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the arrival of Palin and friends crystallized the movement’s conflicts. For one thing, the Palinites had little interest in women’s issues, conventionally understood. Feminists like to say that they’re a diverse group, and it’s true that there have been areas of dispute in the past (on the subjects of lesbianism and pornography, for example), but overall, it was usually easy to separate those who supported “women’s issues” from those who didn’t. The newcomers, however, weren’t talking about child care, parental leave, equal-pay initiatives, or any other issue on the familiar agenda. They were talking about government debt and patronage, about TARP and bailouts and excessive regulation. In March 2010, a Quinnipiac poll found that 55 percent of Tea Party members were women—including five of the nine national coordinators of the Tea Party Patriots and 15 of the 25 state coordinators. A few months later, veteran newscaster Lesley Stahl probably spoke for a lot of media women during an appearance on MSNBC’s Morning Joe. “I wanted to ask all the gurus here why so many of the Tea Partiers are women,” she said. “I find that just intriguing and don’t quite understand why that has happened.” Indeed. For Stahl and her ilk, real women care about day care, not deficits.

Policy aside, the arrivistes were incomprehensible to liberals for cultural reasons. The old guard, consisting mostly of lawyers, writers, journalists, and other media types, tended to cluster on the coasts. The new crowd came from the South, the Midwest, and the West, and a number of them were businesswomen—not surprisingly, given that women are now majority or equal owners in nearly half of American businesses. Some were techies, such as Tea Party organizers Jenny Beth Martin of Georgia, a computer programmer, and Michelle Moore of Missouri, who ran a technology consulting firm. Nikki Haley, South Carolina’s newly elected governor, was an accountant in her previous life. The new congresswoman from South Dakota, Kristi Noem, runs the cattle ranch that she inherited from her family. Tech geeks, businesswomen, and ranchers: not Lesley Stahl feminism, that’s for sure.

Further unsettling the feminist framework was the vigorous maternalism of the newcomers. Many heartland women had seen in feminism’s enthusiastic careerism, as well as its resentment of men and domesticity, an implicit criticism of their own lives. Hence their rejection of the feminist label even as they joined the workforce and lived lives that looked, in many respects, consistent with the movement’s principles. Now there appeared on the scene a new model of female success, one in which maternalism and even housewifery were not at odds with wielding power on the public stage. Palin’s name for the female midterm candidates was telling: “Mama Grizzlies.” Dana Loesch, a homeschooling mother of two, “mommy blogger,” and columnist, cofounded the St. Louis Tea Party. Minnesota congresswoman Michelle Bachmann, who won reelection in November, has taken in 23 foster children over the years. Before the election, some had predicted that 2010 would be another Year of the Woman; it would be closer to the truth to call it the Year of the Mom.

maternal feminism is nothing new. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, temperance fighters—and, to a lesser extent, suffragettes—viewed their role as wives and mothers as the source of their moral authority in public debates. But something important sets today’s maternal feminism apart from the earlier strain: it casts budgeting and governance as maternal issues. “From first-hand experience, [women] know you cannot spend your way out of debt at home and they know that philosophy translates to businesses and to the government,” Martin told Politico. Palin put her fiscal conservatism in the homey rhetoric of a PTA president: “I think a whole lot of moms . . . are concerned about government handing our kids the bill.”

The Palinites, then, have introduced an unfamiliar thought into American politics: maybe a trillion-dollar deficit is a woman’s issue. But where does that leave expensive, bureaucracy-heavy initiatives like universal pre-K, child care, and parental leave? Consider a recent feminist initiative, the Paycheck Fairness Act, passed in the House but scuttled in November by a few Republican Senate votes. Feminist supporters, saying that it would close loopholes in previous antidiscrimination legislation, didn’t worry about how redundant or bureaucratically tortured it might be or how many lawsuits it might unleash. But chances are that the Grizzlies, in keeping with their frontiersy individualism and their fears about ballooning deficits, would see in the act government run amok. After all, it would come on top of the 1963 Equal Pay Act; Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which bans employment discrimination; the 2009 Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act; innumerable state and local laws and regulations; and a crowd of watchdogs at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. How are liberal feminists to understand the kind of soi-disant feminist who would vote against a Paycheck Fairness Act?

