Amazon.com Review
The women of the Bush administration, according to author and Bay Area talk show host Laura Flanders, have received something of a free ride from the press and the public. While many cheer the fact that women have risen to prominent cabinet-level posts, most ordinary people know little about such luminaries as Condoleeza Rice, Elaine Chao, Christie Whitman, Gale Norton, and Karen Hughes. Flanders provides extensive background information on these and other women and holds the actual events of their lives up to comparison against how their stories have been told for political purposes. Flanders' biographies reveal women who may appear more genteel and unthreatening than, say, Donald Rumsfeld, but who are actually much less moderate and centrist than one would expect. Having women in power, she suggests, allows the GOP to appeal to a traditionally shaky female voting demographic and the "up by the bootstraps" reputation of the
Bushwomen obscures the Bush administration's record of selling out the interests of environmental, health, labor, and security issues in favor of well-moneyed corporate interests. And while these women have had successful careers in fields traditionally dominated by men, Flanders tells us that they have often done so with the assistance of questionable corporate connections.
Bushwomen also suggests that the Bushwomen's political careers constitute, in many cases, a betrayal of the various forces (feminism, affirmative action, the civil rights movement) that put them in power. While Flanders' writing style is brisk and often witty, the tone is never overly glib or sardonic and, regardless of political stripe, her research into her subjects is fascinating in that it digs deep into the lives of public figures who, until now, have managed to stay quite private.
--John Moe
From Publishers Weekly
The thesis of radio host Flanders's searing, incisive polemic is that prominent female conservatives in the current administration are the candy coating in which George "W. Is for Women" Bush enrobes a bitter, radical policy. Devoting a chapter to each, Flanders (Real Majority, Media Minority) takes to task women like National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and Labor Secretary Elaine Chao for betraying the causes-affirmative action, civil rights and feminism-that helped them rise to prominence, while allowing the Republican Party to use them as identity politics puppets for expanding its minority voting base. They, along with former EPA head Christine Todd Whitman, Secretary of Agriculture Ann Veneman and Secretary of the Interior Gale Ann Norton, have, Flanders contends, been given an easy ride by national media more interested in their fashion choices and family history than in the jobs, lands and freedoms they've eliminated during their tenure. Then there are what Flanders says are the Bushwomen's conflicts of interest and government valentines to corporate concerns, such as destroying previously protected grizzly bear habitat to please logging interests. Along the way, Flanders provides a powerful account of how the government's social agencies have been systematically disabled-or so she claims-over the past 20 years by the very people hired to head them. Fierce, funny and intelligent, Bushwomen fills in an important gap left by other anti-Bush books.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
