The Stagnation of the Conservative Woman

Photo: Michele Bachmann speaking at CPAC in Washington D.C. on February 10, 2011, Wikimedia Commons.

By COURTNEY PANNELL

February 21, 2011

The GOP doesn’t plan on winning the female vote in 2012 — or ever, at this rate. Democratic opponents are calling the recent House move to slash funding from Planned Parenthood another example of the GOP’s “War on Women.” This war is only strengthened by conservative female figureheads, such as Michelle Bachmann and Sarah Palin, and the ideals that they are lauding, which are out of step with the desires and struggles of the modern woman.

Last week, I attended CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Conference, which is basically a red carpet event for the Who’s Who of the right. (Find footage of the event posted below.) As a conservative woman myself, I was looking forward to commiserating with fellow right-leaning ladies — but they were awfully hard to find. Walking into the convention center lobby, I tweeted, “Where are all the women?” in an attempt to send a rallying cry. I was hard-pressed to find anyone that wasn’t a wannabe-cowboy or Mitt Romney look-a-like, much less someone with a two X chromosomes.

I finally found a room of women at a panel discussion called “The Awakening of the Conservative Woman.” The golden girl of the panel was Phyllis Schlafly, an 86-year-old woman who was pivotal in killing the Equal Rights Amendment in the ‘70s. Alongside her was columnist S.E. Cupp, campaign-finance lawyer Cleta Mitchell, and Rep. Michelle Bachmann.

Although all the panelists were accomplished workingwomen and the event was about awakening the conservative woman, I was shocked by their repressive and outworn messaging points. Someone should probably look up “awakening” in Webster’s, because I might as well have been taking life lessons at the kitchen table of June Cleaver.

The overarching proclamation by the panelists was that marriage should be women’s top priority and that motherhood is the “ultimate job.” Michelle Bachmann claimed, “The real world…is the one you will create with your husband…”

Now, I’m not here to debate the value of stay-at-home wives and mothers; my mother has been one for 25 years. In my view, the family is the cornerstone of a great society, so marriage and motherhood should be celebrated. But how are conservative women supposed to be awakened (a word which connotes an idea of advancement) if our only option is to be stuck at home cooking and birthing?

Behind their glory stories about finding their mates was the idea that a woman has to compromise her career goals in order to achieve the supposed greatest goals of womanhood: marriage and motherhood. “You can’t have it all at the same time,” Mitchell even said to the crowd. She followed up the statement with an anecdote. A young woman (a Harvard student, no less) told Mitchell that she would eventually hire a nanny to help run her household, because she hoped to have a job and children. “Can’t you just get a dog?” Mitchell snarkily replied to the young lady.

What’s ironic about this working mother dichotomy is that in any other room at CPAC you would have heard speakers pleading with young attendees to go into business, become entrepreneurs, help America innovate. But the GOP women seem to want to leave that dream up to the boys.

While GOP men can apparently be fathers and work simultaneously, the panelists of “The Awakening of the Conservative Woman” would find it implausible for a female CEO of a Fortune 500 company to also be a mother of five. In order to do that, she’d have to decide whether to spend her thirties working her way up a corporate ladder or changing diapers. The type of awakening they advocate is more of a pregnant pause — women graduate from college, find a husband, depend on him for financial support, pop out babies, then consider going into politics after the kids are out of the house. Give it 20 years before you cause a stir outside the kitchen.

At CPAC, there was no talk about equitable division of parenting responsibilities, of raising awareness of salary inequality between the sexes, or of advocating for more mother-friendly workspaces or greater female political representation. The women at the top of the GOP mantel think feminism is a bad word. We should all be reading bridal magazines instead of making a fuss about how to fix societal hurdles for our sex.

With no strong feminist voices in the party, the GOP is indeed waging a war against the advancement of women. Well, put me in the enemy camp on this one — I’d much rather wear a blazer than an apron.

Courtney Pannell is a senior in Yale College and the Multimedia Editor of Broad Recognition.

This article does not necessarily reflect the views of Broad Recognition.