Melissa Deckman, Ph.D.
mdeckman2@washcoll.edu
Full Professor
Washington College
About Me:
I study religion, gender and American politics. My latest book is Tea Party Women: Mama Grizzlies, Grassroots Leaders, and the Changing Face of the American Right (NYU Press 2016) and the fourth edition of my best-selling textbook, Women and Politics (Rowman & Littlefield), written with Julie Dolan and Michele Swers, will be available August 2019. In addition to more than a dozen scholarly articles, I am the author of School Board Battles: the Christian Right in Local Politics (Georgetown University Press 2004), winner of the Hubert Morken Award, given by the American Political Science Association biennially to the best work on religion and politics. Along with Laura Olson and Sue Crawford, I am the co-author of Women with a Mission: Gender, Religion, and the Politics of Women Clergy (University of Alabama Press 2005), and the editor, along with Joseph Prud’homme, of Curriculum and the Culture Wars: Debating the Bible's Place in Public Schools (Peter Lang 2015). Currently, I am researching how gender impacts the political engagement of Generation Z, the impact of masculinity on American political attitudes, and Americans' views about civility in politics.
Research Interests
Gender and Politics
Religion & Politics
Public Opinion
Political Parties and Interest Groups
Civic Engagement (youth)
Incivility
Countries of Interest
United States
Publications:
Books Written:
Women and Politics: Paths to Power and Political Influence examines the role of women in politics from the early women’s movement to the female politicians in power today. Focusing on women whose stories have not yet been told, this book includes new analysis and scholarship on the experiences and viewpoints of conservative women, women of color, LGBT women, and millennial women. Students will gain historical insight into how women have achieved political power and how they have influenced the American political system at the state, local, and national levels, in each branch of government. Engaging profiles of the key players who have shaped our political system are interwoven with an analysis of the most recent election data to provide a comprehensive and unbiased introduction to the study of women and politics.
In Tea Party Women, Melissa Deckman explores the role of women in creating and leading the movement and the greater significance of women’s involvement in the Tea Party for our understanding of female political leadership and the future of women in the American Right. Through national-level public opinion data, observation at Tea Party rallies, and interviews with female Tea Party leaders, Deckman demonstrates that many Tea Party women find the grassroots, decentralized nature of the movement to be more inclusive for them than mainstream Republican politics. She lays out the ways in which these women gain traction by recasting conservative political issues such as the deficit and gun control as issues affecting families, and how they rely on traditional gender roles as mothers and homemakers to underscore their particular expertise in understanding these issues. Furthermore, she examines how many Tea Party women claim to write off traditional feminist issues like reproductive rights and gender discrimination as distracting from the real issues affecting women, such as economic policies, and how some even reclaim the mantel of ‘feminism’ as signifying freedom and independence from government overreach—tactics that have over time been adopted by mainstream Republicans. Whether the Tea Party terrifies or fascinates you, Tea Party Women provides a behind-the-scenes look at the women behind an enduring and influential faction in American politics.
Curriculum and the Culture Wars offers a fresh perspective on perennial debates about the role of religion in public schools, focusing on the intersection of religion and curriculum. This debate has been renewed in part due to the growth of elective Bible courses in public schools in many parts of the country. The first half of the book presents new scholarship on the use of the Bible in schools, including a historical analysis of what the Founders had to say about the use of the Bible in public education, a more current assessment of the politics behind the elective Bible class movement in the early twenty-first century, and a critique of such educational programs from constitutional and pedagogical perspectives. This edited volume also offers new insights into long-standing battles that pit religious and secular advocates against one another in the areas of evolution and sex education and considers whether school choice programs that would allow parents the right to send their children to sectarian schools are an affront to promoting the goals of a liberal democracy
Winner of the 2007 Hubert Morken Award, given by the American Political Science Association's Religion and Politics section for the best book on Religion & Politics. If there is a "culture war" taking place in the United States, one of the most interesting, if under-the-radar, battlegrounds is in local school board elections. Rarely does the pitch of this battle reach national attention, as it did in Kansas when the state school board—led by several outspoken conservative Christians—voted to delete evolution from the state's science curriculum and its standardized tests in August 1999. That action rattled not only the educational and scientific communities, but concerned citizens around the nation as well. While the movement of the Christian Right into national and state politics has been well documented, this is the first book to examine their impact on local school board politics. While the Kansas decision was short-lived, during the past decade in school districts around the country, conservative Christian majorities have voted to place limits on sex education, to restrict library books, to remove references to gays and lesbians in the classroom, and to promote American culture as superior to other cultures. School Board Battles studies the motivation, strategies, and electoral success of Christian Right school board candidates. Based on interviews, and using an extensive national survey of candidates as well as case studies of two school districts in which conservative Christians ran and served on local boards, Melissa M. Deckman gives us a surprisingly complex picture of these candidates. She reveals weaker ties to national Christian Right organizations—and more similarities between these conservative candidates and their more secular counterparts than might be expected.
Media Appearances:
Radio Appearances:
'Watch What We're Doing': Could Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan Challenge Trump In 2020?
Newspaper Quotes:
Women Don’t Think Alike. Why Do We Think They Do? Conservative supporters of the president and Brett Kavanaugh aren’t betraying their gender — they’re sticking with what they believe.
Women March as Politics, Equal Rights Dominate Discussion
God Loves Donald Trump, Right?
Blog Posts:
A new poll shows how younger women could help drive a Democratic wave in 2018.
This survey shows that why there's never been a better time for women to run for office.
There was no wave for Republican women this year.
How the Resist Trump Movement could transform into the Tea Party of the Left