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Final Manuscript NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY (Counter)Publics Debate Womanhood in the 1980s: The Newsletters of Eagle Forum, Concerned Women for America, and the National Organization for Women A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS for the degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Field of Communication Studies By Anndrea Ellison EVANSTON, ILLINOIS December 2016 2 Abstract The progressive women’s movement in the United States during the mid-twentieth century enjoyed increased support and success until national politics were dominated by conservatives during the 1980s. This dissertation analyzes the discourse around women’s issues created by two of the largest conservative women’s organizations, Eagle Forum and Concerned Women for America, and one of the largest feminist organizations, the National Organization for Women, during the 1980s. Each of these organizations created documents that then circulated within corresponding publics: the grassroots antifeminist public, the evangelical women’s political public, and the liberal feminist public, respectively. Public sphere theory, especially as it is used in the field of rhetoric, would postulate that the proliferation of publics debating women’s issues during this time period would provide space for divergent ideas and voices to be heard in the public sphere, and thus create a better functioning democracy. However, this case study uses the newsletters of these organizations to show that, in fact, the introduction and growing influence of conservative women required a response from the liberal feminist public, and the resulting interaction between these three publics actually shrank the discursive space. More radical ideas—both to the right and to the left of these three organizations’ views—then faced higher obstacles to entering public discourse. I conclude, then, that rhetoricians can use public sphere theory to account for the ways that publics interact to create exclusion as well as inclusion. I also argue that newsletters as a genre have had a historically important, but varied, relationship with publics. 3 Acknowledgments First, I would like to express my profound gratitude for my advisor, Angela Ray. She persevered with me to finish this project, and she continually showed her support of my efforts. The last few weeks and months required a herculean dedication to me and to academic rigor. To my committee members, Robert Orsi, Robert Hariman, and Ralph Cintron, who created courses that deepened and sharpened my thinking, who engaged in conversations that shaped this project, and who read and gathered so quickly, I am in your debt. Janice Radway had a significant role in the development of this project and my own pedagogical strategies. For all of these scholars, I hope I can find ways to honor your contributions through my interactions with my own students. Thank you. To my colleagues and friends, this process would have been so much more work and so much less rewarding. Jordie’s listening, notetaking, and empathy gave me the space to create my project, my career, and myself. Aileen’s care and support was boundless and so very needed. Ian is the consummate colleague and friend; there is no one I respect more. Elliot’s unwavering friendship and encouragement is the truest example of what it means to be in a cohort. I would not have this dissertation without Daniel; his positive feedback is always deeply meaningful and his suggestions are always on point. Tara provided stamina and brightness at critical points, and her insight is really astonishing in its integrity. Katie has the deepest and strongest heart of anyone I know; she inspires me to love others and to love myself. The world needs more people like Jen; it just does. Kate has been an incredibly helpful sounding board for a wide range of academic and relational issues, and she is consistently an example of the kind of academic I admire. And all the others: Kevin, Faye & Sammy, Bart, and Dwayne, who have cheered me on, shared their own stories and ideas, and 4 grounded me in reality, I can only hope to have been as good a friend to you as you all have been to me. Thank you to my family who supported me unconditionally through the chapter of my life that was dissertating. Aren’t we all glad that’s over? Thank you to Jonathan, who encouraged me to begin this process and, in important moments, encouraged me to save my sanity by stepping away from work, I want all the best for you. And, finally, to CM, whose guidance and wisdom allowed me to finish well. Onward. 5 Contents Introduction 5 Chapter 1: Newsletters, the News, and (Counter)Publics 48 Chapter 2: Eagle Forum and the Grassroots Antifeminist Public Imagine Feminism as a Betrayal of Womanhood 87 Chapter 3: Concerned Women for America and the Evangelical Women’s Political Public Imagine Feminism as an Enemy of Womanhood 140 Chapter 4: The National Organization of Women, the Liberal Feminist Public, and a Feminist Response 186 Conclusion 228 Works Cited 241 6 Introduction Any story of women’s political action in the United States during the twentieth century must account for two competing groups: progressive women, who advocated for legislation and policies aimed at raising women’s economic and political status, and conservative women, who advocated for legislation and policies aimed at instituting legislation that protected the heteronormative family and conventional gender norms. Both groups had periods of success and significant influence. The pendulum swung from progressive advancement to conservative regression; the waves of feminist progress ebbed and flowed. Scholars find one significant concentration of feminist activity during the 1960s and 1970s, which was followed by a staunch antifeminist backlash. Although many histories of feminism acknowledge that feminism did not disappear from the public eye, the 1980s are associated with a halting of feminist progress and a co-optation of feminists’ political voice by conservative women. The mobilization of conservative women during the 1980s was not the first entrée of conservative women into the world of politics. Scholars have documented the various successful political actions of conservative women throughout U.S. history, but the conservative movement in the 1980s relied on the participation of thousands of women who became active in opposition to the women’s movement of the 1960s and 1970s.1 Scholars have accounted for the growing influence of conservative women and approval for conservative policies among the American public during the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s by noting the technological savvy and 1 Carol Mattingly, Well-Tempered Women: Nineteenth-Century Temperance Rhetoric (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1998); Catherine E. Rymph, Republican Women: Feminism and Conservatism from Suffrage through the Rise of the New Right (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006); Ronnee Schreibner, Righting Feminism: Conservative Women and American Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). 7 organizational efficiency of conservative organizations, women’s fear of male violence, and conservative men’s media savvy and deception.2 What needs to be added to these interpretations is an account of the interaction between conservative women and liberal women. Indeed, Beverly LaHaye, one of the most prominent conservative women active during the 1980s, claimed that her impetus for first participating in national politics was dissatisfaction with feminists and their policies.3 The members of her organization, Concerned Women for America (CWA), believed that their perspective was not represented in national politics because the most vocal women were feminists, and they felt a calling to participate in politics for the first time in reaction to feminism. In other words, conservative women became active because they opposed the women’s movement, and their involvement then required a response from liberal women. This continued interaction shaped the available means of discourse surrounding women’s issues during the 1980s. Rita Felski and Nancy Fraser argue that the women’s movement of the 1960s and 1970s introduced new terms into American discourse, such as “sexism,” “the double shift,” and “sexual harassment.”4 The women’s movement, Felski writes, achieved a “gradual expansion of feminist values from their roots in the women’s movement throughout society as a whole.”5 Fraser notes that within the boundaries of the communities of the women’s movement, “feminist women . invented new terms for describing social reality” and “recast [their] needs and identities, thereby 2 Sara Diamond, Roads to Dominion: Right-Wing Movements and Political Power in the United States (New York: Guilford Press, 1995); Andrea Dworkin, Right-Wing Women: The Politics of Domesticated Females (London: The Women’s Press, 1983), 21; Carol Virginia Pohli, “Church Closets and Back Doors: A Feminist View of Moral Majority Women,” Feminist Studies 9.3 (Fall 1983): 529-558. 3 “CWA Takes a Stand,” Brethren Missionary Herald, 1984, LaHaye Folder, Fundamentalism File, Bob Jones University Archives. 4 Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracies,” in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 123. 5 Rita Felski, Beyond Feminist Aesthetics: Feminist Literature and Social Change (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 167. 8 reducing, although not eliminating, the extent of [their] disadvantage
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