From the workplace to the war zone, the Bush administration has wrapped female-friendly rhetoric around some of the most hard-core policy since Ronald Reagan. Some well-placed women have helped to pull off that con job. Invaluable to the president, underscrutinized in the press, the Bushwomen—the women appointed to the inner circle of the president’s cabinet and sub-cabinet—are cast in the public mind as moderate, malleable, maverick, irrelevant or benign. Their carefully crafted images tap into stereotypes, while the reality of their records has remained out of sight...until now. This is the first book to investigate Bush’s women, and to report on how they rose to power and what they’ve done. Find out about why Chevron named a tanker after National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice; how financial ties to big tobacco corporations got Secretary of the Interior Gale Ann Norton dubbed ‘The Woman from Marlboro Country’; how Labor Secretary Elaine Chao bullied union longshoreworkers to benefit her trading-with-China family and friends; read excerpts of Lynne Cheney’s lesbian novel; and discover how Karen Hughes got her first job thanks to the National Organization for Women. Women swing voters can decide elections now, and the Bush team will do whatever it takes to win their support. The cynical crusade to put a female face on anti-feminist policy is revealed in this scathing and entertaining investigation of the sinister politicians we call the Bushwomen

ISBN: 9781859845875