\o7 Women want equality. Equality in a capitalist society means economic equality. Money is power, Power is equality.\f7 - Mary Matalin, Republican campaign strategist

\o7 You have a political arrangement, and when push comes to shove, the higher level of political authority . . . should be in the hands of the husband. There's a genetic predisposition.\f7 -- Allen Quist, Republican candidate for Minnesota governor

Welcome to the big tent of Republican politics.

The political fallout from the resurgence of the radical right is starting. But nothing will hurt Republicans more than the conservatives' gender war against the female members of their own party. Senate candidate Oliver North, for one, raises money with a letter contending that the political process has been "captured by an arrogant army of radical feminists."

For some time, the Republican Party has been casting parts of the American public--blacks, Jews--overboard. But gender war is their riskiest strategy to date. Women make up 53% of the American electorate. Not only is the Republican anti-feminism unlikely to attract Democrats, but the likeliest outcome of the strategy is that it will break apart forever the always unstable Republican combination of freedom in the markets and repression in the home.

In the 1970s, conservative Republican polemicist Phyllis Schlafly made a public career of telling women that they did not belong in public life--that their reproductive fate should rest with the state and that equality was the last thing women should want. Half public, half private, Schlafly was the embodiment of the uneasy GOP alliance of economic libertarians and social conservatives.

But liberty is a hard thing to contain. Republican campaign honcho Mary Matalin, twice divorced and childless, is totally dedicated to her career. She admires sister conservative Republican speech writer Peggy Noonan ("no one knows the American soul better than Peggy Noonan"). Noonan is also divorced, a single mother and even lives in New York City. Dolly Madison McKenna, the woman the religious right defeated for party chairman in Texas, is a banker and oil-and-gas businesswoman. The gulf between many Republican women's lives and the demand to turn back the clock has grown too wide to bridge. Almost 60% of women in the electorate, Democrat or Republican, work for wages. Will Republican working women support a party that considers working a betrayal of women's "essential natures," as lawyer Marilyn Quayle told the GOP Convention in 1992?