The Two Women's Movements

The Two Women’s Movements Feminism has been on the march since the 1970s, but so has the conservative backlash. By Kim Phillips-Fein June 1, 2017 Phyllis Schlafly at a rally at the Illinois State Capitol in 1977. (AP) Not even death could stop Phyllis Schlafly. Her final broadside, The Conservative Case for Trump, was released the day after she died at the age of 92 last September. It was a fitting bookend to her first, A Choice Not an Echo, her self-published endorsement of Barry Goldwater for president in 1964. Unlike many other Christian conservatives who backed Texas Senator Ted Cruz in the GOP’s 2016 primaries, Schlafly supported Trump from the outset. Early in the year, she gave an hour-long interview to Breitbart News, making the case that Trump represented the only chance to overturn the “kingmakers” (her word for the Republican establishment). Like Trump, Schlafly’s politics were often focused on a muscular concept of national security. She wanted to see a “fence” protecting the country’s southern border, and she argued that Democrats were recruiting “illegals” in order to bolster their electoral chances. Despite his three marriages, she saw Trump as an “old-fashioned” man whose priorities were hard work and family. After Schlafly died, Trump returned the love. He gave a eulogy at her funeral in the Cathedral Basilica of St. Louis, raising a finger to deliver a promise: “We will never, ever let you down.” Schlafly emerged on the national scene in the early 1970s, when she led the campaign against the Equal Rights Amendment through her Eagle Forum. Although she’d been well-known in conservative circles since the 1950s, antifeminism brought Schlafly new levels of recognition. In a few short years, she became a household name for a resurgent cultural conservatism, one that ultimately defeated the ERA and helped to elect Ronald Reagan president. Her rise during this period is the subject of Divided We Stand by the political historian Marjorie J. Spruill, a fascinating new account of the “two women’s movements” of the 1970s. Not so long ago, there was little historical literature about the 1970s. One account of the decade, published in 2005, bears the cryptic title (an allusion to Joseph Heller’s novel) Something Happened. Today, there’s a wave of literature on the era, often approached through the sense of confusion and chaos that defined its art and culture (the title of another book: 1973 Nervous Breakdown). Spruill’s narrative joins the many works insisting on the decade as a turning point. Focusing on the 1977 International Women’s Year conferences, a series of state and national meetings sponsored by the federal government to create a set of principles on women’s rights for policy-makers, she tells the story of the cresting of feminism’s second wave and the counter-feminist mobilization that emerged in response. From the vantage point of the present, there is much that seems remarkable about this time. Who can imagine, today or at any point in the past 30 years, the federal government funding conferences throughout the United States with an eye toward crafting some kind of proposal to address sexual inequality? But Spruill suggests that what initially appeared a victory for feminism ultimately became the springboard for a counterrevolution. The state meetings provided ample organizing opportunities for women in the nascent antifeminist movement, and the final national gathering in Houston was met by a “pro-family” rally that brought out tens of thousands. The strength of feminism—its claim to represent women as a whole—turned out to be a weakness as well, since those women who disagreed with its central tenets could puncture the moral claim of unity simply by insisting that the movement did not speak for them. As Spruill points out, “Solidarity among feminists was not the same as solidarity among American women.” In the end, she argues, the 1970s not only gave us some of the most important victories of the modern feminist movement, but also launched the opposition to it that would eventually put Donald Trump in the White House. As the decade began, feminism was on the march, not just in the streets but in electoral politics. Many historians have focused primarily on its radical edge: the consciousness-raising groups, the Women’s Strike for Equality, the abortion speak-outs, the writings of people like Kate Millett and Shulamith Firestone. Spruill, by contrast, paints a picture of feminism in the early 1970s as a pragmatic, bipartisan movement, one that was focused on winning greater economic and political power for women rather than on challenging male authority in the family and home. There were certainly ample grounds on which to fight. In 1971, men held 98 percent of the seats in Congress. The National Organization for Women had to press the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to consider cases of sexual