Is There a Conservative Feminism? An Empirical Account

Research Article

During an onstage appearance at the Conservative Political Action Conference in 2017, Kellyanne Conway, who serves as White House counselor to President Donald Trump, shared that "[i]t's difficult for me to call myself a feminist in a classic sense because it seems to be very anti-male, and it certainly is very pro-abortion, and I'm neither anti-male or pro-abortion" (Wagner 2017). Leaving aside the veracity of the claim that feminism is anti-male and/or pro-abortion, Conway's provocative comment refers to questions that have been swirling around in public discourse in recent years: do conservative women leaders consider themselves to be feminists? And if so, might the growing political movement of conservative women in the United States point to the existence of a "conservative feminism"?

These questions rarely arose in the United States before the 2008 elections; most politically active conservative women leaders did not refer to themselves as feminists, nor did people wonder whether they did. There have been are some exceptions (see, e.g., Sommers 1995; Stacey 1983), but, like the general public, which shuns the label (Huddy, Nelly, and La Fay 2000; Schreiber 2012), conservative women activists have rarely embraced the terminology, and few would have even thought to organize around the concept. Sarah Palin's vice presidential bid, however, prompted a shift. On a couple of well-publicized occasions, Palin called herself a feminist,¹generating considerable discussion and criticism over whether conservative women can be feminists and what "conservative feminism" really means (see, e.g., DiBanco 2015; Gardner 2010; Holmes and Traister 2010; Marcotte 2010; McCarver 2011; Rodino-Colocino 2012; Valenti 2010a, 2010b). Subsequently, presidential candidate Carly Fiorina's claims to be a feminist (Fiorina 2015) and, more recently, first daughter Ivanka Trump's use of the term (DePaulo 2016)²have kept the question of whether conservative women identify with feminism in the public sphere.

The idea that conservatives could identify as feminists is not entirely far-fetched given the growing institutionalization of conservative women's organizations that claim to represent women and/or the growing number of women prominent in conservative politics (Blee and Deutsch 2012; Celis and Childs 2014a; Deckman 2016; Schreiber 2014). Both appear to validate the public declarations of high-profile women like Palin and Fiorina when they align themselves with feminism. However, scholars have also urged...