moved to New York or Washington is that, as a cultural analyst, I want to remain in touch with the mainstream of American life. I frequent fast-food restaurants, shop at the mall and periodically visit Wal-Mart. Like Los Angeles and San Francisco, Manhattan and Washington occupy their own mental zones — nice to visit but not a place to stay if you value independent thought.

It is premature to predict how the Palin saga will go. I may not agree a jot with her about basic principles, but I have immensely enjoyed Palin’s boffo performances at her debut. A feminism that cannot admire the bravura under high pressure of the first woman governor of a frontier state isn’t worth a warm bucket of spit.

Perhaps Palin seemed perfectly normal to me because she resembles so many women I grew up with 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 at high school when I was a child.

Here’s one episode. My father and his visiting brother, a dapper barber, were standing outside having a smoke when a noise came from a nearby barn. A calf had escaped. Our landlady yelled: “Stop her!” as the calf came careening towards my father and uncle, who both instinctively stepped back. Irate, our landlady trudged past them to the upper pasture, cornered the calf, and carried the 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 Palin brand of can-do, no-excuses, moose-hunting feminism — a world away from the whining, sniping, wearily ironic mode of establishment feminism represented by Gloria Steinem, a Hillary Clinton supporter. Palin, if her reputation survives the punishing next two months, may be breaking down those barriers. Feminism, which should be about equal rights and equal opportunity, should not be a closed club requiring an ideological litmus test for membership.

Here’s another example of the physical fortitude and indomitable spirit that Palin as an Alaskan sportswoman seems to represent right now. Last year The Globe and Mail in Toronto reprinted this remarkable obituary from 1905:

Abigail Becker

Farmer and homemaker born in Frontenac County, Upper Canada, on March 14, 1830

A tall, handsome woman “who feared God greatly and the living or dead not at all”, she married a widower with six children and settled in a trapper’s cabin on Long Point, Lake Erie. On November 23, 1854, with her husband away, she single-handedly rescued the crew of the schooner Conductor of Buffalo, which had run aground in a storm. The crew had clung to the frozen rigging all night, not daring to enter the raging surf. In the early morning, she waded chin-high into the water (she could not swim) and helped seven men reach shore. She lost her husband to a storm, raised 17 children alone and died at Walsingham Centre, Ontario.

Frontier women were far bolder and hardier than today’s pampered, petulant bourgeois feminists, always looking to blame their complaints about life on someone else.

What of Palin’s pro-life stand? Creationism taught in schools? The Iraq war as God’s plan? If she tries to intrude her conservative Christian values into secular government, then she must be opposed and stopped. But she has every right to express her views and to argue for society’s acceptance of the high principle of the sanctity of human life.

The one fundamental precept that Democrats must stand for is independent thought and speech. When they become baying bloodhounds of rigid dogma, Democrats have committed political suicide.

This is an edited version of an article that first appeared on Salon.com

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