Lauren Hollender

Women’s Liberation in the Midst of Growing Conservatism

SONGSSSSSSSOWHATENDNOTES
The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines “feminist” as a person who believes in the
“theory of the political, economic, and social equality of the sexes”. It has been forty years since
the beginning of the second wave of the women’s movement, since The Feminine Mystique,
since NOW, and “feminist” is still a dirty word. In all social movements there seem to be
similarities, particularly surrounding their lack of success. Movements may not be as successful
as they could have been due to a lack of cohesiveness, direction, or defined goals. In the case of
the second wave of the women’s movement, it seems that its inability to make more headway or
produce more lasting policies can be attributed mainly to bad timing. Though the movement’s
successes are definitely notable, had it truly begun during the early 1960’s, amongst the liberal
policies, civil rights and anti-war movements, it could have possibly covered more ground.
Instead, it was pushed to the back burner and was only able to emerge as both of the two other
movements died down, and because of this was forced to deal with the conservative
repercussions of the civil rights and anti-war movements. A substantial portion of Americans in
the late 1960’s began to yearn for more law and order, and to feel that America was experiencing
a moral decline. Feminism, especially radical feminism, and the views it projected was frowned
upon by many Americans and encountered fierce opposition from everyday people, including
women, and religious groups, who also fed off of the rise of conservatism in the political sphere.
It was this opposition and shift that hindered the women’s movement’s progress and ability to
make lasting, significant changes that would be visible today.
***add a song lyric in this paragraph
The civil rights and anti-war movements set the tone for change in the 1960’s, and with it
the rise of the second wave of the women’s movement. The conformism and suburbanization
during the 1950’s perpetuated the traditional views of women as homemakers, and continued to
trail into the 1960’s: “a 1961 Gallup poll for the Ladies Home Journal found that young
women aged sixteen to twenty-one described their goals in terms of consumer goods- a modern
kitchen in a ‘split-level brick’ ranch house ‘with four bedrooms with French provincial
furniture’” (Green x). Young women went to college to find husbands and in a 1962 Saturday
Evening Post, nine out of ten women said that childbirth was the most satisfying moment in
their lives (Green xi). Although many women appeared to accept this home-based lifestyle, there
was a growing sense of loneliness and incompleteness- one that Betty Friedan spoke to in The
Feminine Mystique. According to Friedan, the feminine mystique “makes the housewife-
mothers, who never had a chance to be anything else, the model for all women...it simple makes
certain concrete, finite, domestic aspects of feminine existence....into a religion, a pattern by
which all women must now live or deny their femininity” (Friedan 43). She spoke of “the
problem that has no name”, and of women who were afraid to voice their dissatisfaction with
their current position in their homes and in the greater society. Women across the nation were
relieved to find that they were not alone in their suffering, and this realization formed the basis
for the struggle for equality. The opening stages revolved around the founding of the national
Organization for Women (NOW) in 1966, whose mission is “to take action to bring women into
full participation in the mainstream of American society now, exercising all the privileges and
responsibilities thereof in truly equal partnership with men” (NOW.org). The percentage of
women age sixteen and over in the workplace increased from under 30% in 1950 to over 40% by
1970, which led to a significant drop in birthrates as married women in the workforce delayed
starting a family (Boyer 333). Divorce rates increased as women left abusive or unsatisfying
relationships, and the introduction of contraceptives helped to liberate women sexually, and to
“postpone long-term commitments” (Boyer 333). Among the political achievements of the
movement was the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment in 1972, after being introduced to
Congress every year since 1923. The amendment, which declared that “equality of rights under
the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex”
(equalrightsamendment.org) was then sent out to the states for ratification, with thirty-five states
ratifying it by 1975 (Boyer 334). Title IX, requiring gender equity for boys and girls in every
education program that receives federal funding was passed in 1972. Also, the 1973 Supreme
Court case Roe v. Wade ensured a woman’s right to an abortion. All of these successes were
considerable and important, but only small steps towards cracking the glass ceiling that remains
today. In particular, as we will see later, the “victories” of the Equal Rights Amendment and Roe
v. Wade still remain to be realized. As with any movement, the women’s rights movement
cannot be pinpointed as one specific thing; it contained various factions, goals, levels of
radicalism and “the number of women who identified with feminism- through membership in
consciousness-raising groups or NOW or by reading women’s journals- was small” (Green xvii).