discrimination as part of its purview. Until a 1975 Supreme Court ruling, states were permitted to exclude women from juries. Although she evokes the broader cultural politics of feminism, Spruill sees changing these political and legal inequalities as the central goal of the movement. After all, the politics of sexuality and the family were inextricably connected with women’s structural rights: Roe v. Wade was preceded by a 1972 ruling that legalized the prescription of birth control to unmarried women. For Spruill, what is most notable about the early 1970s is how mainstream feminism already was. As she notes (it’s the title of Chapter 2 in her book), there was something of a “feminist establishment” by that time. She points to the Kennedy administration’s decision to set up the President’s Commission on the Status of Women in 1961 to explore the role of women in American life. Its report, “American Women,” was published in 1963, the same year that The Feminine Mystique came out. Indeed, Betty Friedan was an adviser to the commission. By the late 1960s, states throughout the country were undertaking similar investigations. The Republican Party had backed the Equal Rights Amendment beginning in the 1940s, whereas Democrats were wary about supporting an amendment that would overturn labor legislation protecting and benefiting women. Congress passed a bill creating a national child-care system (subsequently vetoed by President Nixon), as well as the 1974 Women’s Educational Equity Act, which was intended to fund programs to counter “sex-role socialization and stereotyping.” President Ford appointed women’s-rights advocates like Jill Ruckelshaus, dubbed the “Gloria Steinem of the Republican Party,” to leadership positions. Even Alabama Governor George Wallace and South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond supported the ERA in the early ’70s. This emerging feminist consensus was undone by the women who became part of the antifeminist mobilization. These were women who insisted on the unique nature of women’s identities as mothers and homemakers. They blamed the second-wave feminism of the ’60s and ’70s for leading women astray, and they were drawn to Schlafly, a Catholic mother of six whose hair was always perfectly coiffed and who preferred pastel dresses to pants. To her detractors, Schlafly seemed impossibly prim. But to her followers, she looked like a true “lady.” Schlafly had been an activist for years. She got her start in 1952, when she ran for Congress from Illinois as a 27-year- old anticommunist housewife. Her Goldwater book, which argued that the “New York kingmakers” in the GOP had sold out the party’s conservative base, became the most widely distributed tract of the 1964 primaries. Schlafly’s focus was foreign policy; she hadn’t been especially interested in women’s issues when she started out in politics. But she knew a constituency when she saw one, and in 1972, she published an essay attacking the ERA titled “What’s Wrong With ‘Equal Rights’ for Women?” Schlafly’s sneering portrayal of feminists would be familiar to anyone who follows the alt-right today. American women, Schlafly wrote, were “the most privileged” class of people ever to have lived, and the real heroes of women’s liberation were the men who’d invented the sewing machine, the automobile, and frozen food. Thanks to them, modern mothers were free to spend time enjoying their children and perhaps to take a part-time job or volunteer outside the home if they wanted more to do. There was no real problem of inequality; instead, the “aggressive females on television talk shows yapping about how mistreated American women are” were tricking women into feeling aggrieved. Ms. magazine, according to Schlafly, was filled with “sharp- tongued, high-pitched whining complaints by unmarried women” who “view the home as a prison, and the wife and mother as a slave.” The magazine’s subtext was “how satisfying it is to be a lesbian.” Schlafly was careful to say that of course she believed in more opportunities for women—she just didn’t think the ERA could secure them. Instead, it would rob women of their special place in society, while also failing to deliver on its promises of equal pay and political representation, thus leaving women worse off than before. Meanwhile, the ERA was being promoted by those in the Republican Party who condescended to people like Schlafly—a “tight little clique running things from the top” that refused to give “equal rights” to delegates who rejected the amendment. Although Schlafly was Catholic, the vision she promoted throughout the 1970s appealed to a host of conservative Protestant and Mormon women as well. Spruill paints a picture of antifeminism as a rollicking political movement, one that—ironically, like feminism itself— offered women a way to participate in a world outside the family.

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