Reagan, rhetoric and women voters : women's representation through language in the 1980 Reagan campaign for president

Abstract

This dissertation examines archival documents from Ronald Reagan’s 1980 campaign for president, looking specifically at how women were both appealed to and talked about within these documents. Documents were collected from the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library Archives. Following recommended critical discourse analysis methods, coding and analysis of these documents revealed several dominant themes. Using intertextual analysis, these themes were compared to the content of the women’s issues speech that the campaign focused the final weeks of the campaign drafting. This dissertation closes with a discussion of how the prevalent themes and ways the campaign chose to talk to and about women reveal the party’s ideological stance on women and equality.