Tea Party Women

Mama Grizzlies, Grassroots Leaders, and the Changing Face of the American Right

Melissa Deckman

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781479891023
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Corruption politique et inconduite

Notable for its radical conservative views, the Tea Party is progressive in one way that much of mainstream US politics is not: it has among its most vocal members not spokes men but spokes women. Michelle Bachmann, Sarah Palin, Governor Nikki Haley, US Representative Cathy McMorris Rodgers, and many others are all prominent figureheads for the fiery and prominent political movement. Many major Tea Party organizations, such as the Tea Party Patriots, are led by women and women have been instrumental in founding new right wing organizations for women, such as Smart Girl Politics, with ties to the movement.

In Tea Party Women, Melissa Deckman explores the role of women in creating and leading the movement and the greater significance of women’s involvement in the Tea Party for our understanding of female political leadership and the future of women in the American Right. Through national-level public opinion data, observation at Tea Party rallies, and interviews with female Tea Party leaders, Deckman demonstrates that many Tea Party women find the grassroots, decentralized nature of the movement to be more inclusive for them than mainstream Republican politics. She lays out the ways in which these women gain traction by recasting conservative political issues such as the deficit and gun control as issues affecting families, and how they rely on traditional gender roles as mothers and homemakers to underscore their particular expertise in understanding these issues. Furthermore, she examines how many Tea Party women claim to write off traditional feminist issues like reproductive rights and gender discrimination as distracting from the real issues affecting women, such as economic policies, and how some even reclaim the mantel of ‘feminism’ as signifying freedom and independence from government overreach—tactics that have over time been adopted by mainstream Republicans. Whether the Tea Party terrifies or fascinates you, Tea Party Women provides a behind-the-scenes look at the women behind an enduring and influential faction in American politics.

1

Introduction

Mama Grizzlies Rising Up

Former Alaska governor Sarah Palin, addressing the pro-life Susan B. Anthony List as its annual “Celebration of Life” Breakfast in 2010, famously warned political leaders in Washington to be wary of “moms who are rising up” in the Tea Party movement to fight against big government:

And Washington, let me tell you, you no doubt don’t want to mess with moms who are rising up. There in Alaska I always think of the mama grizzly bears that rise up on their hind legs when somebody’s coming to attack their cubs, to do something adverse toward their cubs. No, the mama grizzlies, they rear up and, you know if you thought pit bulls were tough well you don’t want to mess with mama grizzlies … And that’s what we’re seeing with all these women who are banding together, rising up, saying no. This isn’t right for our kids and for our grandkids. And women leading the grassroots people’s movements—many of the Tea Party leaders, most of them are women.1

Taking Washington to task for bailing out the financial institutions and the automakers during the Great Recession and increasing the national debt to unsustainable levels, Palin argued that women were playing a pivotal role in the Tea Party in order to protect their families and to stop what she called “this fundamental transformation of America, this road to national insolvency.”2

Sarah Palin has become synonymous with the Tea Party in the United States, which burst on the political scene a few months after Barack Obama’s election in 2008. Although the Tea Party is not a monolithic entity, what binds its many grassroots and national organizations together is its advocacy for limited government, rooted in a conservative interpretation of the Constitution. Reducing the federal debt, lowering taxes, and promoting American exceptionalism are key issues dominating the movement. While these issues have always found a home among conservative political movements in America’s history, what is unusual about the Tea Party is how much of its leadership comes from women, a demographic usually not publicly aligned with conservative causes. In addition to Sarah Palin, arguably one of the most famous national politicians associated with the Tea Party from its inception is former Minnesota congresswoman Michele Bachmann, who started the Tea Party Caucus while serving in Congress. Studies of grassroots Tea Party organizations suggest that women dominate as leaders at the local level, while women are also making their mark in the Tea Party as organizational leaders nationally.3 Amy Kremer, who gained prominence as the chair of the Tea Party Express, routinely appears on news outlets to promote the views of the Tea Party. Women dominate the board of the Tea Party Patriots, another leading Tea Party organization, whose co-founder, Jenny Beth Martin, was named by Time as one of the hundred most influential people in 2010.4 There is no doubt that women are among the Tea Party’s most active movers and shakers at all levels.

To be sure, women have always played important roles as volunteers in many earlier conservative causes, such as the anticommunist movement, the pro-life movement, and the Christian Right.5 Women have also been active in Republican Party politics for much of the twentieth century, although their work was generally isolated to the “housekeeping” functions that take place behind the scenes at the grassroots and precinct levels of politics well into the 1970s, often channeled through ladies’ auxiliary organizations such as the National Federation of Women’s Republican Clubs.6 There have been some notable exceptions to the historical rule that women in conservative political circles rarely emerged as leaders in their own right—Phyllis Schlafly, who was largely responsible for stopping the movement to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment and later founded Eagle Forum, and Beverly LaHaye, the evangelist who started the influential Christian Right organization Concerned Women for America in 1979 as a counterpart to the liberal National Organization for Women, both come to mind. More typically, women’s role in conservative politics through most of the twentieth century was largely supportive, behind the scenes rather than front and center. Yet these twenty-first-century conservative women activists, blogging for change and rallying their fellow “Mama Grizzlies” from a nationally watched podium, are different, a visible force with which to be reckoned.

