Former governor of South Carolina and Trump Administration Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley is the rising star of the Republican race for the nomination this summer.

While former Pres. Donald Trump had a runaway victory in Iowa, Haley’s campaign said they expect a stronger showing this week in New Hampshire. Poll data shows the gap between Haley and Trump is closing fast.

“Think of the fact that you might be making history in this moment,” the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations told Iowa voters in an event in Cedar Falls the weekend before the Iowa caucuses. “And I’m not talking about the history of a female president. I’m talking about history saying we are going to finally right the ship in America. We’re finally going to get it right.”

While Haley has appeared to reject many of the tenets of modern feminism, including her strict anti-abortion stance, she’s previously said she would approve a 6-week abortion ban if she were still governor of South Carolina.

Still, history tells us Haley is following in the footsteps of many influential Republican politicians who claimed the label of “feminist” and others who didn’t, but believed in many modern feminist principles, like being pro-abortion.

She’s the first Indian-American woman to run for GOP nominee, but her campaign hasn’t focused on engaging the Indian and South Asian community in America, which has disappointed some Indian-Americas, the Hindustan Times reported last week.

Haley has also faced questions about her Christian faith and her commitment to American values because of her status as an Indian-American, including Trump’s attempts to cast doubt on her American citizenship ahead of the Iowa Caucus.

Following the ratification of the 19th amendment, women became interested in entering politics, especially since they now had the right to vote. The women who pushed into politics became some of the most influential female political figures of the 20th century, said Dr. Catherine E. Rymph, a professor of history at the University of Missouri.

A major way conservative feminism differs from mainstream feminism is the two groups’ stance on abortion rights.

The Republican Party platform states “the unborn child has a fundamental right to life which cannot be infringed,” and Republicans have made successful efforts to rollback access to abortion. The issue has been polarizing for voters, and even support for complete abortion bans has fallen slightly among GOP voters following the fall of Roe v. Wade, according to data from the Public Religion Research Institute. Still, 63% of Republicans said abortion should be illegal in all or most cases.

Abortion is a major issue for conservative feminists today, and has been a major sticking point for feminists across the political spectrum. Most feminists would consider a pro-abortion stance essential to being a feminist, as Victoria Browne wrote in a 2022 article for Radical Philosophy titled “Anti-abortion feminism: How is this even a thing?”

Voter data shows Republicans are losing ground among young women voters, which is why conservative feminism and the voting behaviors of conservative women are worth watching as the GOP race narrows to one man and one woman.

Here are three ways Haley’s display of what it means to be an empowered Republican woman fit into the party’s broader ideology:

She’s pro-life

Many modern-day conservative feminists are firm in their stance on abortion. While some consider anti-abortion and feminism to be incompatible, that’s not been the case for this Republican-dominated movement. Anti-abortion feminism hit mainstream politics in 1973 with the creation of “Feminists for Life,” by Pat Goltz and Catherine Callahan.

Haley has presented a strong anti-abortion policy during her campaign. She said she would sign a 6-week abortion ban if she were president.

Being anti-abortion is an important stance for both Republicans and political conservatives, Rymph said. It’s something Haley has embraced, which is something other women’s groups like the nonprofit organization New Wave Feminists, an anti-abortion feminist group, have also embraced.

“We need this kind of pro-life feminism today, because a feminism predicated on abortion rights excludes the nearly half of women who call themselves pro-life. This includes many poor and working class women who are actually less likely to get an abortion when faced with an unintended pregnancy and more likely to identify as pro-life than their college-educated peers,” said Amber Lapp, a research fellow at the Institute for Family Studies, in an article for conservative publication American Compass.

New Wave Feminists was one of several groups that signed and submitted an amicus brief to the Supreme Court that claimed ‘the judicially-created right of abortion disadvantages women.’

While these seemingly opposing stances can–and do–coexist in the minds of conservative feminists, Browne cautioned against the “anti-abortion is pro-woman” stance often parroted by anti-abortion feminists.