But there were liberal feminists who understood that the Grizzlies’ arrival confronted them with a question that they needed to take seriously: What is feminism?

Here is the novelist Amy Bloom writing in a Slate powwow on the question: If Sarah Palin explicitly supports equal pay for equal work, subsidized day care, Title IX, and the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, she’s a feminist. If she understands that she is a product of feminism and is prepared to pursue its goals, I can give her a pass on abortion because there are, apparently, honest-to-God feminists who believe that abortion is murder and even though I think that that’s not true, I have to respect that (I guess). But there is no such thing as free market/anti-legislation/I’ve-got-mine feminism. That definition, of course, would exclude most of the Palinites, who would surely call themselves free marketeers. Other feminists defined their movement in such meaningless generalities as to surrender to the conservatives at the gate. “Feminism to me means equality for all women and regard for women’s choices,” the legal journalist Dahlia Lithwick ventured in the Slate forum. Elsewhere, phrases like “women’s progress,” “women’s interests,” “policies that move women forward,” and “goals that benefit women” also appeared in the public discussion about the meaning of feminism.

But the Palinites have drawn big question marks around language like this. What does “equality” mean? Is it equal opportunity, as the newcomers would probably say? Or equal results, as many feminists appear to believe? Does it mean women’s choosing how to run their lives, just as men do? (Grizzlies.) Or does it refer to absolute parity between men and women? (Liberals.) How can both sides claim the feminist mantle with such different understandings of government’s function and of women’s progress?

And these divisions don’t begin to address the biggest bone of contention of all: abortion. The writer and movie director Nora Ephron answered the what-is-feminism quiz simply by announcing: “You can’t call yourself a feminist if you don’t believe in the right to abortion.” Many liberals agree. Yet most Grizzlies oppose abortion; Nevada Senate candidate Sharron Angle, who lost in November, even rejected it in the cases of rape and incest. Palin has praised young women who carry unintended pregnancies to term as “strong,” “smart,” and “capable.” It seems unlikely that the Grizzlies can successfully recast feminism as antiabortion, but surveys suggest that women have been growing less sympathetic to the proabortion position—so who knows?

None of this is proof, of course, that the Palinites “speak for women” any more than feminists do. The midterm election reveals an ambiguous picture about women’s politics. There are a record number of new Republican women in the House of Representatives, in governors’ mansions, and in state legislatures. For the first time since exit polls have been taken, slightly more women voted for Republicans than for Democrats in the congressional election. Nevertheless, according to the Center for American Women in Politics, men were still 7 percentage points likelier than women to vote for a Republican House candidate in 2010. That gender gap is the same size as the one we saw in the 2008 presidential election. To make matters more confusing, a marriage gap also exists: married women were far more likely to vote Republican than single women in 2010. More evidence that feminism is up for grabs.

Rasha has four sisters, and she’s been able to earn the money necessary to help three of them get married. In the past, she worked for another Chinese dealer, and she told me that she would never accept employment from an Egyptian. In her opinion, the Chinese are direct and honest, and she appreciates their remove from local gossip networks.

“The Chinese will sell people anything they like,” she said. “They don’t ask any questions. They don’t care what you do with what they sell you. They won’t ask whether the Egyptians are going to hold elections, or repress people, or throw journalists into jail. They don’t care.” She continued, “The Americans think, If everybody is like me, they’re less likely to attack me. The Chinese don’t think like that. They don’t try to make the world be like them.” She continued, “Their strategy is to make economic linkages, so if you break these economic linkages it’s going to hurt you as much as it hurts them.”

Even if the Chinese had some idea that they want to promote, they lack the soft-power tools of neighbors like Japan and South Korea, which fund development work in ways similar to those of Western governments.

Without a clear strategy, China has turned to a basic instinct of the Deng Xiaoping era: When in doubt, build factories.

The TEDA zone looks as if it could have been uprooted from almost any small Chinese city. Such transplants are springing up all around the world: earlier this year, the government announced that it plans to build a hundred and eighteen economic zones in fifty countries. The Chinese want to encourage domestic industry to move abroad, in part as a way of dealing with diminishing natural resources in China. The TEDA zone offers subsidized rent and utilities to entrepreneurs, and more than fifty companies have become tenants. The majority are Chinese, and they tend to be small; a couple are owned by former lingerie dealers. But almost every Chinese boss whom I talked to complained about the same problem: they can’t find good workers, especially good female workers.

