A conservative male friend drew Bluestem's attention to remarks Sixth District Republican hopeful Phil Krinkie shared with the Central Minnesota Tea Party a week and a half ago. The St. Cloud Times reported in Hopefuls in 6th District tout contrasts to tea party crowd:
He drew mostly laughs with what he called “my personal experience with the money supply.”
“All we really need to do when we are looking to expand the economy, we direct all the money to the women in the economy, and they will spend more and the economy will recover,” Krinkie said. “Then when the economy is overheated, we go the other way and we give all the money to the men, and they’ll be very frugal and hold onto it.”
This seems like a jest that might appear in a Mad Men script, one that the series writers would then contrast with a poignant moment from one of the female characters' lives.
It's a quaint sexism, made perhaps even more odd, like the slightly-off gender remark an old uncle would make at Thanksgiving dinner, in light of the fact that Anoka County Board of Commissioners Chair Rhonda Sivarajah was the other Republican congressional hopeful at the meeting.
Sivarajah and the Anoka County board had turned down $1 million in SHIP state health grant money, the Star Tribune reported on August 1, so it's not as if she's taking the county on a shopping spree. And while Representative Bachmann raised and spent a lot of campaign cash, her frugality--buying clothes at garage sales and consignment shops, while driving used cars--is well-documented.
The need to be frugal in their household budgets is a frequent refrain in tweets and public statements by women endorsed by VOICES of Conservative Women--witness Representative Franson's reaction to potential sales tax on winter jackets for her own three children.
No wonder a younger conservative man found the gender stereotype of the spendthrift woman and the frugal husband to be eyebrow-raising. It maybe Krinkie's experience, but not that of most families, whatever their ideology.
Bluestem looked at another issue in our earlier post about the article: The Met Council as conservative bugabear.
Photo: Is Krinkie taking his gender stereotypes from the Mad Men era?
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Taking away women's right to earn and spend money?
Now where have I heard that before? Ah, yes, The Handmaid's Tale.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Handmaid%27s_Tale
Posted by: Phoenix Woman | Sep 07, 2013 at 07:38 PM