- - - - - - - - - - T A B L E++T A L K Sick of selling junk for your kids' schools so they can afford the basics? Bitch about fund-raising in the Mothers area of Table Talk - - - - - - - - - - R E C E N T L Y Drama Queen Candidates
Making sense of Jonesboro
Hey hey, ho ho, the matriarchy's got to go
In a league of their own
Scouts' dishonor
- - - - - - - - - - Mamafesto
- - - - - - - - - -
Win
- - - - - - - - - -
|
BY LORI LEIBOVICH | Two years ago, journalist Elinor Burkett took to the road to face her biggest fear: conservatives. Specifically, conservative women like Rep. Helen Chenoweth, R-Idaho, who swept into Congress in 1994 as part of the "Republican Revolution." At 51, the strident feminist had never even had a conversation with a conservative before. What she found during her travels were passionate, committed and outspoken women of all ages who cared deeply about issues -- women who were on the far side of the ideological spectrum from Burkett but shared her devotion to political causes. Burkett interviewed Muslim women, young women at Christian rock festivals and black conservatives. She interviewed female blackjack dealers at a casino on an Indian reservation, militia women and women getting their hair done at a Montana salon called Curl Up And Dye. "Everywhere I went, for those two years -- if I was in a diner or in Bloomingdale's, wherever I was -- I stopped to talk to people," Burkett says. "Anytime somebody said, 'Yes, I am a conservative,' I said, 'Talk to me.'" The result, "Right Women: A Journey Through the Heart of Conservative America" (Scribner), is an almost anthropological investigation of the world of right-wing women. Salon recently spoke to Burkett about feminism, affirmative action and confronting her own prejudices. Of all the women you talked to, who were the most fascinating? The younger conservative women. I was totally taken by them because they reminded me so much of myself at their age, and yet they were on the opposite end of the political spectrum. As much as I don't like their politics, they are so earnest, so sincere and so convinced that they are revolutionarily correct, which is exactly what I thought at the same age. I think I was also fascinated by them because they wear the breakthroughs of feminism so comfortably. They take for granted that everyone will take them seriously, that they have the right to and will get as good a job as any man they know. That if some man starts to sexually harass them, all they have to do is slap him around and he will stop. That they can be powerful actresses in the world. I found that breathtaking. There they were with everything that I hoped that we would bequeath to the next generation. But they were spitting on everything that I thought they should believe in. That contradiction was so vivid, yet they would come back to me and say, "Even if you don't agree with us, don't you like it that we're tough?" And I did. You write that you wish the young conservative women could at least be grateful for what you and your feminist counterparts did to create opportunities for them. I kept saying, "Why can't you be grateful?" Then I realized, well, that's disgusting. Did I do this for gratitude? I learned the most about myself from these younger women. Why don't you think that they feel gratitude? And why did you want them to? I am not sure anybody feels gratitude. I don't sit around and feel grateful to Susan B. Anthony when I get in front of the voting machine. Or to the guy who invented Tampax. I think the interesting question is why I wanted gratitude. I think that for every generation of people who has done anything they think of as great or important -- whether it is fighting in World War II, or the civil rights movement or the women's movement -- your identity is so formed by that, it is your blow for history. It is your stake in feeling that when you die, you can look back and say you did something good. If people aren't grateful, then it makes you feel diminished. Yet, of course, if they felt grateful, probably I would be diminished, because they would then be prisoners of my past rather than of their future. If young women are thinking, "Oh, this is so great that I am allowed to do this stuff," then they are not moving forward with their futures. You state clearly at the beginning of your book that you held deep prejudices and stereotypes about conservative women. In fact, you say that until you began reporting this book at the age 50, you had never talked to a conservative. How did you get over yourself? Two things happened for me. The decision to do the book in the first place was an admission that I suspected that my stereotypes were wrong. I wrote in the introduction that after the '94 election, when those seven ultra-conservative women were elected to Congress and nobody took them seriously, including me, I suddenly suspected that maybe I was missing something important. The second thing is, they got me over me. That was the advantage of going in as a self-identified liberal. Because I wasn't being that blank-slate journalist, I was being a full human being. I was inviting comments. So they would say, "So what do you think of this?" and I would tell them, and they would come back at me. It was a very different kind of reporting than I had ever done. What were your stereotypes about conservatives prior to this book? My vision of conservative women was that they were one-dimensional, like paper-doll cut-outs. In Washington, I was interviewing a woman named April Lassiter, who is extremely anti-choice, and I had an emergency message from a friend, a married woman who was 40, had a kid and got pregnant again by accident. She was trying to decide whether or not to have an amniocentesis. She knew, given her age, that she was high-risk for the baby to be in trouble. She wanted to talk it out, but she ultimately decided not to have the amnio, because she wasn't going to have an abortion. I was telling April this story, and she said, "I don't understand why she wouldn't have an abortion. Aren't your friends all pro-choice?" I said, "Of course all my friends are pro-choice. Why would that mean that she would automatically have an abortion?" April believed that if you were pro-choice, you would automatically have an abortion. I had to laugh. She had the same types of preconceptions about pro-choice women that I had about women who were anti-choice. N E X T+P A G E: The paternalism of affirmative action
|
Arts & Entertainment | Books | Comics | Life | News | People
Politics | Sex | Tech & Business | Audio
The Free Software Project | The Movie Page
Letters | Columnists | Salon Plus
Copyright © 2000 Salon.com All rights reserved.
