Cindy McCain

She grew up with wealthy parents. She got a BA in education and MA in special education from a top school. Her dad owned a beverage distribution company and offered her a job upon graduation. Presumably, the kind of job where she could sit around doing ministerial things and collecting large checks. Instead, she launched a special education teaching career working with kids with disabilities (all cites from Wiki unless otherwise cited). At 23, she published a work about a treatment for children with severe disabilities.

In her mid-twenties she met a man who was separated and married him upon his divorce. There is speculation about how he treated his first wife during this, but insiders say he was the pursuer and it was clear to them the first marriage was over. Friends and family blame the man for his behavior towards the first wife, but state that the second wife was not to blame.

She had a few miscarriages and finally gave birth to three children in her late twenties – early thirties, having moved back to Arizona while her husband was often in Washington.

Instead of the fancy vacations that her family income could provide, she chose to visit places like Chuuk. Noticing the poor medical facilities in such areas, she founded the American Voluntary Medical Team, a non-profit organization that set up trips for doctors, nurses, and other medical personnel to supply treatment to poor sick children and provide emergency medical care to disaster-struck third-world areas such as Micronesia, Vietnam, Kuwait (arriving five days after the conclusion of the Gulf War), Iraq, Nicaragua, India, Bangladesh and El Salvador. Instead of delegating others to actually go to these places, she led 55 of these missions over the next seven years. Each trip lasted over two weeks.

While at Mother Teresa's orphanage in Dhaka, Bangladesh, in 1991 as part of AVMT's assistance team following the 1991 Bangladesh cyclone, she met two infant girls you determine need to be brought to the United States for medical treatment. She decided to adopt one of the girls and coordinate the adoption of the other little girl, with another family.

In the late 80s she underwent two spinal surgeries, began taking Percocet and Vicodin, and became addicted, sometimes taking as many as twenty Percocets a day. Unfortunately, with painkiller addiction, social withdrawal, going to great lengths to obtain prescriptions and changes in personality are frequent symptoms, and were among those she dealt with. She began stealing the drugs from AVMT. Of course, arguably she was stealing from her own self-funded non-profit, but it was still stealing.

Through an intervention by her parents, drug treatment, and ultimately a hysterectomy for the back pain, she was able to resolve the addiction and pain issues.

She made full restitution to AVMT. It was speculated that had she been poor or not married to a US Senator, she would have been locked up. Others commented that addiction is a disease with both a social and medical component, and that often harmful actions occur before help is gotten. One can blame people for benefiting from social circumstances, or fight for all individuals suffering from addiction to get the same access to treatment.

One might also note that other, including current, presidential candidates and presidents have had drug and other issues for which they have not served time, and that there is a name for choosing a woman as the example for the person who should do so.

In 1995, she founded the Hensley Family Foundation, which donates monies towards children's programs in Arizona and nationally. She became actively involved with Operation Smile, which provides cleft lip and palate repair surgeries to children worldwide and assists countries in reaching self-sufficiency with these surgeries, in 2001, taking parts in trips with it to Morocco, Vietnam, and India. She was honored by the organization in 2005 and has visited operations to remove landmines in Cambodia, Sri Lanka, Mozambique, and Angola.

Although active in her husband’s presidential campaign in 2007-08, she often interrupted campaigning for overseas charitable work.

In April of this year, four years after a stroke, she visited the Albanian border where she visited schools where children’s sports fields are covered with unexploded bombs. On another trip, she witnessed a boy get blown up by a mine in Kuwait. She next plans a trip to Afghanistan, a central front in the effort to remove land mines, and a visit to Darfur to try to aid the refugees and bring attention to the mass killings and rapes.

A typical article on Cindy McCain has soundbites like this:

“Cindy McCain does not appear to be a Laura Bush in waiting. She was once addicted to painkillers. She is an heiress to a beer distribution fortune, a gilded, glamorous child of the air-conditioned south-west.”

Or like this:

“Cindy's neurotic blonde do”

“CNN correspondent Carol Costello compared Cindy McCain to a 'Stepford Wife'" due to her low key role in her husband’s campaign so far.