Largely white, middle class, and college educated, the movement encountered criticism from
working class women and from many African American women who saw the call for women’s
liberation as less critical than the need to overcome racism (Boyer 335). Internal divisions can
hurt any movement, but the biggest hindrance to the women’s movement came from the intense
opposition fueled by the conservative shift of both American society and government, beginning
right as the women’s movement was taking off.
add song lyric that exemplifies the counterculture
Although the 1960’s are often characterized as a time of liberalism and change, it is
evident that a shift of American opinion towards one that embraced traditionalism and law and
order had begun to take place by the end of the decade. The 60’s were filled with rebellion-
young people rejecting the lives their parents knew and embracing individualism, expression,
peace and love. Opposition to these liberal life styles were beginning to come to the forefront,
particularly in response to the counterculture: a movement of young people who sought an
alternative lifestyle based around drugs, sex, and the rejection of political involvement. Those
moving to the right felt that hippies didn’t believe in “God, family, private property, good
grooming, or personal daintiness” (Anderson 117). The feminist movement and what it stood for
was, for these people, in opposition to their traditional views of a women’s place in society and
in the home. In The Conservative Ascendency, Critchlow connects the rise of the hippie
counterculture to the heightened middle-class anxieties about a breakdown in American society
(p 77). Moderates and conservatives alike agreed that the counterculture was indicative of a
general disorder in America, and they tried to capitalize on the general widespread fear of
erosion by linking crime rates to the rise of the counterculture (Critchlow 95). In addition to the
mourning of traditional values, there was an increased yearning for more law and order. Having
largely accomplished its goals, the Civil Rights Movement had more or less come to a close by
the end of the 60’s. Civil and voting rights were gained, but there was still fierce economic
inequalities and discrimination, especially in the cities. The suburbs by the mid-sixties were
ninety-five percent white, leaving most blacks in the inner-cities, where jobs and opportunities
were scarce (Boyer 246). The tension and frustration led to intense riots in the summer of 1967
in cities throughout the country. A general unease began to permeate throughout the minds of the
onlookers, exemplified in a Harris poll at the time that asked whether “people who throw fire
bombs in riots should be shot”: sixty-eight percent of whites said yes, and twenty-two percent
said no (Critchlow 82). Not only did the rioting lead to a call for more law and order, it also
undermined Johnson’s Great Society and “discredited the entire liberal enterprise” (Critchlow
83). Student activism also added to the apprehension. The 1968 occupation of Columbia
University in protest of its racist expansion into Morningside Park increased regular people’s
fears of a lack of authority, or even the possibility of a revolution. Finally, the reactions to the
police violence during the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago seemed to confirm the shift.
After Hubert Humphrey was given his party’s nomination instead of anti-war Eugene McCarthy,
over ten-thousand activists gathered in Grant Park to protest. The police, sent out by Chicago’s
Mayor Daley, reacted violently- using tear gas and beating people severely as demonstrators
chanted: “the whole world is watching!” (Perlstein 324). After the violence ended, the public’s
general response was surprising: “Bumper stickers proliferated nationwide: WE SUPPORT
MAYOR DALEY AND HIS CHICAGO POLICE. Sixty percent of Americans polled supported
the sentiment, and 90% of the seventy four thousand letters City Hall received in the mail in the
two weeks after the convention.” (Perlstein 336). Perhaps if these events had taken place in the
early sixties, public opinion would have been in greater support of the protesters. Instead, there
was an outpouring of sympathy for the perpetrators of the suppression, showing that the tides had
clearly begun to change.