In 1993 came the biggest news: Dean Hamer's discovery of the "gay gene." In fact, Hamer, a Harvard-trained researcher at the National Cancer Institute, hadn't quite put it that boldly or imprecisely. He found that gay brothers shared a specific region of the X chromosome, called Xq28, at a higher rate than gay men shared with their straight brothers. Hamer and others suggested this finding would eventually transform our understanding of sexual orientation.

Researchers at Northwestern University, outside Chicago, are doing this work as a follow-up to their studies of arousal using genital measurement tools. They found that while straight men were aroused by film clips of two women having sex, and gay men were aroused by clips of two men having sex, most of the men who identified themselves as bisexual showed gay arousal patterns. More surprising was just how different the story with women turned out to be. Most women, whether they identified as straight, lesbian, or bisexual, were significantly aroused by straight, gay, and lesbian sex. "I'm not suggesting that most women are bisexual," says Michael Bailey, the psychology professor whose lab conducted the studies. "I'm suggesting that whatever a woman's sexual arousal pattern is, it has little to do with her sexual orientation." That's fundamentally different from men. "In men, arousal is orientation. It's as simple as that. That's how gay men learn they are gay."

Female sexual orientation is particularly foggy, he says, because there's been so little research done. As for male sexual orientation, he argues that there's now enough evidence to suggest it is "entirely in-born," though not nearly enough to establish how that happens.

Bailey's 1991 twin study is still cited by other researchers as one of the pillars in the genetic argument for homosexuality. But his follow-up study using a comprehensive registry of twins in Australia found a much lower rate of similarity in sexual orientation between identical twins, about 20 percent, down from 50 percent.

Cornell psychologist Daryl Bem has proposed an intriguing theory for how CGN might lead to homosexuality. According to this pathway, which he calls "the exotic becomes erotic," children are born with traits for temperament, such as aggression and activity level, that predispose them to male-typical or female-typical activities. They seek out playmates with the same interests. So a boy whose traits lead him to hopscotch and away from rough play will feel different from, and ostracized by, other boys. This leads to physiological arousal of fear and anger in their presence, arousal that eventually is transformed from exotic to erotic. Critics of homosexuality have used Bem's theory, which stresses environment over biology, to argue that sexual orientation is not inborn and not fixed. But Bem says this pathway is triggered by biological traits, and he doesn't really see how the outcome of homosexuality can be changed.

Males and females have a fundamental genetic difference - females have two X chromosomes, and males have an X and a Y. Still, right after conception, it's hard to tell male and female zygotes apart, except for that tucked-away chromosomal difference. Normally, the changes take shape at a key point of fetal development, when the male brain is masculinized by sex hormones. The female brain is the default. The brain will stay on the female path as long as it is protected from exposure to hormones. The hormonal theory of homosexuality holds that, just as exposure to circulating sex hormones determines whether a fetus will be male or female, such exposure must also influence sexual orientation.

The cases of children born with disorders of "sexual differentiation" offer insight. William Reiner, a psychiatrist and urologist with the University of Oklahoma, has evaluated more than a hundred of these cases. For decades, the standard medical response to boys born with severely inadequate penises (or none at all) was to castrate the boy and have his parents raise him as a girl. But Reiner has found that nurture - even when it involves surgery soon after birth - cannot trump nature. Of the boys with inadequate penises who were raised as girls, he says, "I haven't found one who is sexually attracted to males." The majority of them have transitioned back to being males and report being attracted to females.

During fetal development, sexual identity is set before the sexual organs are formed, Reiner says. Perhaps it's the same for sexual orientation. In his research, of all the babies with X and Y chromosomes who were raised as girls, the only ones he has found who report having female identities and being attracted to males are those who did not have "receptors" to let the male sex hormones do their masculinizing in the womb.

"Exposure to male hormones in utero dramatically raises the chances of being sexually attracted to females," Reiner says. "We can infer that the absence of male hormone exposure may have something to do with attraction to males."