This book addresses why Tea Party women have emerged as leaders of this newest incarnation of conservative activism in ways that are unprecedented in American history, and what their emergence may mean for American politics. I spent 2012 and 2013 attending Tea Party rallies, following Tea Party blogs and Twitter feeds, and meeting with women Tea Party leaders at the national, state, and grassroots levels. I conducted extensive interviews with a variety of Tea Party women, ranging from those women leading national Tea Party organizations and longer-standing conservative women’s groups to women who have formed or are very active in their own state and local Tea Party organizations. My research reveals several important findings about this influential group of activists.

First, the fluid nature of the Tea Party, with its decentralized structure, allows women unprecedented opportunity to engage in conservative activism on their own terms, in large measure because opportunities to get involved in mainstream Republican Party politics are limited or unappealing. Many of the Tea Party women I spoke with recount negative experiences with local and state Republican parties and instead believe that Tea Party activism is a better fit for their brand of activism. That said, there still remains a relationship, however tenuous and born of necessity, between Tea Party women and the Republican Party. Women in the Tea Party also point to a newer generation of very conservative Republican women who have served as role models to emulate and who have not only inspired them to become politically engaged but have given them hope that the Republican Party may become more conservative in its principles and policy positions. Moreover, I demonstrate that Republican women leaders in Congress have appropriated much of the rhetoric first developed by Tea Party women to defend or explain their conservative policy positions to other women.

This leads me to my second finding: Tea Party women have adopted a unique, gendered rhetoric to promote conservative policies. Using what I call the “motherhood frame,” many Tea Party women argue that reducing both the size and scope of government is good for American families. Other Tea Party women move beyond motherhood rhetoric to make other gendered claims against “big government,” arguing that federal government policies, including the Affordable Care Act, promote women’s dependence on government rather than empowering them. Still other Tea Party women extend their gendered rhetoric to defend gun rights, viewing efforts by the federal government to regulate firearms as yet another attempt to restrict women’s liberties, curtailing their ability to defend themselves and their families. Indeed, certain Tea Party women are even making the case that their endorsement of laissez-faire government policies in all of these arenas embodies a sort of “freedom feminism,” to use a term coined by conservative political theorist Christina Hoff Sommers.7

Finally, while the rise of the Tea Party’s women leaders is an important story in American politics, I find that such women are still likely to face an uphill battle when it comes to influencing the public opinion of American women on all these issues—in some cases, even women in the mass public who consider themselves part of the Tea Party movement. Using national survey data, I examine American women’s attitudes about a host of measures about which Tea Party women leaders take pronounced stands, including the role of government in the economy, taxes, pay equity regulation, the Affordable Care Act, and gun rights. Not surprisingly, Tea Party women in the mass public espouse far more conservative positions than women who are either Democrats or Political Independents and are often slightly more conservative than Republican women nationally who do not identify with the movement—but not always. Yet, in some cases, Tea Party women in the mass public do not necessarily march in lockstep with Tea Party women leaders with respect to their policy positions. Moreover, Tea Party women in the mass public represent a small minority of American women, and it is clear from my public opinion analysis that the vast majority of American women are more supportive of a larger role for government to play in terms of the social safety net and the regulation of the American economy—attitudes that have long driven the gender gap in American elections, in which women have been traditionally seen as more likely than men to vote for Democrats.

Studying Tea Party Women

In this book I rely on qualitative methods, including interviews, participant observation, and textual analysis of Tea Party writings, to tell a more complete, nuanced story of Tea Party women and the role they are playing in American politics. I conducted twenty-nine semi-structured interviews with key Tea Party women leaders and local grassroots and state women activists, most in person, to determine why they became involved in the movement and to get their sense of the role that women are playing in it. (Appendix A contains a description of the women I interviewed and their organizational affiliations.) I tend to use the term “leaders” and “activists” interchangeably, although most of the women I interviewed either founded their own organizations or hold important leadership positions within the local or state groups; several have even established their own blogs and enjoy a dedicated following of readers. I met many of the activists while attending multiple Tea Party and national conservative events that drew many Tea Party activists, ranging from local and state meetings in Maryland to national conferences and rallies such as CPAC and Smart Girl Summit, sponsored by Smart Girls Politics Action. While I interviewed a few Tea Party leaders from Texas and Massachusetts, most of my interviews were done with the grassroots activists in Maryland. Given that I reside in the state of Maryland, interviewing Tea Party leaders in this state was certainly a matter of convenience, making it far easier for me to attend local and state events throughout 2012 and 2013, when I completed the primary qualitative research for the book. National studies of Tea Party membership show that most Tea Party members from the major national Tea Party organizations such as Tea Party Patriots and FreedomWorks reside in the South, although in sheer numbers California has slightly more Tea Party members than Texas and Florida, which rank second and third, respectively, according to research done by the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights.8 This same research organization estimates that Maryland has about 7,600 active Tea Party members in national groups. However, as a percentage of its state population, Maryland’s Tea Party member levels rank similarly to California and are only slightly lower than Florida or Texas, so there is no reason to think that the Tea Party is more or less represented in my home state than in other states, despite its Democratic leanings.9