Why not? It’s easy. Cindy’s a Republican, a skinny blonde, an heiress. She might as well be dancing on tables and dating a succession of pop stars; we basically don’t need any more information. We don’t like her husband’s policies, she’s a pretty easy person to try and convict without going through the rigmarole of any kind of inspection of, maybe, the facts.

A friend recently said:

“Surely if it's to mean anything we have to stand up not only for women who we like and feel are on our side, but women we don't like who are still nonetheless the victims of sexism. The coverage of Cindy McCain has been horribly sexist in the past, and I have a feeling it's going to get a lot worse in the run-up to the election. Does she really not deserve to be defended just because we don't like her husband? Is she not a woman?”

Has Cindy McCain made mistakes? Of course. I have not battled addiction, and I don’t judge her for her past difficulties. I don’t judge Senator Obama for his drug use in his youth, which did not stem from physical pain killing, as I think much drug use does have to do with some kind of pain killing. It is clear to me that despite her sins of being blonde and rich, Cindy McCain chose at a number of points in her life to avoid an easier path, and to put herself at risk to help kids in developing countries.

I could write the same kind of thing for Michelle Obama. Along the lines of what michelleobamawatch.com is doing. But I think that is Feminist Analysis 101 and I’ve always found 101 boring. There are a ton of people who need it, but I don’t think any of them are here. Michelle is smart, beautiful, blunt (while I don’t love everything she says, I will defend to the death her right to say it), successful and polished. She has gone and will go far, and I think everyone who has passed 101 (which I think is true of my small readership) gets all this.

I’m not so sure it’s as easy to get it when the packaging is less sympathetic. Less politically compatible and with a storyline that doesn’t follow the path that we feel is necessary for our feminist buttons to be pushed.

Well, I think 202, or maybe it’s 306, is about looking past the storyline and maybe trying to figure out if feminism is about more than just reflexively having certain women’s backs. It’s also about spotting any antifeminism and calling it out.

Well, but: oh boo hoo, rich white blond girl doesn’t need us to stand up for her. And let’s face it. Writing posts decrying treatment of rich white blond women isn’t going to win any popularity contests in the feminist blogosphere.

But that’s the point. If feminism is only about the sympathetic victim of anti-feminism, it’s not feminism, but presenting for the antifeminists a soundbite they can get behind, only to spew the same crap on other occasions, when they know other women, and some feminists, will back them up.

Now, it should be a given that our activism should prioritize those most in need. Feminism cannot leave any women behind. It not only cannot assume that a top-down approach will cover all women, but must aggressively emphasize and participate in bottom-up activities. Defending privileged women does not mean prioritizing them within the movement.

But IMO, feminism cannot tell women – once you’re at a certain point, seeya. You don’t count anymore. Women can be helped from a victim role, but we don’t need to be defended once we’re successful or trying to be, because that’s just tacky and selfish.

Feminism needs to have the courage of its convictions – women are equal. Whatever your situation, you should be not be treated differently based on gender. There is no class of women who needs to wear hairshirts and suck it up just because, if similarly situated men don’t. Because once you go there, you’re saying women really aren’t equal. And if we’re signaling that we’re selectively OK with that message being out there, then that clarifies that we’re really not sure of our footing. We’ll fight in an attractive ring, in a way that affirms our reputation as helpers. We’re not going to fight those fights that make us look aggressive or pushy.

That tells our opponents all they need to know. We don’t really have the courage of our convictions. And that compromises our whole message, and our efforts at all levels.

Nope. I was a shy geek oddball in elementary school, a geek brain outcast in high school, a slut (at that point I hid my GPA) freak in college, a contrary slacker rebel in law school. I would pipe up at law firm dinners to ask why female clients' appearance was critiqued. I would also pipe up at public interest meetings and encourage women to invest and occasionally take "working for the man" jobs where it made sense. I like too much of Ariel Levy to be uniformly blessed by the sex positives and I've done way too many lap dances, and supported other women's decisions to do that or more, to be adored by their opponents. I'm that nail sticking out that each stroke of the hammer just manages to push a little more out of joint. I’ve long since given up winning any popularity contests. I don’t mind being the person who says the unpopular thing because I think it’s actually important for all the reasons the popular things are. And maybe others too.