The Not-So-New Southern Sexism

2019 ◽  
pp. 131-157
Author(s):  
Angie Maxwell ◽  
Todd Shields
Keyword(s):  
White Women ◽  
Working Women ◽  
White Men ◽  
Equal Rights Amendment ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
Traditional Gender Roles ◽  
White Voters ◽  
Second Wave Feminism ◽  
Second Wave ◽  
White Womanhood

The stereotype of southern white womanhood is anything but new, and manipulating it for political gain became a critical part of the Long Southern Strategy. The stereotype strips women of their power, intelligence, and strength, casting them as delicate and in need of constant protection. Antebellum southern white men manufactured that vulnerability to justify the strict laws segregating the races that would protect white women from predatory black men. This notion of southern white womanhood clashed with Second-Wave Feminism and the ultimately failed effort to secure an Equal Rights Amendment. The feminist loss, however, was a major GOP gain, as the Republican establishment realized that traditional gender roles could be the next way to appeal to southern white voters. In due course, the GOP’s messaging tapped into and perpetuated a Modern Sexism, characterized by a distrust of ambitious women, a demonization of feminism, and a growing resentment toward working women.

The Myth of the Gender Gap

2019 ◽  
pp. 189-218
Author(s):  
Angie Maxwell ◽  
Todd Shields
Keyword(s):  
Gender Gap ◽  
Republican Party ◽  
White Women ◽  
White Men ◽  
White Identity ◽  
Equal Rights Amendment ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
White American ◽  
Traditional Gender Roles ◽  
White American Women

Taking their cue from anti-feminist leader Phyllis Schlafly, the GOP celebrated traditional gender roles and demonized feminism as part of a Long Southern Strategy. The Republican Party dropped the Equal Rights Amendment from its platform in 1980, which many feminists believed would cost the party women voters. When the gender gap emerged during the next election cycle with more women than men voting for Democrats, a myth took hold. However, the gender gap is not universal because anti-feminism and Modern Sexism remain deeply burrowed into southern white identity where they have been reinforced religiously and politicized continually by the GOP. When geography and identity are brought to bear on the myth of the gender gap, it looks remarkably different. Where it does not disappear completely, it is reversed, with southern white women proving more conservative than southern white men and dramatically more so than white American women as a whole.

Southern White Patriarchy

2019 ◽  
pp. 158-188
Author(s):  
Angie Maxwell ◽  
Todd Shields
Keyword(s):  
White Masculinity ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
White Southerners ◽  
Patriarchal System ◽  
Traditional Gender Roles ◽  
Evangelical Churches ◽  
White Voters ◽  
Second Wave Feminism ◽  
Second Wave ◽  
White Womanhood

The pedestal upon which southern white womanhood stands is buttressed by an equally sacred southern white masculinity characterized by a distorted notion of honor, a penchant for violence, and male righteousness and superiority. Thus, Second-Wave Feminism spurred not only a defiant anti-feminism with which many white southern men and women identified, but also a men’s rights campaign that portrayed men as victims of reverse discrimination and promoted a dominant and defensive masculinity that was very familiar to southern white audiences. This misogyny, along with a religious assertion of manhood that was popular in southern evangelical churches, provided Republicans with an opportunity to build their partisan brand among white southerners. Often masked by romanticized notions of chivalry, southern white masculinity depends upon a patriarchal system and the traditional gender roles inherent in that system. The GOP would appeal to both as it chased southern white voters throughout the Long Southern Strategy.

Organized Labor, National Politics, and Second-Wave Feminism in the United States, 1965–1975

1996 ◽  
Vol 49 ◽  
pp. 143-165 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dennis A. Deslippe
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Labor History ◽  
Working Women ◽  
The United States ◽  
Organized Labor ◽  
Equal Rights Amendment ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
National Politics ◽  
Second Wave Feminism ◽  
Second Wave

Second-wave feminism, scholars argued until recently, was a product of middle-class educated women who rejected inequality masquerading as domestic tranquility in the postwar United States. Women unionists were either invisible in these accounts or dismissed as unimportant to the development of feminism's objectives and strategies. Recent labor history research has called this portrayal of working women into question. Whether considering a single union or broad national patterns of political change, several historians have pointed to unionists' contributions to campaigns for equality. These came in the areas of pay and job discrimination as well as in the effort to pass the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA).

