Martha Burk is a political psychologist and director of the Corporate Accountability Project for the National Council of Women's Organizations.
In the midst of the media obsession with which Democratic presidential candidate has the most “star power,” Republican hopefuls at last week’s Conservative Political Action Conference trotted out a star of their own—Ronald Reagan. Both Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney, currently distrusted by the party conservative faithful who will decide the nomination, invoked the Great Communicator. While this may be welcome news for some, female voters ought to be alarmed.
The 40th president was indeed a clear-eyed visionary: He envisioned a world where women would never be granted equality in the U.S. constitution, abortion was illegal and equal employment laws were a thing of the past.
Lest we forget his truly monumental accomplishments:
Reagan began his assault on women even before he was elected. The Republicans had been the first major party to champion constitutional equality for women, putting the Equal Rights Amendment in their platform in 1940. Ronnie ended that. The ERA disappeared from the platform in 1980—Reagan not only opposed it, he backed a Human Life Amendment that would ban abortion and even some types of birth control.
Once elected, he welcomed the New Right, headed by ultraconservatives from the Heritage Foundation, American Enterprise Institute and the Free Congress Foundation, the same groups that don’t trust the current crop of Republican candidates to be conservative enough. They wasted no time in 1981 putting forth their agenda in the form of the so-called Family Protection Act, which would have dismantled equal education laws, banned “intermingling of the sexes in any sport or other school-related activit[y]” and required that marriage and motherhood be taught as career choices for girls—but not, of course, marriage and fatherhood for boys.
Their act never passed, but the seeds were sown. Marriage promotion by the government as a solution to poverty became a reality under George W. Bush, Reagan’s political son. So has a reinstatement of Reagan’s 1984 “Mexico City Policy,” which dried up money for international family planning. Though he failed to completely dismantle Title IX (women’s groups fomented a revolt among soccer parents), other Reagan-era tenets have become reality under W—the first federal abortion ban and federally funded abstinence-only sex education.
Many other Reagan policies that harmed women were either “under the radar” or not connected directly to women in the eyes of many Americans. Smaller government, a belief he held with a religious zealotry, translated directly into smaller government departments—like the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), charged with investigating sex discrimination in the workplace. While sex discrimination claims rose 25 percent, the Reagan administration cut the EEOC budget in half, put Clarence Thomas in charge of the henhouse and issued a directive to investigate “by the book.” That was code for delay, draw out and drop cases. Many women were forced to simply give up. The EEOC, like most other government agencies slashed in the Reagan years, has never recovered.
Reagan also refused to raise the minimum wage, and instilled in the national psyche a belief that higher wages for the lowest level workers costs jobs (not true as we learned when the minimum was finally raised in 1996). Then, as now, the majority of minimum wage workers were adult women. Translation: more women and their children in poverty, more women holding two low-paying jobs to make ends meet and less food on the table, period. Well, all except catsup—which he tried to have declared a vegetable as he cut school lunch programs.
With W’s approval ratings far in the tank, conservative candidates will have to resurrect Reagan. They will wax eloquent in the coming months that his economic agenda, with tax cuts for the rich and dismantling of social programs, was ahead of its time. (They won’t mention the record deficits.) Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan., another GOP hopeful, drew loud applause at the meeting when he held up red books representing the IRS code, and declared: “This should be taken behind a barn and killed with a dull ax.” Another alarm bell for women. The deficits of the 1980s look minuscule compared to today’s black hole—getting deeper every second, insuring that programs like the Women, Infants and Children nutrition program will continue to be starved far into the future.
The Reagan “vision” for America, with its disproportionately negative impact on the female half, has become the foundation of Republican dogma. Though the name Ronald Reagan no longer appears on the ballot, his policies just keep running and running.
