In a recent text detailing the alleged wrongs of feminism, conservatives Suzanne Venker and Phyllis Schlafly pronounced,
It is our sincere hope that this book helps support Americans who don't believe women in this country are oppressed, who know government is not the solution to women's problems, who don't believe marriage and motherhood are outdated institutions, who think men are as important as women, who think gender roles are good and exist for a reason, and who see the mainstream media for who they are (Venker and Schlafly 2011, 11).
While it may be tempting for feminists to dismiss these ideas as old-fashioned and even detrimental to women, doing so restricts how we comprehend the full range of women's political participation. In my work on conservative women, I argue that we must take such comments, and their messengers, seriously. Failing to do so means that political science broadly, and the field of women and politics more specifically, is limited in what it can tell us about ideology, identity, and political practice.