if the new brand Republicans and Tea Partiers continue to grab more power.
Tea Partiers are predominantly female. A large number of Tea Party candidates for office are female.
You need to reexamine your stereotypes.
Face of the tea party is female
When the tea party movement burst onto the scene last year to oppose President Barack Obama, the Democratic Congress, and the health care legislation they wanted to enact, some liberal critics were quick to label its activists as angry white men.
As the populist conservative movement has gained a foothold over the past year, it’s become increasingly clear that the dismissive characterization was at least half wrong.
Many of the tea party’s most influential grass-roots and national leaders are women, and a new pollreleased this week by Quinnipiac University suggests that women might make up a majority of the movement as well.
.....“For years, it has been the liberal women who have organized and been staunch grass-roots and policy advocates,” Rebecca Wales, a spokeswoman for Smart Girl Politics, a new group formed to train and mobilize women in the tea party movement. “No longer is it only the liberals. Conservative women have found their voices and are using them, actively and loudly.”
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.”....
....A former healthcare administrator as well as stepmother, Dawald, 46, said women have particularly been drawn to tea party activism because of their perspective on the proposed healthcare overhaul that became the movement’s defining issue.
“Statistically, healthcare is something that women drive,” she said. “They usually decide where their families will be cared for and are the ones making the appointments and so forth, so (the tea party’s opposition) became something that was being driven very strongly by women.”
Dawald estimates that at least 55 percent of ResistNet’s 74,000 members are women. In Tea Party Patriots, an influential umbrella coalition of local groups, 15 of the 25 state coordinators are women, as are five of the Patriots’ nine national coordinators.
One of those national coordinators, Jenny Beth Martin of Atlanta, considered among the more prominent grassroots leaders in the movement, said she thinks women have been drawn to the movement because of their experience with family finances.
“Many women are the primary decision makers when it comes to the household budget,” said Martin, a 39-year-old mother of two who did political and IT consulting before losing her home and becoming a full-time tea party activist.
“From first-hand experience, they know you cannot spend your way out of debt at home and they know that philosophy translates to businesses and to the government.”
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0310/35094.html
Read the whole thing--BTS
