Nikki Haley’s Gender Trap
Conservative women accept and reject feminism all at once.
At the Republican debate on Wednesday, Nikki Haley was a popular target. Candidates attacked her repeatedly, sensing that as her poll numbers have risen, she’s become more of a threat. When Haley responded, she did so in a familiar way. “I love all the attention, fellas — thank you for that,” she said. She is the only woman in the GOP field, lest anyone’s forgotten. Her remark referenced her gender without sounding too feminist. For Haley, that’s a common strategy.
When she entered the race for president, she brought gender to the forefront, announcing, “May the best woman win.” Later, in a debate where Vivek Ramaswamy called her “Dick Cheney in three-inch heels,” she responded in kind, telling him they were five-inch heels and “I don’t wear ’em unless you can run in ‘em.” The author of a book on female leaders, Haley has cited Margaret Thatcher as her role model. “There’s nothing wrong with Iron Ladies being feminine,” she said. “There’s nothing wrong with Iron Ladies being great wives, and great moms.” Haley, of course, is more than a wife and mother. She’s the former governor of South Carolina and was Donald Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations. She owes her career to the hard-won gains of the feminist movement. She just can’t admit it.
Like many conservative women before her, Haley confronts a trap of her own making. She plays up her gender when it suits her, but never too much, because otherwise she’ll trigger Republican voters who despise so-called identity politics. Haley has tried to head off that threat. ”This is not about identity politics,” she said during her campaign announcement. “I don’t believe in that. And I don’t believe in glass ceilings, either. I believe in creating a country where anybody can do anything and create their own American dream.” GOP strategist Alice Stewart told CNN in September that Haley had “no need for her to light her hair on fire and [stress] the fact that she’s a woman because she uses her ability and experience as a way to connect with voters.” In practice, Haley can offer only a stripped-down brand of female empowerment with its most cynical elements on display.
Judge her by her policies and her rhetoric, and the extent of her anti-feminism becomes clear. Haley may not believe in glass ceilings, but she has no sense of solidarity with other women, either. Her abortion position is nonsensical. Though she’s called it “a deeply personal topic” and said, in the same speech, that she understands “why someone’s body and someone else’s life are not things to be taken lightly, and they should not be politicized,” she’s also indicated that she would have signed a six-week ban on abortion as the governor of South Carolina. She would drastically shrink the social safety net as president, harming millions of women and their families in the process. As Judith Levine noted at The Intercept, Haley’s proposed “entitlement reform” would amount to a privatization of Social Security and Medicare and cuts. At one debate, Levine wrote, Haley “decried bipartisan pandemic-era policies that expanded eligibility for government assistance — and lifted millions, most of them children, out of poverty. When Congress ‘passed that $2.2 trillion Covid stimulus bill, they left us with 90 million people on Medicaid, 42 million people on food stamps,’ Haley declared. ‘No one has told you how to fix it.’” On trans rights, she is vicious. “The idea that we have biological boys playing in girls’ sports — it is the women’s issue of our time,” she said during a June CNN town hall. “My daughter ran track in high school. I don’t even know how I would have that conversation with her.”
Anti-feminist women often rise to the heights of conservative politics. Haley likely bets that she can do the same. But her very cynicism may be her undoing. Once happy to serve Trump, she’s now running against him — all while leaning into her gender at high-profile moments. To think tanks and business interests, she marks a refreshing change from the pugilistic Trump. To the base, though, she may look like a traitor. Worse yet, the way she performs her gender could alienate voters enthralled by Trump, who is accused of sexually assaulting or harassing dozens of women and once bragged of grabbing women by their genitals. In the wake of Trump, there’s little room for a woman like Haley. Her unfavorable situation is revealing. Anti-feminist women can disavow identity politics all they want, but they can never truly escape it. They must hope that conservative voters and activists will ignore that uncomfortable reality. With Trump as an alternative to Haley, though, they have little incentive to do so. Haley may be running in five-inch heels, but she’s running straight into a wall.
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