New York University researcher Lynn S. Hall, who has studied traits determined in the womb, speculates that Patrick was somehow prenatally stressed, probably during the first trimester, when the brain is really developing, particularly the structures like the hypothalamus that influence sexual behavior. This stress might have been based on his position in the womb or the blood flow to him or any of a number of other factors not in his mother's control. Yet more evidence that identical twins have womb experiences far from identical can be found in their often differing birth weights. Patrick was born a pound lighter than Thomas.

the research suggests that early on in the womb, as the fetus's brain develops in either the male or female direction, something fundamental to sexual orientation is happening. Nobody's sure what's causing it. But here's where genes may be involved, perhaps by regulating hormone exposure or by dictating the size of that key clump of neurons in the hypothalamus. Before researchers can sort that out, they'll need to return to the question of whether, in fact, there is a "gay gene."

There is, however, a towering question that Sanders's study will probably not be able to answer. That has to do with evolution. If a prime motivation of all species is to pass genes on to future generations, and gay men are estimated to produce 80 percent fewer offspring than straight men, why would a gay gene not have been wiped out by the forces of natural selection? This evolutionary disadvantage is what led former Amherst College biologist Paul Ewald to argue that homosexuality might be caused by a virus - a pathogen most likely working in utero. That argument caused a stir when he and a colleague proposed it six years ago, but with no research done to test it, it remains just another theory. Other scientists have offered fascinating but unpersuasive explanations, most of them focusing on some kind of compensatory benefit, in the same way that the gene responsible for sickle cell anemia also protects against malaria. A study last year by researchers in Italy showed that female relatives of gay men tended to be more fertile, though, as critics point out, not nearly fertile enough to make up for the gay man's lack of offspring.

Those same genes would work one way in heterosexual women and another way in homosexual men. The UCLA lab is examining how these genes might be turned "up" or "down." It's not a question of what genes you have, but rather which ones you use, says Bocklandt. "I have the genes in my body to make a vagina and carry a baby, but I don't use them, because I am a man." In studying the genes of gay sheep, for example, he's found some that are turned "way up" compared with the straight rams.

I must say that when visiting countries such as Egypt and Morocco, where native women cover all but their faces, I am not likely to go out in public in shorts and a T-shirt, as I do here at home. Some culturally tone deaf Western tourists do dress as if they're touring Disneyland, but most have the presence of mind to cover up somewhat, out of respect for another country's culture, beliefs and tradition.

I often wish Muslim immigrant women would repay the courtesy here in the U.S. Whenever I see a woman in full body garment or head scarf -- and there are plenty of them in my community, where there are many immigrants -- I take it as an affront.

I say this knowing it is highly controversial to do so, but it feels to me as if they are holding American women back. The women in my neighborhood do not cover their faces, but many go outside -- even in the stifling Washington, D.C., summers -- in full-body coverings. I wish they would adopt a "When in Rome . . ." approach and make full use of the freedoms granted to women in this great nation.

In fact, I wish the U.S. would pre-screen for women who want to take full advantage of the freedoms they gain by moving from a society that represses women to one that does not. Immigration is a privilege and not a right.

I remember speaking to a group of Westernized Iranian women years ago, not long after the Iranian Revolution of the late 1970s. One told me, "We loved our shah and do not want to see women pushed back into ancient times and dress codes under the Ayatollah." Much more recently, an Iranian feminist told me that Iranian émigrés wearing full-body garb in this country are making an anti-Western statement by so doing.

as reported by the Washington Post: "Although veiled women are estimated to number no more than several thousand in this country of 64 million, [French Parliament Member Andre] Gerin said, behind them are what he called 'gurus' who are trying to impose Islamic law on French society. "For instance, Gerin said, doctors at the Mother and Child Hospital in Lyon told him during a visit that they are threatened several times a week by angry Muslim men who refuse to allow their pregnant wives or daughters to be treated by male doctors, even for emergency births when nobody else is available. 'The scope of the problem is a lot broader than I thought,' he said at a news conference summing up his findings. 'It is insidious.' "

I have interviewed American Muslims, both immigrants and native-born converts, who say they choose to wear headscarves or full-body coverings. Some of them are highly educated and could easily have chosen not to do so. But, to me, many of them seemed to have ulterior motives -- motives based on acceptance into a community or by a man who provides emotional or financial support. A true choice? Perhaps, but a heavily freighted one as well.

I've been asked why I am so opposed to Islamic coverings, but tolerate Catholic nuns' habits. That is fodder for subsequent columns.