Nice Deb
11/22/2011
Tina Dupuy of The Atlantic, having visited eight Occupations in the U.S. and Canada, reports on what can only be called a “gender gap” in the Occupy movement:
During the very first week of the Occupation in LA I noticed that the gender breakdown in its General Assembly (GA) and various committee meetings was roughly the same as the within the U.S. Congress. In other words, about one-fifth of those who were participating in the (small d) democratic part of this Occupy encampment were women. It was the same with the people who slept in the camp.
This is pretty consistent throughout the movement in general.
She notes that this is a point of concern at the camps:
I’m not the only one to notice the Occupy gender gap. This issue is talked about at GAs, I’m told, a lot. Nearly every night at Occupy LA, the question comes up: “What can we do to get more women out here?”
It shouldn’t be a mystery why more women are not part of the movement…
…The Tea Party, on the other hand, is led by fierce, strong willed women, who are looking out for their children’s futures like “Mama Grizzlies”. One poll indicated that 55% of the Tea Party movement is made up of women.
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.
As Peter Roff In US News Politics wrote back in September of last year:
To the extent that it is run by anyone, the Tea Party movement is–like all great social movements–largely run by women…
Read the entire article at Nice Deb. Included in the article is the video trailer, Fire From the Heartland, “The first-ever film to tell the entire story of the conservative woman in her own words…”
H/T Weasel Zippers
