Politico reports on the growing number of conservative women who have joined the fight over health insurance and health care. In fact, a recent Quinnipiac University poll finds that 55 percent of the members of the tea party movement are women — deflating the leftist talking point that tea party members are just angry white males.
Then there’s the observation below. While I disagree with the professor’s assertion about conservative women having to struggle for political inclusion, her thought is interesting. Elected leaders should take note.
Melanie Gustafson, an associate professor of history at the University of Vermont who has studied and written about the role of women in politics, said the tea party has provided a more direct way for conservative women to have influence than the Republican Party, where she says “women have always struggled for inclusion.”
Gustafson said the surge of female activism in the tea parties is similar in some ways to the response to Theodore Roosevelt’s Progressive Party in 1912 from “women who couldn’t vote, but who saw it as moment where they could enter directly into politics, rather than by influencing their husbands.”
“There’s something happening here (in the tea party movement) in the same way which is bypassing the parties and I think women are comfortable with that type of organizing, because it’s community organizing” that revolves around family rituals.
