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THE CONFLICT OF PRINCIPLE AND EXPEDIENCY
 
 
I cannot remember a time when the Republican party was not part of my life. I grew up in a family where political talk dominated daily meals and weekend picnics in the red rock desert surrounding my hometown of Moab, Utah. My mother and father constantly reminded us that public service is an honorable calling, that we had a duty to participate in the nation’s political life, and that we could do this best by working for the Republican party.
 
I started that “working” early on. As a preschooler, I remember standing with my dad outside the Grand County High School auditorium handing out Willkie for President pamphlets. By the time I entered first grade, I’d stuffed envelopes, licked stamps, and passed out literature for Dad’s campaign for the state senate. After he was elected, the family went to Salt Lake City for the three-month legislative session; and for the next eight years I witnessed in a modest way Utah’s political life.
 
I went to school in Salt Lake City when the legislature was in session, and after school I would wander the halls of the state capitol, sit in the legislative chamber watching the men debate, and occasionally be allowed on the senate floor to sit in my father’s chair. I was fascinated by the political jockeying and relished the stories about what the Republicans and Democrats were doing to each other. To me at that young age, politics seemed not only a worthwhile endeavor but the most exciting action around.
 
The values I was taught as a child were the values my family respected so highly in the Republican party: Lincolnian compassion and championing of equal opportunity for all Americans; Theodore Roosevelt’s vision of a responsible capitalism held in check by a caring government; and Herbert Hoover’s ethic of self-reliance, in which individuals turned to government for help only as a last resort. For much of my life, I not only believed that this was what the party stood for, I worked to further those ideals. I organized campaigns for Republican candidates, recruited new members, and did a wide variety of tasks directed toward increasing its power. As for the Democrats, I thought they stood for big government that obstructed individual freedom, and that Franklin Roosevelt and his New Deal had undermined America’s remarkable free enterprise system. It was unimaginable to me that I could have much in common with the values of the Democratic party.
 
But beginning in 1964, the national Republican party changed. It turned its back on the Lincoln tradition and gradually embraced a presidential electoral strategy that reinforced resistance to the civil rights movement. Over the years, the party that had so majestically led the nation through the Civil War betrayed its founding principles of freedom for all. By 1980, this strategy had further expanded to embrace a deliberate policy of hostility toward women. The shift was subtle—in the late twentieth century, no major American political party could openly admit it opposed opportunity for 53 percent of the nation’s citizens. But the preceding decade had produced some scattered gains for women; and in reaction, the Reagan and Bush administrations actively sought to dismantle those gains. A different Republican agenda came into play.
 
This book is in the main the story of that changed and changing agenda. Only peripherally is it about the party’s racial strategy introduced in 1964, a tale that has already been told well and in detail elsewhere. But bigotry is bigotry, regardless of who the objects of hatred or ridicule may be. While the focus in these pages is on gender, the fates of women and blacks in America have been intertwined since the nation’s beginnings; no change in the political life of one happens without affecting the other.
 
Second, this book is about the struggle between the women’s movement and its political opponents. It is about the feminist women of the Republican party: how we sought to turn our party’s commitment to individual freedom into concrete action, and how we fought those who embraced the messages of misogyny. The dictionary defines misogyny as hatred, dislike, or mistrust of women. While the majority of the Republicans who opposed us weren’t misogynists, those who sought to control the party’s agenda discovered that the women’s liberation movement—stimulated in 1963 with the publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique and born in 1966 with the founding of the National Organization for Women (NOW)—was generating a backlash not unlike the racist backlash to the civil rights movement. Growing numbers of women were challenging the traditional roles expected of them; more and more they were entering the work force, whether out of choice or necessity; and many were raising their voices demanding to be heard. For some Americans, these changes were unsettling or even frightening, and fear bred resistance. In 1980 the national leadership of the Republican party adopted a misogynist strategy that deliberately exploited this backlash to win votes. It has pursued this strategy ever since.
 
The third and overarching story in this book is the age-old conflict between principle and expediency in pursuit of political power. By playing on fear and hatred in its quest for votes and discovering that this paid off, the national leadership of the Republican party has sown a cancerous divisiveness across the land.
 
To understand the misogynist strategy, it is necessary to return to the nation’s founding, for the root cause of this division over gender springs from a defect deep within American culture. It derives from an enduring belief that women should not have equal opportunity because their “natural” sphere is the private world and their judgment in public matters cannot be trusted. The division also springs from political greed. It is the interplay of philosophical belief and “practical” politics that has deprived American women from fully sharing in their nation’s promise.
 
That promise was articulated in the Declaration of Independence, which committed the nation to the ideal that all Americans are guaranteed equal opportunity to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Yet in 1788, twelve years after proclaiming this grand promise, the propertied white men of America ratified a Constitution that ignored women and accepted slavery. To have given white women and black slaves constitutional protection at that time would have required a philosophical leap that most of these men could not have made. Most found it impossible to accept women and blacks as equals. It also would have placed a serious roadblock in the way of the Constitution’s ratification, since giving either of these groups the vote would have upset the delicate political balance that bound southern slaveowners and northern business owners in common cause.
 
Thus began the carousel of American racial and gender politics. Still, it was only a few decades later that the new nation’s propertied white males were challenged. The movement for freedom for those left out of the Constitution grew slowly and quietly through religious and intellectual revival meetings. By 1829, when New York State abolished slavery, it had begun in earnest. By 1848, women had organized. Gathering in Seneca Falls, New York, on July 19 and 20, 1848, these women and a few male friends, under the leadership of Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, issued the Declaration of Sentiments. Patterned after the Declaration of Independence, it called for a woman’s right to divorce and to ownership of her property after marriage; an end to the double standard of morality between men and women; full political participation; and equal opportunity in education and employment. It declared that woman is “man’s equal—was intended to be so by the Creator, and the highest good of the race demands that she should be recognized as such.”
 
The declaration spoke eloquently, in words that are still timely today. Six years later, male acquaintances of the women who supported the Seneca Falls declaration took their own action. In July 1854, united in their opposition to slavery and angered by the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which opened the western territories to the “peculiar institution,” a coalition of Whigs, Free-Soilers, and antislavery Democrats met in Ripon, Wisconsin, to propose the formation of a new party that would turn its back on all the existing political parties—the Whigs, the Free-Soilers, the Know-Nothings, and the Democrats. Within a week, similar meetings in other states followed suit, and the Republican party was born.
 
The cause of liberty for the slaves was what brought these men together. The leaders of the recently born women’s movement were not present at the party’s founding, but they were confident that with the abolition of slavery would come freedom for their sex as well. Although women lacked the formal political franchise to participate in the new party, movement leaders did all they could to help it.
 
Within six years of its founding, this upstart, passionate freedom movement had turned into the most powerful political force in the country, and in 1860 its candidate for president, Abraham Lincoln, was elected, setting the nation in a different direction that promised new opportunities for all Americans.
 
Accepting the abolitionists’ arguments that eliminating slavery must be the party’s first priority, the women put aside organizing for women’s rights and threw themselves into the Civil War effort, expecting that their cause would be enthusiastically embraced by the Republicans once the war was won and the slaves were freed.
 
It was not to be. The war ended in 1865, and the Thirteenth Amendment, ratified in December, abolished slavery. But only a few short years after the terrible conflict ended—before the wounds had healed and the weariness of war had receded—Republican leaders broke their pledge to further women’s rights. In 1869 the Republican-controlled Congress sent the Fifteenth Amendment to the states for ratification. The amendment gave the vote only to black men and not to women—a betrayal that was the most destructive action the party was to take against women until the days of Reagan–Bush.