Jul 06 2010

Angry Women Dominate the Tea Party

(4 pm. – promoted by ek hornbeck)

An Alternet story from yesterday contemplates the reason for women dominating the rank of the Tea Party movement. According to a Quinipiac poll the the TP is 55% women and Slate 6 of the 8 Tea Party Patriots are women and 15 of the 25 state coordinators are women. Like the men, they are predominantly white, Christian and “middle class”. It ain’t just angry white men.

July 5, 2010 Why have American women become so active in the right wing Tea Party movement? Could it be that they are drawn to the new conservative Christian feminism publicized by Sarah Palin? Without its grassroots female supporters, the Tea Party would have far less appeal to voters who are frightened by economic insecurity, threats to moral purity and the gradual disappearance of a national white Christian culture.

Most Americans are not quite sure what to make of the sprawling right-wing Tea Party, which gradually emerged in 2009 and became a household name after it held nationwide Tea Party rallies on April 15th 2010, to protest paying taxes. Throwing tea overboard, as you may remember, is an important symbolic image of the colonial anger at Britain’s policy of “taxation without representation.”

Many liberals and Democrats initial dismissed the Tea Party’s emergence on the political scene as a flash in the pan reactionary group to the state of the economy and an African American President’s intervention that helped the banks, Wall St. and the auto industry.

But they haven’t “flamed out” yet and, as E. J. Dionne points out, they are a threat to the “internal unity of the Republican Party.

The rise of the tea party movement is a throwback to an old form of libertarianism that sees most of the domestic policies that government has undertaken since the New Deal as unconstitutional. It typically perceives the most dangerous threats to freedom as the design of well-educated elitists out of touch with “American values.”

So what is the attraction for women, especially white women? Do they see this as a conservative version of the Feminist movement?

Some are angry-mom-activist types who, like their heroine Sarah Palin, outgrew the PTA. But some would surprise you with their straightforward feminist rage. For the last few years Anna Barone, a Tea Party leader from Mount Vernon, N.Y., has used the e-mail handle annaforhillary.com: “The way they treated Hillary is unforgiveable, and then they did it to Sarah Palin,” she said. “I’ve been to 15 Tea Party meetings and never heard a woman called a name just because she’s powerful. I guess you could say the Tea Party is where I truly became a feminist.”

snip

Rebecca Wales (spokesperson for Smart Girl Politics describes it as a group made up of “a lot of mama bears worried about their families.” The Tea Party, she says, is a natural home for women because “for a long time people have seen the parties as good-ole’-boy, male-run institutions. In the Tea Party, women have finally found their voice.”

Oddly they have even embraced some of the early Feminist movement slogans and mantras. One Delaware Senate candidate, Christine O’Donnell, has used Germaine Greer’s phrase “Lords of the back room” to describe her reasons for running for office. These women idolize Republican women like Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann and Nevada Senate candidate, Sharron Angler and are eager to support them, against their own self interests.

arlethamaselli0

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  2. Chris Cillizza discusses this in his article Tea Party = Republican party? in the Washington Post’s The Fix

    The scads of media coverage about the burgeoning “tea party” effort has focused heavily on the idea that those who identify themselves as part of the movement are political free agents — dismissive of both parties and Washington in general.

    New data out of Gallup suggests that premise isn’t right, as nearly seven in 10 tea party supporters describe themselves as “conservative Republicans.”

    All told, nearly 80 percent of tea party supporters describe themselves as Republicans, while 15 percent say they are Democrats and just six percent are, in their own minds, “pure independents.”

    Democrats disregard at your own risk.

  3. don’tcha know.  

  4. I see it as a new wrinkle on the old patriarchal bargain and an update of Victorian motherhood.  Both concepts worked to valorize the social contributions of privileged women.  In this country, that would be wealthy and bourgeois white women.

    And yes, the parallels to mid-ninteenth centuyry feminism are striking particularly when we consider the strains of racism that ran through early feminism, especially in the struggle for women’s suffrage.  Some of our most dearly admired feminist icons were appalled, simply appalled that black men were given the vote before they were.

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