The Rise of Conservative Christian Women

Palin, O'Donnell, Angle, and Haley
October 08, 2010
By Thomas S. Kidd

With the improbable victory of Christine O'Donnell in the Delaware Republican primary, this has become the year of the new Republican woman. We don't yet know how the elections will turn out, but Republican candidates Carly Fiorina in California, Nikki Haley in South Carolina, and Sharron Angle in Nevada -- with the "mama grizzly" Sarah Palin looming behind them -- have altered America's political landscape and heralded surging female power in the GOP. The success of these candidates has sent the political left and its segment of the blogosphere into a particular kind of frenzy about the ostensible "radicalism" of the women of the GOP. The root of this frenzy is fear not just of conservative women, but of something that seems even more malevolent to the secular Left: evangelical conservative women.

The prominence of Christian female power brokers in American politics is nothing new. Going back to the colonial era, the story of American religion has disproportionately been the story of women. In essentially every Christian denomination at any period of American history, women have been the majority of congregants. And although they have often been excluded from pastoral leadership, women have found all kinds of ways to lead in the church, and in political causes championed by churches. The temperance (anti-alcohol) movement produced Frances Willard, one of America's most powerful reform leaders of the 19th century. More recently, Phyllis Schlafly of the Eagle Forum was probably the person most responsible for the defeat of the feminist Equal Rights Amendment of the 1970s, and Beverly La Haye founded Concerned Women for America, an organization that mobilized hundreds of thousands of American women to support the pro-life movement and traditional marriage. the rest