There’s a woman in Congress who is having an open conversation about sexist double standards within her political party. She’s advocating to include issues that impact women voters and is sick of men “with their country accents” using Laken Riley’s name — the nursing student killed last year in Athens — for their personal benefit.
That woman is U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the firebrand Republican from Rome.
“Women are keeping the family going and are raising their kids, and they’re also struggling. They can’t pay their bills, their credit cards are maxed out. Insurance is crushing them,” Greene said in a recent interview with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
You might know Greene for her heckles of then-President Joe Biden or history of support for baseless conspiracy theories. But lately, she’s broken with her party and President Donald Trump on Israel, calling the war in Gaza a “genocide,” and demanding justice for victims of Jeffrey Epstein, the financier and child sex offender.
After deciding to stay out of the races for governor and U.S. Senate, Greene is taking aim at what she sees as the male-centered establishment in the Republican Party.
Greene said Republican men want her support and endorsements but don’t take her opinions seriously.
“They want women just to go along with whatever they’re doing and basically to stand there, smile and clap with approval, whereas they just have their good old boys club,” she said.
Greene even wrote off Georgia’s all-male crop of GOP candidates for governor and U.S. Senate as uninspiring.
“If I’m not inspired, there’s a lot of other people that are not inspired,” she said.
Gender dynamics within the GOP are prickly. Claims of sex-based discrimination push against the conservative ideology that Americans should rise on merit, not personal identity.
“If I had to choose a group to be connected to, and there’s one group just focused on my gender and another focused on my accomplishments, my education and what I can bring to the table, I would be geared more toward that group that’s looking at me for how I can be an asset,” said Takosha Swan, a woman Republican running for lieutenant governor.
Greene said she’s “uncomfortable” talking about the gender dynamics inside the Republican Party, adding that she owns a construction company in a male-dominated industry.
“I’m an elected member of Congress. I’m nobody’s victim,” she said. “But it’s real.”
Several Republican women declined to be interviewed for this story. Those who did understood where Greene was coming from; they just didn’t agree.
“I have not experienced anyone treating me differently because I’m a woman,” said Lauren Daniel, a former state representative running for state Senate. “I don’t feel like there’s a barrier there because I’m a woman.”
Female representation within the Republican Party is low, even though women made up 52% of Republican voters in the 2024 presidential primary and half of Republican voters in the primary for governor in 2022, according to an AJC analysis.
A fifth of the 100 Republican representatives in the state House are women. Of the 33 Republican senators, the only woman is state Sen. Kay Kirkpatrick of Marietta.
Kirkpatrick said being an orthopedic surgeon, a profession with some of the lowest rates of women participation in the medical field, she is used to being the only woman in the room.
She said she doesn’t agree with Greene that the party marginalizes women’s voices.
“I do feel like my voice is heard,” she said. “I always want to be an excellent surgeon and an excellent legislator, and I tell young women I mentor the way to do that is come early and stay late and be prepared,” she said.
Katelyn Stauffer, a University of Georgia political science professor who studies women in politics, said Americans think about political parties in gendered ways, so they tend to ascribe feminine stereotypes to Democrats and more masculine stereotypes to Republicans.
Voters also tend to view women as more liberal than men, leaving Republican women to push against that presumption, she said.
“Women are strategic as candidates, and they understand the perceptions that might be ascribed to them, so sometimes they work all the harder against that,” Stauffer said.
Greene’s loyalty to Trump and her sharing of videos of her working out and shooting guns helps counteract general presumptions about women in politics, Stauffer said.
It’s not like women have been completely excluded from politics. Across the South, there are women are serving as governors in Alabama and Arkansas, both Republicans.
Kelly Loeffler, now the head of the Small Business Administration under President Donald Trump, served as Georgia’s first female senator. And Speaker Pro Tem Jan Jones briefly served as Georgia’s first female House speaker. Both are Republican.
Influential conservative radio host Martha Zoller ran as a Republican candidate for Congress in 2012 and said she faced more sexism from voters than from GOP leaders.
“I had people asking me who was going to take care of my kids and how I was going to manage my home,” she said.
But she did feel more pressure from Republican men when it came to reproductive rights, even as the former director of an anti-abortion rights organization, Georgia Life Alliance.
“The men are just really harsh and radical in the pro life movement,” she said. “I’m as pro life as they come, and I also live in the real world. If you even speak in that way, I think you get pounced on a lot more on the (pro-)life issues than you do about anything else.”
Zoller said she has sympathy for Greene but didn’t see gender as the only factor at play.
“If the only thing that was unique about her was that she was female, she might have a case, but she’s a person that has taken a lot of hard-line positions on things. She has created a lot of controversy,” Zoller said. “She’s been a juggernaut at raising money, but she has not been a team player.”
Greene said the issue is larger than her, and Republicans are ignoring women at their own peril. She too is a college-educated professional and mother in metro Atlanta, a demographic both Democrats and Republicans are seeking to win over in future elections.
“I totally understand these women, and I understand why many times they don’t want to vote for the generic, good old boy Republican that isn’t really campaigning on issues that are important and bring no value or change to their life,” she said.
AJC staff writers Tia Mitchell and Phoebe Quinton contributed to this story.
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