Mid-July in Washington, D.C. is rather nasty -- it's swampy, sticky, and full of cranky people dying for August recess. The press tends to reflect this ill temper: negative stories, scandal hunting, and plain old bad news. And then a story in the July/August issue of The American Enterprise on "Female Entrepreneurship" brings a breath of fresh air by reassuring us of the livelihood of the American Dream.

Barbara DeLollis's (of the Fresno Bee) piece on "Today's Passion for Female Entrepreneurship," looks at what is considered one of the fastest growing sectors of the country's economy. After providing the requisite cheery facts, (for example, all told there are 8 million American businesses owned by women,) DeLollis tells the stories of a few women who have started their own businesses and obstacles they faced: regulatory hurdles, trouble finding start-up capital and the determination required to succeed. One woman, Joanne Cornwall, an African American Studies professor at San Diego State, decided to start her own side-business on a part-time basis. Sister Locks, the new company, was based on a hair weaving technique she developed from an ancient African process. It turned out that California's cosmetology licensing board was none too fond of such innovation -- the board only has regulations for hair straightening treatments, outlawing by omission Cornwall's new business. Cornwall, with the help of attorneys from the Institute for Justice in Washington, D.C., is challenging the board's outdated regulations in court.

Frank Gregorsky, a former aide to the House Republican leadership and a fellow at Seattle's Discovery Institute, studied this burgeoning group of women entrepreneurs in his January 1997 report for the Joint Economic Committee, "Taking Risk and Taking Charge: Women Business-Owners in Post-Corporate America." Gregorsky discovered the political exile of these female entrepreneurs. Women business owners like Cornwall are independent in the way envisioned by the original equality-oriented feminists and yet are often pragmatic and profit-oriented. This positions them opposite modern feminists who support regulations, red tape and government meddling.

A recent article in The San Francisco Chronicle profiled women entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley. The biggest hurdle for the women of Silicon Valley, it seems, is finding venture capital to invest in their ideas. Marlene McDaniel, who appears in both the Chronicle and Enterprise piece, is president and chief executive of Wire Networks, an interactive publishing company that produces Women's Wire. She describes herself as an "anti-feminist" in the Enterprise article, and said of her success, "It wasn't easy. But I don't think it's easy for men to start businesses either." In the Chronicle piece, though, McDaniel and some of her colleagues acknowledged that the technology world is still male-dominated, which they say forces women to work "twice as hard."

On the other side, an equal number of female high-tech executives told the Chronicle reporter that gender played little or no role in the degree of entrepreneurial success, pointing instead to other factors like the small though growing network of female executives and the slim chances of anyone getting access to venture capital. Since there are fewer women than men applying for venture capital, it stands to reason that there would be fewer women actually getting it as well. This is not the message one gets from feminist advocates.

The lesson here is about an opportunity whose window is closing. Republicans are nominally the party of free markets and limited government. If they get back to common sense policies they will have the opportunity to regain ground among women -- not with the phantom of a "soccer mom," but with real women invested in making their own way economically. There are at least eight million women who would be interested in tuning in.

-Katherine Post

Director of the Center for Enterprise and Opportunity