CLINTON, N.Y.

WHATEVER Sarah Palin’s merits as a potential vice president, her candidacy has reopened an important debate on the balance between work and parenthood. A number of commentators have questioned whether Governor Palin, with five children, should take on even higher political office than she already has. One of her children has Down syndrome, and her 17-year-old unmarried daughter is pregnant.

It is ironic that Palin’s conservative supporters have risen to her defense as a working mom (and used the issue of sexism to deflect legitimate questions about her qualifications), while some on the left have raised more traditionally conservative arguments against her taking the job. Perhaps this odd turnaround shows how far society has come in accepting working mothers.

However, the Palin debate is curiously limited to a debate about moms and the so-called “mommy wars” between working and stay-at-home mothers. As I notice when newspapers or magazines run articles about balancing work and family, the focus is almost always on the dilemmas faced by mothers. If the inhabitants of some other planet were monitoring our discussions, they might conclude that human reproduction and childrearing is carried out solely by females, who also live as single mothers.

We discuss the fitness of Palin as a mother of young children to be vice president or president but do not raise the same questions about Barack Obama or John McCain as fathers. What about Todd Palin, her husband? He comes up all too rarely in these discussions, but he is apparently on leave from his job to be a full-time dad.

The discussion of Sarah Palin needs to focus not on whether she can do it alone but whether, like male candidates for public office, she has a spouse or other partner who can effectively shoulder the responsibilities of child care. It seems that she does — so why not use Palin’s candidacy as an opportunity to highlight the growing number of men who are full-time dads — there are about 160,000, or triple the number from a decade ago, according to the U.S. Census Bureau — or who are in relationships where parenting (and housework) is equally shared?

If Palin’s candidacy is an advance for women, it also reflects feminism’s unfinished business. Pioneering 18th Century feminist Mary Wollstonecraft thought that women could be equal citizens while being the primary caregivers of the family. However, the expectation that it is the woman who will assume the main task of parenting inevitably burdens women with a dilemma that men largely avoid and thus puts women at a disadvantage both within the family and in society at large.

True gender equality can come about not just when women break glass ceilings, but when the fulfillment and responsibility of work and of parenting are evaluated by both men and women as they determine which path to pursue. We shy away from this issue because it goes far beyond equal opportunity in the job market to a deeper discussion about gender roles, the structure of family life and whether women who “choose” to opt out of careers are really making an autonomous decision or are in some measure subject to social pressures that their husbands almost never experience.

I suspect that Palin’s conservative supporters, who have hardly been enthusiastic about feminism in the past, are not interested in raising such transformative questions. At the same time, her liberal critics risk hypocrisy by not raising them. If both sides wanted a true discussion about work and parenting we might combine the issues raised by Palin’s candidacy with Obama’s call for increased paternal responsibility. That would add yet one more ground-breaking dimension to the 2008 election.

Peter Cannavo is an assistant professor of government at Hamilton College, in Clinton, N.Y.