Face of the tea party is female

April 7, 2010 04:43


Many of the tea party’s most influential grass-roots and national leaders are women, and a new poll released this week by Quinnipiac University suggests that women might make up a majority of the movement as well.

By KENNETH P. VOGEL at POLITICO

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 poll released this week by Quinnipiac University suggests that women might make up a majority of the movement as well.

Generalizations about such a decentralized assortment of local groups are difficult, and the poll’s assistant director, Peter A. Brown, cautioned that its finding that 55 percent of self-identified tea partiers are women has a relatively high margin of error.

But tea party organizers and activists say they’ve seen the influence of women firsthand — personified by the politician most associated with the movement, former Alaska governor Sarah Palin, the headline speaker Saturday when tea party activists hold a pair of rallies in Nevada, one of them in Searchlight, the home of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

Celebrities such as Palin have had less influence shaping the movement, however, than an outburst of women’s activism unusual among conservatives.

“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.”

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