Female counterpoint

Nancy Pfotenhauer is not afraid of challenges. The New Jersey native was chosen to be, she says, “the only Yankee” on the University of Georgia homecoming court — and dared to express her politics in front of 80,000 Bulldog fans at halftime in Sanford Stadium.

“I wore a Reagan button,” Mrs. Pfotenhauer says of the 1985 event. “It was the very first political statement of my life.”

Now, as president of the Independent Women’s Forum, Mrs. Pfotenhauer faces a new challenge: Keeping an organization born in the “culture wars” of the 1990s relevant in the post-September 11 age.

Founded in 1992 as a conservative antidote to left-leaning feminist groups, IWF made its reputation as a smart and sassy bunch during the Clinton era.

The Clinton presidency “was sort of like hitting a pinata without a blindfold,” Mrs. Pfotenhauer says. “The nation was confronted with the hypocrisy of the feminist movement, which claimed to speak for all women but supported the philanderer in chief. … That was the news every day — did he or didn’t he, and to whom?”

The IWF ladies reveled in their contrarian stance, wearing as badges of honor the epithets hurled at them by critics.

“I simply couldn’t fathom that any bright, educated woman would actually believe the ideas that IWF put forth,” feminist writer Susan Jane Gilman said in a 2000 article in Ms. magazine, describing IWF as a group of “articulate, reactionary women who are all sweetness and bite; they know how to work the media and smile as they attack everything from Title IX to sexual harassment legislation.”

Sharp-tongued sound-bite tactics lost some of their appeal once President Bush was elected. That became even more true, Mrs. Pfotenhauer says, after the terrorist attacks in 2001.

“The nation has really changed, not only because of President Bush being a different man, but because of September 11,” she says. “We are living in much more serious times. It is … wholly inappropriate to be flip.”

The organization has a formidable reputation among Washington conservatives.

IWF “provides a tremendous counterpoint from a woman’s perspective on the importance of economic issues to everyone, not just to women but to everyone,” says David Keating, executive director of Club for Growth, a group that supports lower taxes and other free-market policies.

“Often, when the cable shows and the media and the op-ed pages, they turn to feminist groups as presenting the viewpoint of all women. And it’s simply not true,” Mr. Keating says. “IWF has done a very good job of getting out the message of the benefits of limited government and lower taxes to women and their families.”

Brought in as IWF’s president during an organizational crisis three years ago, Mrs. Pfotenhauer, 39, expresses a businesslike view of the group’s new focus.

“Before, it was enough to be anti-Clinton and go on [television] and attack him. It’s not enough to do that anymore,” she says. “Frankly, it’s not worth the investment by donors, if that’s all you’re going to do. Our job is to provide as much value as possible in the marketplace of ideas.”

If that sounds like an economist’s statement, it should: Mrs. Pfotenhauer has a master’s degree in economics from George Mason University, where she was a research assistant to professor Walter Williams, a free-market advocate whose syndicated column appears in The Washington Times.

Economics inspired her pro-Reagan homecoming statement at the University of Georgia, Mrs. Pfotenhauer says.

“I was sitting there in econ classes, knowing that you would fail an Econ 101 test if you could not prove that raising the minimum wage would increase unemployment and that rent control increased homelessness,” she says. “And I was watching the government go in the opposite direction. There were 19-year-olds who knew what the country should be doing, and the politicians were going the other way.

“When I watched Reagan, I saw, he’s got it — increasing economic prosperity for everyone. It’s about increasing the size of the pie and not fighting over how the current pie is divvied up,” Mrs. Pfotenhauer says.

That pro-growth vision led her into politics. In 1988, she became chief economist for the Republican National Committee. After stints as a congressional economist and in the first Bush administration, she went to the private sector as a top lobbyist for Koch Industries.

She became IWF president in 2000, after co-founder Barbara Ledeen left in a dispute over the group’s direction. Mrs. Pfotenhauer, who had been on the group’s board of directors, says “there was a bit of a ’tag, you’re it,’” to her being chosen IWF president.

She took charge at IWF at a time of major change, not least of which was the shift from playing defense against the Clinton administration to playing offense with the Bush administration.

“You go from primarily fighting bad things to trying to promote good things,” Mrs. Pfotenhauer says. “As anyone who’s been in this town will tell you, it’s a lot easier to stop something bad than it is to pass something good. All of the rules of the game are stacked against someone getting something passed.”

That means a more relentless focus on issues.

“We’ve been critiqued in the past for being all sizzle, no steak. They cannot say that anymore,” Mrs. Pfotenhauer says. “While we have tried to hold onto our edge and our sense of humor, we would not be doing our job if we shied away from the substantive policy debates of our time.”

One of the most notable changes under Mrs. Pfotenhauer’s leadership was the discontinuation of IWF’s publications: a newsletter called Ex Femina and the Women’s Quarterly.

TWQ, as the quarterly was known, was praised as “stylish” and influential. But, says Mrs. Pfotenhauer, it was “a high-cost, low-distribution vehicle,” expensive to produce and reaching a readership of fewer than 5,000.

“As much as we love hard copy, we’ve embraced the electronic age,” she says, speaking of IWF’s revamped Web site (www.iwf.org).

The goal of IWF, she says, is dominance in the issues market.

“We’re trying to take what it would take to success in the private sector and apply it to the policy sector,” Mrs. Pfotenhauer says. “We know our market. We need to own our market.”