Given the fluid and dispersed nature of Tea Party activism, it is difficult to generate a random sample of women Tea Party members to interview. Instead, I relied on referrals from other activists for women to interview, compiling what social scientists refer to as a “snowball” sample. While I recognize that the comments and insights generated during these interviews, which lasted anywhere from one to two hours, are not fully generalizable to the population of female Tea Party grassroots activists nationally, they give valuable insight into the workings of smaller, local-level Tea Party groups.

I also interviewed women serving as leaders within national Tea Party organizations, including Tea Party Patriots, FreedomWorks, Smart Girl Politics, and As a Mom … a Sisterhood of Mommy Patriots, and other conservative leaders affiliated with national political organizations based in Washington, DC, which brings a national perspective on how and why women are heavily involved in the movement, especially compared with previous incarnations of conservative activism. Being a participant observer at numerous Tea Party events has also given me a clearer understanding of the political views of these activists and the strategies they are undertaking to effect political change.

Additionally, I rely on a textual analysis of primary source materials published by Tea Party activists and organizations, most of which I found online, published digitally via organizational websites, such as Smart Girl Politics Action’s Smart Girl Nation and As a Mom … a Sisterhood of Mommy Patriot’s Minute Mom Magazine. Throughout the course of this research, I regularly followed many Tea Party women’s blogs and Twitter feeds. These writings helped me identify key issues for Tea Party women as well as the rhetorical frames they employ to build support for their cause. In particular, the interviews and textual analysis shed light on the motherhood frame, and other gendered, rhetorical appeals, employed by Tea Party women to encourage other women to become engaged in conservative political activism.

To gain a better sense of what Tea Party women in the mass public look like, and to determine what drives their support for the movement, I analyze survey data from the Public Religion Research Institute, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that polls regularly on numerous political issues, including those of special concern to the Tea Party. Through survey data analysis, I also take a closer look at the key demographic and political characteristics of Tea Party women in the mass public, such as religion, race, partisanship, and socioeconomic status, and compare them with American women nationally to determine how or if Tea Party women are noticeably different. I also consider what factors make women likely to identify themselves as part of the Tea Party, and I compare the roots of their support with those of men.

Through the national survey data analysis, I also examine Tea Party women’s attitudes on economic policies, social issues, gender roles and feminism, and gun control, conducting multivariate analyses to determine how or if their support for the Tea Party may condition their attitudes on such issues compared with other women. In conducting multivariate, statistical analyses, I don’t offer an exhaustive explanation for numerous public policy positions that animate many Tea Party women, but instead hope to determine if Tea Party membership among women independently drives such positions among American women, or if women’s attitudes are better explained by partisanship, ideology, or other factors. I use similar controls for my statistical models in order to make comparable comparisons across a wide range of public policy positions. (Readers interested in seeing the full results of the statistical analyses can find them in appendix B.)

Tea Party women in the mass public are in many ways not the same as the activists I profile in the book. Emily Ekins, a pollster with the libertarian organization Reason, likes to call Tea Party sympathizers in the general public the “other Tea Party”—those Americans in national surveys who may consider themselves as part of the Tea Party but who do not necessarily engage actively in politics.10 Examining these Tea Party women in the mass public not only gives me a chance to compare and contrast women Tea Party leaders on the front lines of the movement with women who may be sympathetic to many Tea Party policy goals nationally, it also allows me to determine just how amenable other American women more generally may be to the Tea Party women’s gendered claims that smaller government is best for women’s interests. As such, I compare Tea Party women’s attitudes on such policies nationally with those of other American women—both Republican women who do not identify with the Tea Party, and American women who are Democrats or Political Independents—as a way to gauge how receptive other American women may be to the Tea Party’s message that smaller government, reduced taxes, and fewer business regulations are in women’s best interests. Enacting the type of conservative legislation touted by the Tea Party—including the women featured in this book—will come about only if the Tea Party can convince more Americans to vote for conservative candidates at all levels of government. My analysis of national survey data provides an indicator of the potential areas in which...