More Female Tea Partiers than Male? I'm Not Surprised:

TPM has the new poll up showing that slightly more disgusted Republican women self identify as Tea Partiers than Republican Males. I have some ideas about this. For one thing I think that the Tea Party movement enables women to self express, politically, in a way that has been largely thwarted by men in the Republican party. If you were a feminist, there were lots of avenues to power in the new Democratic Party--but if you were basically conservative you were largely limited to a supporting role in the Republican Party. That means two things: One, you have had lots of experience in Church and in the Community in a supporting role: licking envelopes, organizing food drives, car-pooling. Two, that experience is actually fairly high powered: these aren't women who are uneducated or who were always at home. They are women who returned to the home by choice, or force, after having a life outside it. The Republican party is full of women like my Sister-in-Law who used to have fairly high powered jobs but retired into the home and the church for their childbearing years. The thwarted managerial talent in their playgroups has to be seen to be believed. Fundraising and networking for the PTA was a major outlet for their job skills. Its not surprising that a bunch of women like that would see the Tea Party as just another way to get active socially and politically without betraying their conservative female identities.

Upper class white women, like elderly medicare patients, have time, experience, and anxiety on their side in becoming politically active. On the left, such women are working and are not well networked in with churches and other such traditional loci of power and activism. On the right there were, until this new fake grassroots movement, lots of ways that women met and supported each other. I'd expect teabaggery, like left behind theology, quiverfull, porn hysteria and a host of other moral panics to sweep through this community with lightning speed.

aimai