White House press secretary Sarah Sanders and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., aren’t exactly friends, but you’ll find them in close quarters on a new website.
Independent Women’s Voice, the 501(c)(4) nonprofit affiliate of the conservative Independent Women’s Forum, recently launched Champion Women, a project described on its site as “a movement committed to championing the ideas and amplifying the voices of all women.” Alongside Sanders and Gillibrand, you’ll find HLN host Ashleigh Banfield, Carly Fiorina, and other women from across the political spectrum.
“We’ve all noticed how degraded the public conversation has become, and especially it became clear when it came to how women were being discussed in the political arena. The responses to women were obviously coarse, sexualized, personal, ad hominem, and to some degree, we were becoming used to it,” IWV President Tammy Bruce told me by phone on Thursday, explaining what motivated her group to launch the project.
“When we say this is not partisan,” she emphasized, “we mean it.”
Before I could even ask, Bruce, a vocal supporter of President Trump, broached his infamous attack against Fiorina’s physical appearance back in 2015, listing it among a series of other high-profile jabs at women in politics. Such needlessly gendered insults are the exact flavor of dialogue IWV hopes to discourage. “I’m a big supporter of the president,” said Bruce. “I’ve been extremely critical of him.” Constructively critical, you might say.
“I don’t know anybody who’s not guilty of engaging in personal commentary,” Bruce noted, arguing attacks on women have been normalized and “acculturated.” To explain society’s devolution, Bruce points to the “isolation of social media” and “the fact that there has not been an organized movement” like Champion Women aimed at correcting the problem.
Bruce’s background as a former leader in the National Organization for Women informs her perspective; she traces the root of the problem back to the 1970s and the “development of this idea from the Left that people who disagree with you are the enemy, they’re not good people who have a different idea.”
Clearly sensitive to concerns the group’s efforts might be mistaken as an encroachment on free expression, or a way to coddle women, Bruce insists, “It’s not about what you can and cannot say, it’s asking everybody to be more conscious about how we’re engaging.”
“Please criticize women and their ideas and their policies,” she said.
When it comes to comedians like Michelle Wolf, who rocketed to some measure of notoriety for roasting Sanders at the White House Correspondents Dinner this year, Bruce wants “their comedy, and the way they create humor, to be a bit more disciplined.”
“I don’t know how liberals are going to be able to handle another six-and-a-half years. I think they know it’s got to be changed because it cannot be sustained and civil society cannot be sustained,” she mused.
IWV, Bruce says, is actively soliciting the support from the Left in their bid to build Champion Women’s influence, which she expects will come once they “see that we’re serious, that this is something they can actually relate to.” Actress Bo Derek just joined Champion Women as an ambassador, according to Bruce.
IWV worries that a political culture which tolerates attacks on women “prevent[s] many women from participating in politics and their communities.”
“To allow personal, baseless attacks on women to go unchallenged sends a message to women everywhere: ‘Keep quiet or suffer the same fate,” the Champion Women website says. The group asks supporters to join their movement by signing a pledge, that among other items, asks cosigners to promise not to “objectify any person, regardless of gender, as a way to silence or intimidate them,” or “belittle any woman’s looks or sexuality, or dismiss them based on stereotypes about what women are supposed to believe.”
“This is something that the feminist movement should have really developed,” Bruce said. “But because it was a partisan movement that didn’t happen.” With Champion Women, IWV hopes to fill that vacuum.
