Women Stirring the Tea Party Movement

The memory still makes me smile. We were fishing our way through the Ozarks a few summers ago and stopped at a tiny barbecue joint with picnic tables outside for some pulled pork sandwiches. I went up to the sliding screen window to peer in at the menu and place an order when suddenly a very preppy woman in pearls, decked out in pink and green, appeared. "What'll you have, sugar?"

I've been to a lot of pit barbecue stops over the years, but I'd never seen one like this. It was run by a whole crowd of women who looked like they'd just come from doing their service requirement at the Junior League. As I waited for my sandwich, I spotted a sign on the wall hanging from a polka-dot ribbon: "If Mama ain't happy ... Ain't nobody happy!" I marveled not only at the use of "ain't" twice in one sentence, but the succinct way in which it placed mothers at the epicenter of well-being for all.

So I smiled again when I saw that Darla Dawald, national director of the Tea Party group ResistNet, quoted that gem of wisdom to Politico, and added, "Well, when legislation messes with mama's kids and it affects her family, then mama comes out fighting."

Her point is right on the money. Women are the caregivers and decision makers in most households on healthcare. They deal with the nitty-gritty firsthand, and that explains why so many women were opposed to the healthcare reform bill. A recent USA Today/Gallup poll reported that 87 percent of Tea Partyers—compared to 50 percent of all Americans—consider passage of the healthcare reform bill a "bad thing." For problem-solving women who are used to multi-tasking between car pools, client calls, and cooking dinner, the slow pace and high expense of government healthcare reform doesn't cut it. We all have our own tales of woe about the healthcare industry, but we have just as many to tell about our fiascoes with government bureaucracy, wasteful spending, and one-size-fits-all solutions.

A recent Quinnipiac University poll shows that a majority of self-identified Tea Partyers are women, and that's not a big surprise to me. The poll reported that while only 19 percent of American voters generally trust government to do the right thing "almost all of the time" or "most of the time," that number drops to only 4 percent among the Tea Partyers. I bet much of that distrustful 96 percent are the moms who typically deal with the government red tape: A majority of the time, we're the ones who put a vacation hold on the mail, or file applications for the kids' passports. We're the ones who have to go into the jaws of the beast, gathering all the receipts for the taxes every year and writing the check for the tax-prep service because it's too complicated for most families to do their own taxes anymore.

Speaking of writing checks, the same maternal instinct that Dawald refers to comes into play with family finances these days. Women often are the ones who pay the bills and reconcile the checking account. That's a change from our mothers' generation. In most families, women never touched a checkbook—much less the online bill-payer button or the Quicken software. In some families, it was impolite to talk about money. The husbands took care of that, and many wives only learned about the accounts for the first time when their husbands passed away.

That's what happened in my family. My mother never went to college, but my sisters and I did and were out on our own for a while before we got married. Mom married after high school and Dad always managed the finances; we had to learn the hard way that you can't spend more than you have, that it's better to pay off the credit card each month, and that you have to save some for a rainy day. With our generation came dual-income families, separate checking accounts, and roll-over 401(k) accounts. "Kitchen-table economics," politicians are fond of calling it, and over the last 30 or 40 years, most women have learned it. When Dad died, Mom had to learn it too. And, like many women, she's really good at it now.

Maybe that's why the homepage of Smart Girl Politics, a Tea Party organizing group for women, features a running ticker of the national debt per citizen. According to the CBO report it highlights, national debt will hit 90 percent of GDP by 2020, equal to $170,000 worth of debt per household. There's a reason they're putting those numbers in terms of each family; it makes it real to the person paying the bills and mailing in the check for the SEP IRA contribution. If you click on the "activist toolbox," you'll see things like a list of the E-mail addresses of congressional chiefs of staff, questions to ask Congress about the healthcare bill, and tips for effectively communicating with your lawmaker over recess, courtesy of groups as diverse as the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights and the National Rifle Association. (No ACLU or gun-related rhetoric, and the information's actually very good.) Like my mom, these women have gotten really good at this.