DIGITAL Magazine - The Nation

August 2/9, 2010
Katha Pollitt
Grisly Mamas
There are lots of conservative white women
voters in America. In 2000, white women went
for Bush by one point; in 2004, 55 percent
chose Bush over Kerry; and in 2008, after all we’d been through,
53 percent chose McCain over Obama. In a way, when we
feminists and progressives talk about “women voters” in that
rah-rah EMILY’s List way, we are buying our own propaganda,
because really it’s women of color, especially black women, who
push “women” solidly into the Democratic camp. By speaking
so generally about “women”—whom pundits subdivide into silly
pseudodemographics like “waitress moms,” “security moms,”
“Sex and the City voters” and so on, each of which receives a
specially crafted message—we make it hard to see right-wing
women as anything but bizarre exceptions or (more kindly) as
women just waiting for the brilliant appeal to some
self-interest they didn’t know they had.
This mindset explains why so many are surprised
that the Tea Party is full of women. It’s man bites dog,
er, make that woman bites cat—females are supposed
to be liberal. A widely cited Quinnipiac University
poll reported that the majority of Tea Partyers—
55 percent—were women, and Ruth Rosen wrote a
thoughtful piece setting out possible reasons why.
According to Gallup, women are 45 percent of the
Tea Party, but whatever the exact figure, it’s safe to say there are
a whole lot of Mama Grizzlies out there.
What’s strange about that? Men may control political parties
and movements, but across the political spectrum women are the
workhorses. Indeed, move ments have to engage women as well
as men or they won’t get very far. White women mobilized
against women’s suffrage and for the KKK, which had hundreds
of thousands of female auxiliaries back when the KKK was a
respectable family organ ization. They were grassroots activists
in the John Birch Society and the insurgent Goldwater wing of
the Republican Party. Then as now, women mobilized as mothers,
ordinary women reluctantly laying aside their oven mitts to go
out and save America from moral rot. “In the cold war era,”
historian Michelle Nickerson, author of the forthcoming
Mothers of Conservatism: Women and the Postwar Right, told me,
“women on the right were…on the phone, knocking on doors,
getting signatures, planning events, opening bookstores, going
to study groups, etc. They were incredibly effective and they
created a powerful anti-statist gender ideology that fuels conservative
women’s politics still.” (As a housewife quoted in Rick
Perlstein’s Before the Storm told Time magazine in 1961, “I just
don’t have time for anything. I’m fighting communism three
nights a week.”)
Historically, right-wing women were put to organizing one
another and kept away from real power. That’s the sad story
of Phyllis Schlafly, who had to concentrate on antifeminism
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because there was no future for her in foreign policy. But heck,
it’s 2010, and right-wing women are tired of licking envelopes
and knocking on doors to elect yet another jowly good ol’ boy.
Go Nikki Haley! These days conservative women work, and
fundamentalist stay-home moms want to be in public life. They
have the same desire for power and respect and a place in the
sun that liberal women do. The antiabortion, anti–gay rights
and Christian fundamentalist movements funneled right-wing
women into party politics; now the Tea Party adds a note of faux
kitchen-table “common sense”: why shouldn’t the government
have to balance its budget the way a family does? Why should
the virtuous taxpayer “bail out” the lazy and imprudent? Why is
this Muslim Kenyan communist running the country?
A lot of liberals are making fun of Sarah Palin’s “Mama Grizzlies”
ad for her SarahPac. Over scenes of white women waving
(or wearing) flags, carrying Tea Party signs (Mo M s
opposed t o Ma n d at e s —Un c o n s t i t U t i o n a l),
attending rallies and having photo ops with Palin herself,
the weirdly urgent, electric voice of Palin delivers
a speech of apparent contentlessness: women are
going to “get things done for our country,” are having
“kind of a mom awakening,” “because moms
kinda just know when something’s wrong.” That’s
right, sisters: you don’t want to mess with Mama
Grizzlies when someone’s coming after their cubs! To
an outsider the ad looks vacuous and unprofessional—didn’t they
know they had to salt the visuals with more black and brown
faces? And how come the only politician you see is Sarah? But the
message couldn’t be clearer: white conservative women blah blah
blah! Tax cuts yes, healthcare reform no! We want our country
back! In a country where 55 percent tell pollsters Obama is a
socialist, that’s really all you need. You can fill in the candidates’
names later, when you send in your check.
Are the Tea Party women feminists, as Palin now says she is?
The F-word must be on a roll if this canny opportunist is claiming
it, but Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton would
turn over in their graves at the thought. Feminism has made it
possible for right-wing women to play a bigger role in politics
than their John Birch predecessors—for example, as Nickerson
points out, feminist-driven changes in gender roles have made
conservative men more comfortable working with women. But
a feminist is someone who, whatever her personal choices, actually
supports equality for women—all women. It isn’t someone
whose main political goal is akin to the notorious Tea Party declaration,
“Keep your government hands off my Medicare”—i.e.,
let’s shred the safety net, except for the bits that help me. When
Tea Party darling Sharron Angle, who wants to criminalize all
abortion without exception, says a 13-year-old raped by her
father should turn a “lemon situation into lemonade” and have
the baby, this is not feminism—it’s the saccharine cruelty of the
truly oblivious. n