Housewives were to the Republican Party infrastructure what labor union members were to the Democrats’. “If it were not for the National Federation of Republican Women, there would not be a Republican Party,” Barry Goldwater admitted. (Nixon couldn’t stand them: “I will not go and talk to those shitty ass old ladies!” he’d fume. All the same, gritting his teeth, he went.)83 By the 1950s, a majority of GOP activists were women, compared to 41 percent of Democratic Party activists.
