Beyond a steady rightward shift and an increasingly reactionary rhetoric, conservative leadership is taking on another characteristic — it’s becoming more female. Both nationally and in Tennessee, the most beloved and vocal conservative leaders these days seem to be women.

Memo to Kleinheider: conservative women have always been here.  His comments confuse me. Does he not closely follow Tennessee and national politics? The existence of women on the right is hardly new:

Women need to be embraced as leaders — but not out of fear or necessity. It should happen the right way, or else the Right will merely be seen as a bunch of weak-willed reactionary little boys sending their women out to do their fighting for them.

Michele Bachmann was elected before Sarah Palin. Marsha Blackburn’s been involved in Tennessee politics for a long time now. Robin Smith was chairwoman of the TN GOP before Palin was on the scene. In order to have so many women running in 2010 means that women have been working up the ranks of the party and active in their communities for many years. It takes a long time to build up the name recognition, fundraisers and social capital to run for office. I’m surprised that he failed noticed that.

In fact, Republicans and conservatives have seen many of the “first” women across a number of categories. Labels and identity politics are just not as important to us. Just because the media suddenly noticed that women were in the conservative movement, doesn’t mean that we weren’t always there. Most of my political viewpoints come directly from my mother, who became a staunch conservative in the early 80s.  We’ve always been here. Now we’re getting the recognition that we deserve.

Palin is the catalyst not the movement.

Ironically, we owe it to the feminists and liberals in Congress for galvanizing all of the suddenly-visible conservative women that are shocking! Kleinheider.

This movement didn’t start with Sarah Palin nor will it end with her. Palin was the catalyst and should be analyzed, but the media, liberals and bloggers need to look at the bigger picture. Conservative women have always been in the movement, but Sarah Palin was the first woman to resonate with us. Prior to Palin, I always admired Elizabeth Dole. However, she was a DC insider with an Ivy League education. I could admire her (and the struggles she faced at Yale) but couldn’t identify with her. When Palin arrived, we had someone who reflected us.

Had the media and feminists said, “Great. The conservative movement is finally acting on what we’ve been preaching for 30 years,” I doubt that conservative women would now be so vocal. It was the the angry reaction of the feminist movement and the media that attacked Palin,  her family and her education. Suddenly liberals questioned if a woman could work and raise a large family. Her state education was ridiculed and her middle class existence was mocked. Those were the strengths that Palin represented. She was conservative and lived a very different lifestyle from the career politicians and bi-coastal elites, who are constantly telling us how to live.

By mocking Palin and what she represented, the media and feminists were collectively slapping the faces of every conservative woman in the country. This outrage is what motivated the  conservative women’s movement to come together, and what I’ve been writing about for over a year now.

This anger motivated countless numbers of bloggers. My friend, Tabitha Hale,  started her blog directly because of Palin. It led Teri Christoph to start Smart Girl Politics. It motivated a number of women who are now running for office.

Palin wasn’t the only factor though. Conservative women, just like conservative men, are angry at the government and our free-spending Congress. Women are just as involved as men in the Tea Party. The policies and activities of the Bush Administration and now the liberals in power are motivating men and women alike to stand up. Perhaps it’s a combination of our “traditional values” and anger that have caused women to be visible.

My dad told me this week, “I’m just as conservative as your mom, but I don’t have time to go to Tea Parties.” Ironically, the traditional values and roles that conservatives have long defended are what free women up to be active in the Tea Party movement. If Congressman Blackburn noticed that Tea Parties are largely female, it’s because there are more housewives on the right. My mom has always been a conservative activist because she had the time. If women control most of the purchasing power in this country, is it surprising that we’re actively protesting the wasteful actions of our government? Tea Parties are a reflection of the masses of Americans waking up to what Congress is doing, not a sudden pink-wash of the right.

Kleinheider, and others like him, should try to do a little research.  Again, this movement didn’t start with Sarah Palin nor will it end with her. My advice to reporters and academics would be to widen your angle beyond Palin, Bachmann and Blackburn. Palin was the catalyst and deserves to be analyze.  It is shortsighted to say that the conservative movement suddenly turned pink. You’re just now noticing us.

Much of the fault lies with academics. As Ronnee Schreiber notes in her book, Righting Feminism, hardly any academic study has been conducted on conservative women…ever. There was a small amount of research done after the failure of the ERA, but they assauged their failure by concluding conservative women are no different than conservative men. Since the 1980s, they’ve assumed that conservative women view politics indentically to men. Since we’re barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen, we vote as our husbands and fathers do. They fail to see that conservative women are independently conservative because that’s the political movement they agree with. Since liberal feminists created the field of gender studies and created cushy jobs for themselves, it makes sense that they wouldn’t research areas that could potentially harm the movement and their sources of income.

To be concluded in Part 2.