Abstract
In light of the Electoral College victory of Donald Trump for U.S. President in 2016, it behooves all feminists and social workers to consider carefully the commitments, political methods, and grievances of the radical right, including women, mostly White, of the Tea Party and other like-minded organizations. Melissa Deckman offers readers an astute study of women of the contemporary U.S. right that she has developed, in part, from in-depth interviews with leaders of the Tea Party who are female. Additionally, Deckman has analyzed public opinion data from national polls and conducted extensive participation observation at Tea Party rallies and meetings.
One of the author’s key findings is that women have led and currently lead major Tea Party organizations, such as the Tea Party Patriots. Right-wing conservative women have been founders of new right-wing organizations for men and women and also creators of conservative right groups designed for women only, such as Smart Girl Politics. These women-only groups are closely linked with other organizations that combine the energies of both women and men. Mainstream press and social media have provided too little coverage of female contributions to the New Right, making Deckman’s book valuable as a counterbalance to the male centeredness of most of the U.S. national media.
Another important finding of Tea Party Women is that women leaders and members of the radical right in the United States have gained leverage within the conservative movement and the larger Republican Party by claiming that their traditional gender roles as wives, mothers, and homemakers give them special insights into political, economic, and cultural issues that affect nuclear and extended families. That argument will be highly familiar to feminists and social workers who have read about the identical case made about women’s gendered expertise in the Progressive era—the argument that women’s housekeeping, mothering, and caregiving expertise was the perfect preparation and springboard for women’s leadership in urban reform.
The author details the reframing skills of radical right women, who have designated gender discrimination, violence against women at home and in public, and reproductive rights as distractions from what they insist are the two primary concerns of the right: (1) economic stagnation, including the loss of industrial jobs for men and the consequent and decreased buying power of many middle-class, lower middle-class, and working-class households, and (2) excessive government intrusion in family life, religion, and schooling. For many women of the right, feminism is authentically valued as a movement to liberate women from big government’s unwarranted regulations, taxation, and—in their view—unwarranted privileging of people of color and new immigrants.
Tea Party Women documents radical right women’s experiences of marginalization within local- and state-level Republican Party organizations during the late 20th and early 21st century. As a consequence, some conservative women withdrew from Republican Party groups and, instead, invented their own grassroots associations that focused on expanding gun owners’ rights, multiplying networks of home schooling, shrinking the U.S. budget deficit, and minimizing taxes in order to enhance take-home pay.
Like activists of the second-wave feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s, Tea Party women have found their voices and empowerment as members of women-led grassroots organizations. Their forms of sisterhood focus on dramatically different goals from those of the mainstream women’s movement that has built invaluable reproductive rights clinics, lesbian and queer health centers, domestic violence shelters, sexual assault treatment and prevention programs, and antisexual trafficking organizations. Nonetheless, it is important to recognize that Tea Party women’s networks have spread in a similarly rhizomatic way—from the bottom up with a strong emphasis on horizontal solidarity.
Social workers active in rural, exurban, and sectarian agencies might well benefit from Deckman’s distillation of the political dynamics of right-wing radical women’s organizations. After all, there may be some selective matches possible between social work services and Tea Party women’s needs in the realms of parenting, caregiving, adult education, and wellness.
We would be wise to avoid caricaturing radical right women. They march to the beat of a different drummer, but they march.