WHEN IT COMES TO WOMEN, THE GOP ISN’T WHAT IT USED TO BE

Once upon a time, in a land now unimaginable, the Republican Party was a hotbed of women activists hellbent on fighting for human rights.  Really.  Republican women led the antislavery movement in the 19^thcentury and catapulted from there into their own battle for suffrage.  Ida B. Wells, an iconic African American journalist and militant civil rights crusader, was a prominent Republican who saw the party of the late 1800s as the best conduit for hope and change.

Unfortunately, those aspirations did not live forever.  Far from a bastion of human rights advocacy, today’s GOP might as well be called the Grand Old Patriarchy. Out of 535 members in Congress, there are only 20 Republican women.  The party’s gender divide in the House breaks down to 187 men and 13 women, while Democrats in that body have 146 men and 89 women.   At the state level, you can count the number of GOP women governors on one hand, with two fingers left over.  

The race and ethnicity picture is just as bleak. Almost 90 percent of Republicans are white. There are only two African American Republicans in Congress, and one of them – Will Hurd of Texas – just announced he will not run again. Yet, Lindsey Graham, in a rare moment of candor back in the pre-Trump days of 2012, worried that, “We’re not generating enough angry white guys to stay in business for the long term.” We should be so lucky.

It doesn’t take an advanced degree in anthropology to understand why the Republican culture has fed and sustained the party’s demographics.  All you really need to grasp this dynamic can be found in the Archie Bunker theme song:  “Guys like us, we had it made. Girls were girls and men were men. Mister, we could use a man like Herbert Hoover again.”

Take South Carolina’s 3^rdCongressional District for example.  In the wake of the Republican’s 2018 midterm disaster, which left the party with the lowest number of female House members in more than 25 years, an opportunity to mitigate those losses emerged earlier this year.  An incumbent’s death triggered a special election in this predominately red district.  The party’s female leaders at every level – from Rep. Susan Brooks, the outgoing co-chair of the bipartisan Congressional Caucus for Women’s Issues, to Sarah Palin – poured every available resource into supporting a female candidate, who seemed almost perfect for this district. 

Pediatrician Dr. Joan Perry was seen by even her detractors as a smart, personable candidate who rang the bell on virtually every conservative issue, from abortion and immigration to the sanctity of Donald Trump.  Yet her male opponent in last month’s primary election trounced her by 20 percentage points.  

According to the New York Times, Perry’s chief liability was her gender.  The paper quoted a typical voter, a 68-year-old man, saying that Perry was right on all the issues but that, “women, as you well know, sometimes get to be kind of emotional.”  Tapping into that sentiment was the virtually all-male House Freedom Caucus and its leader Rep. Mark Meadows, who endorsed Perry’s opponent on the basis that you “need a strong backbone” to stand up to the liberals. One of its TV spots portrayed Perry as “another lying Nancy Pelosi liberal.”

Research has shown that GOP women fare the worst as candidates in deeply Republican districts simply because of the dominance of Archie-Bunker-like gender stereotyping.    Hartwick College’s Laurel Elder found that the party itself, “and its increasingly conservative ideology . . . is the biggest barrier to women’s representation within the party.”  The real culprit, she said, is the deeply patriarchal culture in which Republican women play a subservient role to male leaders.

When it comes to gender equality issues, polling has demonstrated a gigantic perceptual gap among women in both parties.  For example, only 30 percent of Republican women see sex discrimination as a serious problem.  Among Democratic and Independent women, however, the vast majority see it as an extremely urgent concern.  Similarly, only 26 percent of Republican women  said there was a problem of unequal pay between men and women performing similar work.  

In a country where women make 80 cents for every dollar a man earns, and one that lags far behind other nations in terms of workplace gender equality, it’s not hard to understand the party’s lack of appeal to women.  Add to that the toxic masculinity of a Republican president who has rarely met a woman he doesn’t bully or abuse. Not to mention his policy portfolio totally void of any respect for human rights.  There is no mystery about the GOP’s estrogen deficit.  

Yet, the male leaders of this party (excuse the redundancy) still don’t get it. New York Congresswoman Elsie Stefanik resigned from the party’s congressional campaign committee, saying she wanted to devote her energies to recruiting female candidates and helping them win.  “We need to be elevating women’s voices,” Stefanik said, “not suppressing them.”  Amazingly, her words provoked a stern reprimand from her colleague, Rep. Tom Emmer, the chair of the GOP’s congressional campaign.  He accused Stefanik of playing identity politics instead of “looking for the best candidate” regardless of gender, race or religion.  In other words, stick with the pipeline of angry white guys.  

Emmer’s position, of course, is hardly new. The “best person” juggernaut has been used for time immemorial by white men to keep folks who don’t look like them out of the power structure.  Way too slowly, however, that insular approach of the white brotherhood has gradually dissipated in most group cultures.  Diversity and inclusiveness are now commonly seen as essential ingredients for organizational effectiveness.  The memo, however, obviously escaped the Republican leadership. Out of the party’s 200 House members, there are 13 women and one African American.  Yet, leaders like Emmer see no value in diversifying.  

Back in 1920, Republican women led the fight for suffrage and obtained the right to vote for the men who would speak for them.  You’d think that the next step in the process would have been for the party to fill at least a substantial number of elected offices with women who could then speak for themselves.  Sadly, that hasn’t happened in 100 years and is unlikely to do so anytime soon.