Christine Bass, who attends church in Alaska with Sarah Palin, feels insults hurled at the Republican vice-presidential candidate as if they were aimed at all evangelical women. She smarts when the governor is demeaned as "caribou Barbie," a nitwit suspected of being controlled by her husband.

Since Sen. John McCain chose Ms. Palin as his running mate, critics have picked at everything from her unwed teenage daughter's pregnancy to the Republican Party's purchase of a $150,000 campaign wardrobe, to her North Country accent.

Polls show her strongest supporters are evangelical women over 29. In a PBS poll for the program "Religion & Ethics Newsweekly," 65 percent said they had "warm" feelings toward her. One reason may be that Ms. Palin, 44, contradicts caricatures of evangelical women as subservient and dull-witted.

Evangelical women resent such portrayals, and like the idea that one of their own runs Alaska while her hunk of a husband helps with the five kids. Some also believe Ms. Palin poses a challenge to churches that do teach male authority in the home and church.

Shadyside resident Faith Martin, 67, fought a losing battle for women to be made elders in the conservative Reformed Presbyterian Church. Church people told her to speak through her husband, that "it's OK if you think that, but your husband should say it," she said.

She knew of Ms. Palin before Mr. McCain picked her, and was impressed by her reputation as a reformer. Her place on the ticket turned her from a grudging McCain voter to proudly sporting a McCain-Palin button.

The response of critics to the pregnancy of Ms. Palin's teenage daughter showed that "the wider culture really misunderstands the conservative evangelical community," she said.

"They said that this showed bad judgment because he had picked her to appeal to the conservative culture and now, with this situation, they will turn their backs on her," she said. Instead, evangelical women "sympathized with her and see her as a strong woman who doesn't flinch."

Although Ms. Martin has feminist sympathies, she rejects what she sees as the movement's dogma that equality depends on the right to abortion. In Ms. Palin she sees a response to errors in both the church and feminism.

"She's proved that it can be done -- that you can have a cohesive family life, a supportive husband and a career at the same time," she said.

Mimi Haddad, president of the evangelical feminist group Christians for Biblical Equality, said there's irony in the fact that most evangelical leaders who call for male leadership at home and in church have no problem with Ms. Palin's run for office.

She believes Ms. Palin's candidacy may challenge them to reconsider their restrictions.

"How can you say that a woman can be the leader of the free world but not of the church or the home?" she said.

But not all conservative Protestants teach that. The Assemblies of God, the pentecostal denomination in which Ms. Palin came to faith and remained until 2002, has had female pastors since its foundation in 1914. Today, one in five Assemblies ministers is female.

"They are senior pastors, associate pastors, missionaries, evangelists. They serve any ministry they feel God has called them to. There are no restrictions on them," said Juleen Turnage, a spokesman for the denomination.

Wasilla Bible Church, to which the Palins moved in 2002, doesn't allow female "teaching elders," which includes pastors. But the Rev. Larry Kroon, the senior pastor, said the church's statement of faith doesn't mention that issue and he doesn't consider it a problem if members disagree with his interpretation of finer points of the Bible.

"Biblically, we believe that the husband is the head of the home, but he is to lead following the servant leader model set by Jesus," he said. "Scripturally we believe the senior pastor should be a man and he should follow in the servant leader model of Jesus. In the community at large, we have no hesitation about a woman as vice president or president," he said.

However, "Sarah may never have heard me preach on any of this," he said. "It's not an issue here; it's not something we put out like some sort of straitjacket that people have to live in."

That's the experience of Ms. Bass, who joined the church in 2005. She knows the Bible verses that are used to teach male authority, but "in the time I have been at Wasilla Bible Church I have never heard a sermon on . . . that topic," she said.

She was raised in conservative churches. Her wedding sermon was on Ephesians 5, in which wives are told to submit to their husbands as the church submits to Christ, and husbands are told to love their wives as Christ loves the church. That's not authoritarian, she said.

The verses "balance each other, like a seesaw with both ends balanced perfectly in midair. But as on a seesaw, getting it to balance in midair takes cooperation on the part of both people involved," she said.

"I have always been free to do whatever I want and be what suits my talents."

Evangelical women are not likely to be turned off by news that the Republican National Committee purchased Ms. Palin's designer wardrobe at high-end stores, said Marie Griffith, professor of religion and director of the Women and Gender Studies Program at Princeton University. She wrote "Daughters of God" about women in the neo-pentecostal Aglow movement. Although most Aglow women dressed from bargain stores, they chose leaders who were slender and glamorous. They wanted to be represented by women with style, she said.

"Just in terms of her comportment and her looks and her clothes, Sarah Palin would have appealed to them as someone to aspire to be like," she said

"Those high spiky heels and short skirts say something about that style of femininity that is quite common among women at leadership levels in those evangelical circles. There is something about her mix of femininity and toughness that is very appealing to them."

Dr. Griffith said she started with her own prejudices about evangelical women, but was surprised to find them counseling each other out of abusive marriages and leaving churches whose pastors told them otherwise.

"I realized that when we talk about feminism, we leave a lot of women out of that, but that is the kind of work they were all about [at Aglow]. They saw their faith as greatly empowering for them as women," she said.

Most of them believed in what they called submission to their husbands, but it was predicated on him acting Christ-like toward them, she said. "They would always say, 'We're not doormats.' They hated that image of evangelical women as doormats," she said.

Cindy Levine Hatch, a psychotherapist from Oakdale who specializes in counseling evangelical Christians, said that in 20 years of practice she's seen emphasis on male family leadership decline but not disappear.

An avid evangelical, her own response when her husband asked her to define submission was, "That's where you submit your ideas to me and I tell you if they're stupid or not."

Ms. Hatch isn't convinced that Ms. Palin has the experience to be vice president. But, she liked how Ms. Palin "came across as feisty, fearless and not wowed by the situation in which she found herself," she said.

Ms. Palin is "the first female I have seen reach this political stature without developing that embittered quality that women like Hillary Clinton and Geraldine Ferraro seemed to have," she said. "Whether political experience will beat the crap out of her and she will develop that quality, I don't know."

Team Sarah is trying to spare Ms. Palin that pain. It's part of the Susan B. Anthony List, a political action committee that backs prolife women, and endorsed her 2006 run for governor. Its social networking site, www.teamsarah.org, highlights insults, such as one from a Democratic strategist who dismissed her as "the fluffy bunny."

Ms. Palin was a dream pick for the Susan B. Anthony List, said political director Joy Yearout, 26, an evangelical in the religiously diverse group.

She hopes Ms. Palin will inspire more evangelical women to run for political office. Ms. Yearout finds her easier to identify with than other prominent women in politics.

"A lot of them are grandmothers. Sarah Palin is a mom, a hockey mom. She's balancing her work with getting the kids to school and going to sporting events, just like so many younger mothers. That's a paradigm that they haven't ever seen in the public square," she said.