Tanya Melich considers herself a moderate Republican. She believes in the goals of the women's movement and of the GOP and she never thought those two beliefs were mutually exclusive.
For years she's been active in the national party, several times serving as a delegate from New York to the national convention.Melich, a Utah native, played politics by the rules. She was loyal.
She was civil. She was reasonable. Recently, after decades of being reasonable, Tanya Melich became angry.
Bantam just published the story of her disillusionment. Melich's book is titled, "The Republican War Against Women," and subtitled, "An Insider's Report from Behind the Lines."
In one sense, "The Republican War Against Women," is a history book. It takes the reader back more than 20 years. In those days Republican women shared the spotlight with Democratic women as leaders in the women's movement.
Melich chronicles the rise and fall of the Equal Rights Amendment. She chronicles the way increasingly strict anti-abortion (she consistently refers to it as "antichoice") language came into the Republican platform. She explains how Sandra Day O'Connor came to be appointed to the Supreme Court. She explains how the party eventually decided to endorse child care (Phyllis Schafly said it was OK).
She chronicles the rise of the New Right. In her view the New Right is a homophobic, racist, misogynist and inappropriately powerful minority within the GOP. She constantly reminds the reader that the GOP is the party of Lincoln, the party that freed the slaves, the party that gave women the vote. At the end of her book, Melich asks her fellow Republicans to stop voting for bigots.
Melich comes to Salt Lake City Monday, Feb. 12, for a 2 p.m. reading at A Woman's Place Bookstore, on Foothill Boulevard. The Deseret News caught up with Melich in California, in the midst of her book tour. She says her message in Utah will be the same as it has been around the country. "Reasonable people have got to step up and say, `This cannot go on any longer.' "
The eldest of Mitchell and Doris Melich's four children, Tanya grew up in Grand County. "I cannot remember a time when the Republican Party was not part of my life," she writes. "I grew up in a family where political talk dominated daily meals and weekend picnics in the red rock desert surrounding my hometown of Moab, Utah. My mother and father constantly reminded us that public service is an honorable calling, that we had a duty to participate in the nation's political life, and that we could do this best by working for the Republican Party."
Her father was the son of Serbian immigrants. Mitch Melich's father died when he was 10, and Mitch put himself through law school by working in the mines of Bingham Canyon. He was a corporate executive - also a state senator, the Republican candidate for governor against Calvin Rampton in 1964, a Republican National Committeeman, and the solicitor for the Department of the Interior during the Nixon administration.
Dorie Snyder Melich was her husband's equal in activism. She volunteered a dozen ways, from the local elementary school to the National Arthritis Foundation. Tanya Melich's earliest lesson about equality came during her girlhood in the 1940s when her mother brought Girl Scouting to Grand County. "She felt that young girls weren't getting as much attention as young boys. There wasn't as much for them to do."
In 1952, 15-year-old Tanya accompanied her family to Chicago, where her father was a delegate to the Republican National Convention. She met Douglas MacArthur. She met her Grandfather Snyder's old mining engineering buddy, former President Herbert Hoover. "It was a defining moment of my life . . . I believed we were on a glorious mission to save the country from the Democrats who were ruining it."
The Republican Party has forgotten how to embrace many factions - that's what Melich wanted to write about. Her editor read the first draft and said, "If you want to reach an audience beyond the political junkies, you need to tell your personal story, too." So she did.
There are many ironies revealed in "The Republican War Against Women." One of ironies is that George Bush refused to listen to Republican feminists - would not even meet with them - yet Newt Gingrich not only listened, he listened for hours.
The reaction to her book from Republican bigwigs has been what she expected, Melich says. They say the party doesn't have a problem with women. They point to Nancy Kassebaum. Says Melich, "My point is that the Republican Party has never been against individual women. The problem comes in their policies."
When she wrote the book, she was angry, Melich says. She held out little hope that the party would broaden enough to include her. On this tour, she's met many people who share her concerns. "Women are coming out of the woodwork." She has new hope.