SIX hundred Republican women convened at the Capital Hilton last month to meet with the new congressional leadership. They told Newt and his lieutenants what they wanted: tax cuts and a balanced budget, the Education Department eliminated, English as the official language, and welfare programs turned over to the states. In their upscale Ellen Tracy duds, these professional women complained that affirmative action in the workplace means that “hard work is no longer rewarded”; they demanded tort reform to prevent sexual-harassment lawsuits from putting them out of business. A picture of a closed sawmill—one more victim of federal regulation—met with sympathetic groans. Gloria Steinem urged these women out of the home, and now Congressman Bill Taxon, Chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, is urging them into the House. Congress will be more conservative if they accept.
The Women Leaders Summit brought participants from across the country under the sponsorship not of Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum or of any other conservative group but of a mainstream GOP organization: the Republican Network to Elect Women. Indeed, a member of the Eagle Forum sheepishly admitted that she was in attendance “to keep an eye on them.” With the abortion issue off the agenda, however, this meeting was the latest confirmation of what internal GOP polls indicate about Republican women: they’re conservative. In September, Phil Gramm decisively won a straw poll of a thousand women attending the National Federation of Republican Women’s convention in New Mexico with—at 35 per cent—double the votes of Lamar Alexander. (Bob Dole finished third.)
Comments