And the East Coast wasn't all that bad. New Jersey had women's suffrage before being one of the original 13 states to create the United States, which of course they had to give up.

That said, I was taken with the Palin nomination from the beginning, largely because she embodies the mythology of the West and recalls my own pioneer ancestors. Mormon women were left alone, often for years at a time, as their men went away to serve missions or in the military (the Mormon Battalion in the Mexican War). They therefore not only had to raise children but to deal with everything else life could throw at them in an isolated, harsh desert environment. Not unlike the women you describe in your article, the Mormon pioneer woman could cook, manage five kids, pull a cow from a blizzard and shoot a deer or a hostile Indian. If memory serves, Utah was the first state to grant suffrage to women, and even Brigham Young sent his wives east for higher education. In one of his books about Mormon history, Wallace Stegner wrote, "Their women were incredible."

So what you describe as a new feminism is really the old, self-reliant feminism of our pioneer ancestors, which remains very much alive in women of the West and elsewhere, I am sure. This largely explains Sarah Palin's appeal. Your article captures it well.

Let me tell you, there still are Italian woman here like the ones you described in your column. They have small farms and sell vegetables at the roadside stands. In the summer months, they get up at 6 a.m. and work the farms all day. A woman named Lena ran a pizza place -- she was big and strong and tough, and her husband was a grape farmer. She would kick our butts if we messed around at all at the pizza place or around her house (I lived around the corner from her).

This is small-town USA, and Sarah Palin is one of us the same way Lena was. We all liked Lena and like Sarah too in the same way. This is Sarah's appeal -- she is as real as the small-town farm lady that you told about in your story about the runaway calf.

I have never met tougher, stronger women (in every respect) than the women of my great-grandmother and grandmother's generation. And as you remarked, loud! (Much louder than the men, in fact.) The older ones, while sitting together around the kitchen table, would bust out into some of the most beautiful singing voices I've heard (traditional southern Italian field songs, I was later told).

Your story about the calf reminded me of one that I recall personally. It was the mid-1970s, and my young uncle's car had gotten stuck on the beach during a sudden, howling thunderstorm. Our beach house was bursting at the seams with family members willing to help push the car back to the road. Among those chosen to take up the task were Louise and Jean, two of my grandmother's female cousins. They were fraternal twin sisters, the last in the family to be born in Italy. At the time they were pushing 55 but were in great shape, strapping and the size of Amazons, their skin tanned into a dark, olive complexion. I wasn't allowed to go because I was only eight years old.

An hour later, they came back to the house, soaking wet but mission accomplished. They entered carrying Mickey, their cousin, a man of slight frame, who had been knocked over by the wind and who had sprained his ankle. The first thing Louise and Jean did when they came through the door was to drop Mickey unceremoniously on the couch and ask me to fetch them beers from the refrigerator. To this day, I look back and think: Those were two of the sexiest women I ever laid my eyes on!

Not surprisingly, when I later went to college, during the height of the PC wars in the late eighties, campus feminism often puzzled me and sometimes angered me. These women would never in a million years choose my great-aunts and cousins as their role models. In fact, they'd probably cast scorn on them as backwards hillbillies. And you know what, those relatives of mine were hillbillies, in a way, or their equivalent in rural southern Italy. But I suppose the sisterhood of feminism was a rather small tent, the way it played out on campus. Their loss, as you've pointed out for years.

When I saw Sarah Palin's speeches just before and during the Republican convention, I turned to my boyfriend and said, "This woman is the biggest threat to Democratic chances to the presidency since Reagan." He understood immediately, but others I said that to initially had no idea what I was talking about. Clearly, they never had a Louise or Jean in the family!