The Stagnation of the Conservative Woman: Courtney Pannell reflects

Writing in The Yale Herald, my friend Courtney Pannell, a young conservative woman herself, reflects in an absolutely brilliant article on the problems that many women are experiencing with American conservatism and the Republican Party today: -

"The GOP doesn’t plan on win­ning the female vote in 2012 — or ever, at this rate. Demo­c­ra­tic oppo­nents are call­ing the recent House move to slash fund­ing from Planned Par­ent­hood another exam­ple of the GOP’s “War on Women.” This war is only strength­ened by con­ser­v­a­tive female fig­ure­heads, such as Michelle Bach­mann and Sarah Palin, and the ideals that they are laud­ing, which are out of step with the desires and strug­gles of the mod­ern woman.

Last week, I attended CPAC, the Con­ser­v­a­tive Polit­i­cal Action Con­fer­ence, which is basi­cally a red car­pet event for the Who’s Who of the right... As a con­ser­v­a­tive woman myself, I was looking for­ward to com­mis­er­at­ing with fel­low right-leaning ladies — but they were awfully hard to find. Walk­ing into the con­ven­tion cen­ter lobby, I tweeted, “Where are all the women?” in an attempt to send a ral­ly­ing cry. I was hard-pressed to find any­one that wasn’t a wannabe-cowboy or Mitt Rom­ney look-a-like, much less some­one with a two X chromosomes. 

I finally found a room of women at a panel dis­cus­sion called “The Awak­en­ing of the Con­ser­v­a­tive Woman.” The golden girl of the panel was Phyl­lis Schlafly, an 86-year-old woman who was piv­otal in killing the Equal Rights Amend­ment in the ‘70s. Along­side her was colum­nist S.E. Cupp, campaign-finance lawyer Cleta Mitchell, and Rep. Michelle Bachmann. 

Although all the pan­elists were accom­plished work­ing­women and the event was about awak­en­ing the con­ser­v­a­tive woman, I was shocked by their repres­sive and out­worn mes­sag­ing points. Some­one should prob­a­bly look up “awak­en­ing” in Webster’s, because I might as well have been tak­ing life lessons at the kitchen table of June Cleaver. 

Now, I’m not here to debate the value of stay-at-home wives and moth­ers; my mother has been one for 25 years. In my view, the fam­ily is the cor­ner­stone of a great soci­ety, so mar­riage and moth­er­hood should be cel­e­brated. But... behind their glory sto­ries about find­ing their mates was the idea that a woman has to com­pro­mise her career goals in order to achieve the sup­posed great­est goals of wom­an­hood: mar­riage and moth­er­hood. “You can’t have it all at the same time,” Mitchell even said to the crowd. She fol­lowed up the state­ment with an anec­dote. A young woman (a Har­vard stu­dent, no less) told Mitchell that she would even­tu­ally hire a nanny to help run her house­hold, because she hoped to have a job and chil­dren. “Can’t you just get a dog?” Mitchell snark­ily replied to the young lady. 

What’s ironic about this work­ing mother dichotomy is that in any other room at CPAC you would have heard speak­ers plead­ing with young atten­dees to go into busi­ness, become entrepreneurs, help Amer­ica inno­vate. But the GOP women seem to want to leave that dream up to the boys..."

For Coco's full article, click HERE.