As Amia Srinivasan has put it, right-wing anti-abortionism should be understood as essentially a ‘symbolic’ form of politics because a ‘real movement’ to abolish abortion would have to be premised upon a programme for serious structural change, including state-guaranteed parental leave, childcare provision and universal healthcare, as well as safe, free, accessible contraception and massive investment in sex education,” Brown said in the Radical Philosophy article.

She supports anti-trans policy

The Republican Party has been very anti-trans. More than 300 anti-trans bills have already been filed this year. Nearly 600 anti-trans bills were filed in 2023, and 86 passed.

The bills filed in 2024 have been described as “extreme” by the New Republic.

In December 2023, she said the government should “stay out of it” when it came to healthcare bans for trans people. Haley has also supported policies that would ban trans girls from participating in girls high school sports.

“We need to raise strong girls, because strong girls become strong women, and strong women become strong leaders,” the former South Carolina governor said in a campaign event in Iowa. “And none of that happens if you have biological boys playing in girls sports.”

Anti-transgender legislation was featured on the mainstage of the 2023 Conservative Political Action Conference, where Project 2025 was presented. Project 2025, also known as “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise,” is a legislative agenda that includes legislation that would ban trans participation in sports, the removal of any LGBTQ+ content from libraries and from the internet and a complete ban on pornography, Dame Magazine reported.

She insists she has a place in the Republican Party

Haley is one of a long line of Republican women who chose to stay in the party, and advocate for their place as leaders there, instead of organizing in woman-dominated spaces, Rymph explained. Her academic research examined how women entered politics following the ratification of the 19th Amendment, allowing white women to vote.

“What I found, which seemed kind of ironic, was that the women who entered Republican Party politics, who don’t stay in those women-only spaces, those women are the ones who became a voice for women’s rights, and eventually feminism in the Republican party,” Rymph said.

Haley is running on the Republican ticket, despite a large share of her supporters who say they would describe themselves as politically independent. Even in Iowa, where Trump took a strong victory, 34 percent of Haley supporters described their political ideology as “independent,” according to CNN entrance polls.

Many of Haley’s supporters are people who feel like they may lose their party to Trumpism, Rymph said. They are people Rymph described as feeling like they no longer have a place in the Republican Party, which they were part of because of their belief in conservative principles.

“These people don’t support Trump because they don’t believe that Trump is a conservative. These voters were Republicans because of the party’s belief in conservatism,” she said.

Haley’s strong stance as a Republican who has a place in the party because of her conservative values mirrors the work of Republican feminists who came before her.

Women like Mary Louise Smith, the first female chair of the Republican National Committee, stood her ground as a Republican despite her disagreements with her male colleagues. Regan appointed her vice-chair of the United States Commission on Civil Rights in 1980, but did not re-appoint her in 1984.

Unlike Haley, Smith was pro-abortion and relegated as a defender of reproductive rights. She served on the board of directors for the Iowa chapter of Planned Parenthood from 1986-1992. When she died in 1997, she remained the only woman to have chaired the Republican National Committee, a post she held from 1974-1977.

“She believed in the two party system and that the Republican Party was her party. Because she had decades of working in that party, that’s the place where she believed she could be effective, and that if she left the party, she would just be another American voter. She wouldn’t have the kind of influence that she had within the party, despite her policy differences,” Rymph said.

What now?

The New Hampshire Republican Primary is Tuesday. This week’s Republican debate was canceled after Haley said she would not attend if Donald Trump did not show up.

Poll data from American Research Group shows Trump and Haley are tied at 40% in New Hampshire. DeSantis is expected to have about 6% of the vote.

On Sunday, DeSantis announced he was suspending his campaign and endorsed Trump. Now, the race is between Haley and Trump.

“Does the party want to look forward and address issues that desperately need solving — decreasing the debt and deficits, making Social Security solvent, fixing a porous southern border? Those are the things Nikki Haley focuses on,” South Carolina state Sen. Tom Davis told NBC News Sunday. “Or does it want to be a party that looks backward and settles scores for perceived past grievances, one that seeks ‘retribution’? Those are the things Donald Trump emphasizes.”