Page Two, The Feminist
Ghost at the Conservative Political Action Conference
New to CPAC is the
Second Amendment Sisters (SAS)
formed in December of 1999 by women who objected to the Million
Mom March against guns that was planned for Mother’s Day 2000.
Its five founders found each other and kindred spirits through
posts to freerepublic.net, a right-wing web page. They brought
5,000 women to Washington for an Armed Informed Mothers March
and turned them into a national organization. Although it admits
men as associate members, SAS believes it is important to "put
a woman’s face" on opposition to gun control. Proclaiming that
"Self Defense is a basic human right" it organizes "ladies days"
at gun clubs and "shop and shoot weekends." "Come nervous, leave
proud," SAS says. Although its focus is on gun ownership and use,
it includes martial arts within the scope of self defense skills
women should have and is pointedly not affiliated with the National
Rifle Association (which has its own women’s auxiliaries).
Perhaps the least informed
of all the women’s groups at CPAC was the Clare
Booth Luce Policy Institute. Founded in 1993, its priority
is giving young women "hands-on training in countering radical
feminism and fighting for conservative principles." Proclaiming
that "feminists are wrong on almost every issue they tackle,"
CBLPI objects to almost anything tinged by feminism: affirmative
action "because feminists were seeking to foster a pattern of
dependency based upon special preferences," women’s centers "that
became places to plot the demise of traditional values," and "leftist"
women’s studies programs. Although no one at its booth would agree
to an interview, CBLPI’s positions are clear from its publications
and web page. Its newsletter hosts a regular page of "Feminist
Follies" where it quotes "Mrs." Steinem (Gloria’s mother?) on
things it does not like.
While it shares policy
positions with the other conservative women’s groups, more than
any of the others the CBLPI ignores facts and rewrites history.
It extols "Mrs. Luce ... [as] the most influential woman in both
modern American history and the American conservative movement"
with little knowledge of her life, her own views or her time.
It also says "she came under the same kind of attack from liberals
and feminists of her day that modern women encounter today when
they are successful without espousing feminist ideas." In CBL’s
day, feminists and liberals were on opposite sides of the great
policy divide created by protective labor laws and the Equal Rights
Amendment. Luce was on the feminist side — an ERA supporter who
often looked to other women for support. Long after political
realignment put liberals and feminists on the same side, Luce
still supported the ERA. Her biographers note she was always friendly
toward the ERA. When Gloria Steinem had tea with her in Hawaii
in the late 1970s, she found Clare to be a feminist on every issue
except abortion.
Clare Booth Luce was
a remarkable woman, but not because "she personified the qualities
that mainstream women admire," as CBLPI leaflets declare. After
an inauspicious start in life, she became a magazine editor, a
playwright, a Member of Congress (R-CN, 1943-47), and Ambassador
to Italy (1953-57). Born in 1903, the second child of a young
mother who lived with her father for nine years but never married
him, Clare was anything but mainstream. Strikingly beautiful and
intensely ambitious, she married a millionaire twice her age and
divorced him six years later to become a full-time working mother.
Her 1935 marriage to TIME magazine founder and publisher
Henry Luce freed her to write and dabble in politics. CBL was
also a feminist, as her own mother had been. Alva Belmont personally
recruited her into the National Woman’s Party; one of her tasks
was to drop ERA leaflets from an aeroplane at the NWP’s 1923 conference
in Seneca Falls a month before her first marriage.
Clare’s politics resembled
those of many well-off women of her day. She rejected the welfare
state of the New Deal and opposed US involvement in the European
War. She believed that women were politically important, and that
they deserved equality with men. Having won her seat in Congress
partly by organizing the woman’s vote, she began her speech before
the 1944 Republican convention by acknowledging that "Plainly
the honor of speaking to you... has come to me because I am a
woman." Writing in a syndicated column in the mid 1930s, she said
war would lose its romance if there were more "war-veteran mothers."
She asked, "What nation would plunge into a war in which its men
fought not for their wives and sweethearts, but with their wives
and sweethearts?" Although she became steadily more conservative
and fiercely anti-Communist as she grew older, only on abortion
did she differ with the feminist movement. CBL had an illegal
abortion when she was 18, but converted to Catholicism after her
only daughter was killed in 1944.
If CBLPI wants young
conservative women to emulate Clare Booth Luce, they should hope
no one reads her biography.
Conservative women
are very shy, especially young conservative women, so they may
not find Luce to be a role model they can follow. Or perhaps they
are simply inoculated by traditional female modesty. In three
days at CPAC I saw fewer women at the podium than at a typical
Republican national convention — about 15 percent, including
introducers and panel moderators. Even the panel on "Real stories
of real liberal bias on real college campuses" featured five young
men but no women. When speakers asked for questions from the floor,
only a dozen women stood at one of the two microphones to ask
a question in three days; only one of these looked like she was
under 30. After Schuld spoke, the male moderator asked how many
in the audience were women. There were a few titters but only
about a dozen women raised their hands. In this audience of 4,000
about 40 percent were women, but raising their hands to admit
this was too much for them to do. As long as conservative women
prefer passivity they are no threat to feminists.
The annual conference
is not a place for the grassroots to debate issues, except in
so far as it happens in private conversations. There are no workshops.
When time permits, questions were accepted from the audience,
but when these became short speeches the moderator cut the questioner
short. The tight schedule just didn’t permit extensive exchanges.
Nonetheless, the Patriots
Act and the Total Information Awareness project received some
sharp comments. While a speech favoring profiling was cheered
loudly, another recommending that the military patrol our borders
provoked grumbling as the full implications sank in. Conservatives
are seriously conflicted between their love of individual freedom
and their desire for security. A questionnaire filled out by 621
participants showed that only 21 percent were "prepared to give
up some freedom for increased security," while 46 percent thought
that "concerns about the threat to individual freedom are justified."
Everyone wanted to stop illegal immigration, but the many children
and grandchildren of immigrants were ambivalent about reducing
legal immigration. This "family values" crowd wasn’t warm to the
idea that immigration policy should no longer give relatives priority.
CPAC made a special
effort to recruit young people — tomorrow’s leaders they
call them — with reduced fees and special scholarships. Of
the 4082 people who registered for this year’s conference, 1726
paid the student fee.
Surveys of past CPAC
conferences show that most were attending for the first time.
About 30 percent of those responding were evangelical or fundamentalist
Protestant; 30 percent were Catholic; 20 percent were mainline
Protestant; with the remaining distributed between Jewish, Atheist
and Other. Only two percent were Mormon, even though many people
in this denomination are conservative Republicans. One result
of CPAC’s youth outreach is that 60 percent were under 25. Less
than 40 percent were women. Next to Virginia, Ohio sends more
people to the annual conference than any other state. When asked
their impression of various conservative politicians, Pat Buchanan
and John McCain receive the least favorable ratings. Not surprisingly,
President Bush and the Republican leadership have the most favorable
— though Trent Lott’s previously high ratings went down this
year.
Although those attending
and exhibiting at the CPAC range from the mainstream to the fringe
right, attendees at the 30th conference saw themselves as more
mainstream than fringe. They are happy with how far the conservative
movement has come and where it is going. This represents a mutual
convergence between the Republican party and the American right-wing.
For the last thirty years right-wing Republicans have waged a
concerted war on Republican moderates, driving them out of power
and out of the party. Now that conservatism has taken over the
center of the Republican Party it’s softening its edges — becoming
more pragmatic and less ideological. The conservatives helped
the Republicans win elections, and now that Republicans rule,
they are eagerly turning the proposals of the right-wing think
tanks into Republican policy for the next decade.
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