What's Right(-Wing) with White Women? The Development of Conservative Ideology

• In Event: Politics of Intimacy: Race, Family and the Neoliberal State

Abstract

In the aftermath of the last several national US elections, media post-mortems have focused on the seemingly irrational voting behavior of white women, the majority of whom favor the Republican Party. Headlines to the effect of "What's wrong with white women?" and "The betrayal of white women voters" abound, advancing the perception that white women vote against their own interests - as women - by supporting a political party that promotes anti-women policies. This paper begins from the premise that white women are and historically have been political agents who possess a gendered and racialized political identity that reflects a particular set of interests. In short, they are not ignorant of their own interests. Rather, working from within an American political development framework, this research asserts and examines the on-going significance of three pillars of white conservative women's ideological formation and self-determination as political agents: Christian chauvinism, white supremacism, and domesticity. Based on semi-structured qualitative interviews with conservative-identified women in Florida, this work explores the following set of questions: What are the political values and preferences of Republican women? In what ways do gender and racial identities intersect with and overdetermine the formation of conservative women's ideologies? In what ways do other identities, interests, or ideological commitments - particularly those pertaining to class, family status, and nationalism - take precedence in shaping white women's political commitments? Do these values and preferences come together to form an expressly female conservative ideology? How are they alternately absorbed or rejected by the dominant political ideology of the Republican Party? In seeking to answer these questions, this paper advances a historically grounded understanding of the political ideologies that drive white women's conservative ideologies and activism and provides an empirical investigation into contemporary politics of conservative white women.

Author

• Chelsea Ebin, Centre College