Around the same time that this cultural shift was taking place, the Republican party was
beginning its long road to dominance and its own internal movement towards definitive
conservatism. The “conservative ascendency”, as Donald Critchlow calls it, spanned across
decades, and cannot truly be attributed to a specific event, year, or person. It was a gradual build
up of events, all feeding off of many Americans’ return to traditional values, and one that
culminated in the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. In 1964, Republicans were the minority at
every level, and Lyndon B. Johnson’s defeat of Barry Goldwater in that year was viewed by
many politicians as “a clear repudiation of conservatism” (Critchlow 76), leaving the party
divided. The start of the GOP’s rise may have possibly been influenced by a decline in support
for the Democrats, due in part to LBJ’s continued escalation of the war in Vietnam. Although he
was popular during his early years due to successes like the expansion of the welfare state, the
1964 Civil Rights Act, and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, LBJ’S support was waning, with only
thirty-five percent of Americans supporting the Vietnam War by 1967 (Wells). At this point, the
conservatives began to believe that liberalism was weak but were still unsure about how to take
advantage. Then, as the Democratic Convention of 1968 left the party divided and violence
ensued as we saw earlier, Republican politicians began calling for more law and order, and
Richard Nixon was their man. Nixon was not conservative enough for many Republicans, and it
didn’t help that Democrats controlled both the Senate and the House. He did, however, work to
incorporate the silent majority (people who believed, among other things, in the traditional
family values that the women’s movement challenged) by “articulating a clear set of resentments
with which they could all identify” (Critchlow 102). While Watergate hurt the GOP, and only
eighteen percent of voters identified as Republicans in 1974 (Critchlow 102), Nixon had made an
important contribution to the party, specifically by engaging Americans who had been
disillusioned with the liberal regime, and by making “political themes that linked race, populism,
and conservatism” more durable in the American political scene (Lowndes 139). During Gerald
Ford’s presidency, the New Right emerged and, as we will later see, worked to target “average
Americans, many of whom felt that their culture was under attack by the Left (Critchlow 128).
The New Right continued to help transform the Republican party into a voice of conservatism,
contributing to the election of arch-conservative Ronald Reagan in 1980. In his farewell address
in 1989, Reagan said: “they called it a Reagan revolution and I’ll accept that...but for me it
always seemed more like the Great Rediscovery: a rediscovery of our values and our common
sense” (Lowndes 155). Although they may not have seemed successful at the time, events of
earlier decades such as Goldwater’s candidacy and Nixon’s attempt to create a new majority
were, in effect, the shift, and paved the way for Reagan’s election. By 1980, the Right was able
to connect with “Forgotten Americans, the Silent Majority, and finally, Middle America”
(Lowndes 158)- the people who, as we saw earlier, were disillusioned by America’s moral and
cultural degradation, and whose ideals would form the basis of the opposition to the women’s
movement.
A significant roadblock for the women’s movement was the increasing involvement of
religion in U.S. politics, facilitated by the rise of the New Right. The New Right tried to tap into
grassroots discontent over social and moral issues and “projected a vision of America as a place
where people upheld traditional values, mothers placed primary value on their homes and their
children...” (Critchlow) 130. Among those they were “prepared to wage ideological battle with”
were feminists demanding ratification of the ERA (Critchlow 132). Many of the activists who
opposed the ERA and abortion were from religious groups. Following the the passage of the
ERA, ninety-eight percent of anti-ERA activists claimed church membership, compared with
thirty-one to forty-eight percent of pro-ERA activists (Critchlow 141). Evangelical churches
became organizing centers for “women concerned about what they considered an assault on their
family values” (Critchlow 141). They opposed the ERA because they believed that it threatened
the essence of God-fearing Christian women...and that the place of wives and mothers in the
family and in society came from Biblical injunctions to uphold the authority of husbands and
fathers (Critchlow 141). After Roe v. Wade established women’s right to terminate pregnancy,
immense opposition sprung out, particularly from the Roman Catholic community. Seventy
percent of the National Right to Life Committee was Roman Catholic (Critchlow 135).
Members of the New Right saw the abortion issue as “a wedge to lure traditional Roman
Catholic and evangelical Protestants away from their Democratic loyalties” (Critchlow 136).
These activists had considerable political influence: by 1976, over fifty different constitutional
amendments to ban or limit abortions had been introduced in Congress (Critchlow 136).
Because the Republican party was becoming increasingly conservative, and attempting to
connect with Americans who held traditional values at the time that the ERA and abortion
became national issues, religious groups were extremely influential and helped form the base of
the opposition to feminist goals.
