Caught at Crossroads: What It Means to be a White Conservative Woman in 2022
Renkert, Sara Claire
2022
-
White women, as an electoral group, have consistently voted in the majority for the Republican candidate in every presidential election since 1952, except for two. While this phenomenon as a whole has been studied by scholars over the past few decades, few scholars have taken a qualitative look at white female conservatives and their relationship to political misogyny in the Trump and post-Trump ... read moreera. Between 2016 and 2020 alone, white women increased their vote for Donald Trump by 5 percentage points, whereas white men decreased their vote by 13 points (Igielnik et al. 2021). What about those four years of the Trump Administration (which was riddled with sexual assault allegations, the defunding of women’s health care and child care as well as misogynistic actions) made conservative white women increase their votes by such a degree? This paradox of often sexist beliefs combined with increased white female voter support led me to embark on the following thesis project to explore the qualitative side of this previously data-driven finding through in-depth interviews with seven white conservative women residing in different regions across the country.This study finds that the 2022 white women’s space within conservatism is complex and paradoxical at first glance and close to the heart of those within the movement. While their expressions of conservatism fall along many of the lines of traditionalist female scholars of the past, the women interviewed breathe new life into the movement through their pride for their country and their families as well as against the rampant corruption they see in the media and politics. These women also inhabit a place of insecure power from systems of racism that at once benefit them and cause them political dismay amidst of a world of racial reckoning. Equally faced with the ideological paradox of agreeing with gender equality and fighting against the liberal women’s movement, conservative white women sidle between progressive expressions of gendered empowerment and traditional forms of womanhood and motherhood, therefore, bringing arguments of feminist expression to the forefront when voting for a candidate expressing sexist remarks. Lastly, the women are also situated between ties to their traditional Christian family values, their roles as mothers and the intense political discussions of race, gender and politics of the moment – each culminating in a crossroads of both the 2016 and 2020 elections and its Republican candidate who confidently brought these issues to the forefront. Some were turned off by his bombastic tweets, controversial personality and sexist campaign sayings, but many chose to look past it for the sake of the policies and protection Trump espoused to them and their families.
Thesis (B.A.)--Tufts University, 2022.
Submitted to the Dept. of Political Science.
Advisor: Peter Levine.
Committee: Peter Levine and Sarah Sobieraj.read less - ID:
- 4b29bm894
- To Cite:
- TARC Citation Guide EndNote
- Usage:
- Detailed Rights
