Women have come to the fore of a movement some liberal critics labeled as a group of angry white men. | AP Face of the tea party is female

When the tea party movement burst onto the scene last year to oppose President Barack Obama, the Democratic Congress, and the health care legislation they wanted to enact, some liberal critics were quick to label its activists as angry white men.

As the populist conservative movement has gained a foothold over the past year, it’s become increasingly clear that the dismissive characterization was at least half wrong.


Many of the tea party’s most influential grass-roots and national leaders are women, and a new poll released this week by Quinnipiac University suggests that women might make up a majority of the movement as well.

Generalizations about such a decentralized assortment of local groups are difficult, and the poll’s assistant director, Peter A. Brown, cautioned that its finding that 55 percent of self-identified tea partiers are women has a relatively high margin of error.

But tea party organizers and activists say they’ve seen the influence of women firsthand — personified by the politician most associated with the movement, former Alaska governor Sarah Palin, the headline speaker Saturday when tea party activists hold a pair of rallies in Nevada, one of them in Searchlight, the home of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

Celebrities such as Palin have had less influence shaping the movement, however, than an outburst of women’s activism unusual among conservatives.

“For years, it has been the liberal women who have organized and been staunch grass-roots and policy advocates,” Rebecca Wales, a spokeswoman for Smart Girl Politics, a new group formed to train and mobilize women in the tea party movement. “No longer is it only the liberals. Conservative women have found their voices and are using them, actively and loudly.”

Melanie Gustafson, an associate professor of history at the University of Vermont who has studied and written about the role of women in politics, said the tea party has provided a more direct way for conservative women to have influence than the Republican Party, where she says “women have always struggled for inclusion.”

Gustafson said the surge of female activism in the tea parties is similar in some ways to the response to Theodore Roosevelt’s Progressive Party in 1912 from “women who couldn’t vote, but who saw it as moment where they could enter directly into politics, rather than by influencing their husbands.”

“There’s something happening here (in the tea party movement) in the same way which is bypassing the parties and I think women are comfortable with that type of organizing, because it’s community organizing” that revolves around family rituals.

Take women such as Darla Dawald.

“You know the old saying that if mama ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy?” Dawald, national director for the tea party social network and activism site ResistNet said, when asked why women seem to outnumber men in the movement. “Well, when legislation messes with mama’s kids and it affects her family, then mama comes out fighting — and I don’t mean in a violent way, of course.”

A former healthcare administrator as well as stepmother, Dawald, 46, said women have particularly been drawn to tea party activism because of their perspective on the proposed healthcare overhaul that became the movement’s defining issue.

“Statistically, healthcare is something that women drive,” she said. “They usually decide where their families will be cared for and are the ones making the appointments and so forth, so (the tea party’s opposition) became something that was being driven very strongly by women.”

Dawald estimates that at least 55 percent of ResistNet’s 74,000 members are women. In Tea Party Patriots, an influential umbrella coalition of local groups, 15 of the 25 state coordinators are women, as are five of the Patriots’ nine national coordinators.

One of those national coordinators, Jenny Beth Martin of Atlanta, considered among the more prominent grassroots leaders in the movement, said she thinks women have been drawn to the movement because of their experience with family finances.

“Many women are the primary decision makers when it comes to the household budget,” said Martin, a 39-year-old mother of two who did political and IT consulting before losing her home and becoming a full-time tea party activist.

“From first-hand experience, they know you cannot spend your way out of debt at home and they know that philosophy translates to businesses and to the government.”

FreedomWorks, the Washington nonprofit group that has helped facilitate the tea party movement, has given female tea party leaders, including Martin, the platform and the tools to reach a wider audience, said the group’s top organizer, Brendan Steinhauser, because “they’re very effective as leaders at the local and national level, and they help make it a more powerful movement.”

Steinhauser said it “is no accident” that Martin largely emceed the massive, FreedomWorks-sponsored Sept. 12 Taxpayers March on Washington, a seminal event in the tea party movement. “We wanted to highlight her because she is reflective of what we saw in the movement and what we hoped to see in the movement.”

Since Democratic candidates traditionally attract the majority of women’s votes, the emergence of an energized group of female conservatives is something the Republicans who have assiduously courted them will pay off this November.

“If, in fact, the tea party movement were to bring women into the Republican ranks who were not otherwise affiliated with the process before, or were former Democrats, that would certainly be good for the Republicans,” said Quinnipiac’s Brown.

The gender gap also could make the tea party more of an electoral force in its own right, Brown said.

Lu Ann Busse, head of the Colorado coalition of tea partyesque 9.12 Project groups, sees another practical political advantage to having so many women associated with the tea party — it makes it harder to vilify a movement when its public face is a female one.

“How do you justify figuratively or literally beating up on grandmas and moms with children in tow? It just does not look good,” the 54-year-old grandmother wrote in a blog post last month declaring women “the Tea Party Super Majority.”

Busse estimates that about 60 percent of the active members in the Colorado tea party and 9.12 Project groups are women. “The political elite and power players do not know what to make of us tea party women or how to deal with us,” she wrote, “but that is too bad because we are on a mission.”

Toby Marie Walker, co-founder of the 5,000-member Waco (Texas) Tea Party, said women have proved themselves more adept at handling disagreements within the movement and are “better communicators.”

“Most of the women I deal with in the movement are a lot like me,” she said. "Even if I don't like them, or disagree with them, I recognize we're all on the same highway, we are just on different buses and can agree to disagree.”

Walker said it is women in particular who have pushed back against efforts to build a more centralized leadership structure for the tea party movement, which some organizers suggest could help the movement translate its energy into electoral success.

“Most of the women do not want a large, top-down movement,” Walker said. “We like the local flavor and independence of the tea parties. We don't need anyone to tell us what to do from D.C. or a large organization to lead us. We're capable of handling most of it on our own.”