The women’s movement also encountered opposition from everyday people, both men
and women, who disagreed not only with the movement’s ideology, but with its main political
goals. Although it would seem that all women would want to participate in their own liberation,
an increasing percentage of American women were holding on to traditional views of their role
in society. Reading Marabel Morgan’s popular book of the seventies, The Total Woman, it
appears that the fifties had never left: the entire book is about teaching women to be good wives
and mothers. Chapter titles include “Accept Him”, “Admire Him”, “Adapt to Him”, and
“Appreciate Him”, and in Morgan’s outline of a woman’s priorities she says: ““first of all,
remember that you are a person responsible to God, your power source...until you become the
kind of woman He wants you to be, you will not be able to fully give yourself to others..for you
have little to give....your second priority is to your husband..too many husbands get lost in the
shuffle after junior arrives, or are replaced by their wives other activities...your next priority is as
a parent to your children,” (244). Beliefs such as these came in direct contradiction with the
feminist movement’s goals of full equality for women, and hindered the movement’s progress in
reaching out and connecting with all American women. Men opposed the movement for a
variety of reasons, including economic ones: the ups and downs of the seventies’ economy
pushed men to become resentful of women entering the workforce and potentially taking their
jobs. The movement had difficulty getting American housewives to support the ERA. Even
First Lady Betty Ford failed in her attempts to rally them: she told a reporter that she recognized
the “low status of the homemaker in today’s society and would like to find ways to raise it”, but
did not realize that most American “homemakers” did not consider themselves “low status” and
did not like being told they were by the president’s wife (Critchlow 139). A rising political
activist who declared that “the American people do not want the ERA, and they do not want
government funded abortions, lesbian privileges, or federally funded universal health care”
(Boyer 369) was Phyllis Schlafly, founder of STOP ERA. Schlafly believed that ratification of
the ERA would result in women being drafted into the military, abortion on demand, same-sex
marriage, and loss of legal protections for wives, mothers, and female workers. The STOP ERA
campaign tapped into a growing resentment among traditional religious women that their values
were being threatened, and ERA advocates, who had underestimated Schlafly and the anti-ERA
movement, were admitting by 1976 that they had failed to win over the average homemaker
(Critchlow 140). The grassroots opposition’s movement against the ERA proved to be hugely
important in helping to halt its ratification, and the movement‘s success and growing support
amongst Americans can be attributed to the increasing conservatism of U.S. culture and politics.
While the second wave of the women’s movement was successful in certain respects, the
fierce opposition that arose as a result of America’s conservative shift greatly limited the
movement’s ability to make lasting political, or even ideological changes. Although Roe v. Wade
and the Equal Rights Amendment were viewed as great achievements for the movement in 1972
and 1973, battles are still waged over them to this day, and the ERA remains to be ratified. The
Republican party has been able to use social issues such as abortion to mobilize people
previously uninvolved in government, and abortion has become a defining issue for many
Americans in their voting. While Roe v. Wade ensures a woman’s right to an abortion, states can
restrict it to varying degrees, and many states only cover abortions from rape, incest or life
endangerment under Medicaid. In her 1990 song, “Lost Woman”, Ani DiFranco describes a
woman’s emotions as she makes a difficult choice and has to face a group of protesters: “I passed
their handheld signs/ Went through their picket lines/ They gathered when they saw me coming/
They shouted when they saw me cross/ I said why don't you go home/ Just leave me alone/ I'm
just another woman lost”. She does not outwardly support or oppose abortion, but recognizes
that nobody is perfect and seems to be critical of the emotional trauma that the protesters can
cause: “But that picket line persisted/ And that clinic's since been closed/ They keep pounding
their fists on reality/ Hoping it will break/ You know I don't think there's one of them/ Leads a
life free of mistakes”. In terms of the ERA, the opposition essentially succeeded in halting
ratification- the amendment was not ratified by the needed thirty-eight states before 1982. The
ERA has continued to be proposed in every Congressional session since 1982, but women still
are not equal to men under the law. Currently, a third wave women’s movement is underway, but
it is so factionalized that it is difficult to truly call it a movement. Today’s divisions can be seen
as the work of the opposition- faced with so much backlash, feminists were forced to try to
decide what the most important issue was to them. The fight for women’s equality has been a
constant struggle, burdened by the increasing conservatism of American society and politics.
But, the fight is not over, and ideologies are not irreversible, and so there is reason to hope for
the future.