No One Home to Answer the Phone

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lily Geismer
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Equal Rights Amendment ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
Liberal Politics ◽  
Trade Offs ◽  
Economic Climate ◽  
Second Wave Feminism ◽  
Women's Equality ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Second Wave

This chapter looks at the growth of suburban feminism as a means to consider the persistence of certain elements of suburban liberal activism and ideology in a changed political and economic climate. The increasing wedding of feminism with suburban politics had key trade-offs for the larger cause of women's equality. The sensibility and organizing strategies of suburban liberal politics were both crucial to the success of several campaigns, especially the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). The pivot also helped the movement further earn the notice and attention of politicians eager to win suburban votes. Yet the relationship hardened the middle-class orientation of second-wave feminism and elevated class-blind and consumerist ideas of choice.

scholarly journals “Il en faut un peu”: Farm Women and Feminism in Québec and France Since 1945

2006 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 73-96
Author(s):  
Gail Cuthbert Brandt ◽  
Naomi Black
Keyword(s):  
Rural Women ◽  
Political Action ◽  
Demographic Characteristics ◽  
Farm Women ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
The Social ◽  
Second Wave Feminism ◽  
Public Debates ◽  
History Of ◽  
Second Wave

Abstract Certain farm women's organizations continue to represent the social feminist tradition of Canadian suffragism and the broader social Catholic feminism still influential elsewhere. Canadian historians have often criticized such groups in contrast with a more aggressive, equal-rights feminism found among urban and rural women in both waves of feminism. We argue that, far from being conservative, groups identified as social feminist serve to integrate farm women into public debates and political action, including feminism. We outline the history of the Cercles de fermières of Québec, founded in 1915, and the French Groupements de vulgarisation-développement agricoles féminins, founded since 1959. A comparison of members with nonmembers in each country and across the group, based on survey data collected in 1989 for 389 cases, suggests that club involvement has counteracted demographic characteristics expected to produce antifeminism. In general, we find less hostility to second-wave feminism than might be expected. Relying mainly on responses to open-ended questions, we argue that, for our subjects, feminism is tempered by distaste for confrontation. Issues supported by the movement for women's liberation are favoured by farm women, but the liberationist style and tactics are eschewed. Those of our respondents identified as feminists express preference for a complementarity modelled on the idealized family.

“America’s Gunpowder Women”

2019 ◽  
Vol 88 (2) ◽  
pp. 175-207
Author(s):  
Chris Suh
Keyword(s):  
White Women ◽  
Equal Rights Amendment ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
White American ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
White Middle Class ◽  
National Woman's Party ◽  
Gender Based ◽  
White American Women ◽  
Feminist Movements

This article uncovers the little-known story of how the novelist Pearl S. Buck used her authority as a popular expert on China to pose a direct challenge to her white middle-class American readers in the post-suffrage era. Through provocative comparisons between Chinese and white American women, Buck alleged that educated white women had failed to live up to their potential, and she demanded that they earn social equality by advancing into male-dominated professions outside the home. Although many of her readers disagreed, the novelist’s challenge was welcomed by the National Woman’s Party (NWP), which sought to abolish all gender-based discrimination and preferential treatment through the introduction of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). This story revises our understanding of the post-suffrage era by showing the vibrancy of feminist debates in the final years of the Great Depression, and it provides a new way into seeing how racialized thinking shaped American conceptions of women’s progress between first- and second-wave feminist movements.

Attitudes of Southern Women: Selected Group Comparisons

1976 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 160-171 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christina G. Blanchard ◽  
Judith V. Becker ◽  
Ann R. Bristow
Keyword(s):  
White Women ◽  
Social Orientation ◽  
Behavior Patterns ◽  
Equal Rights Amendment ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
Southern Women ◽  
Southern City ◽  
And Behavior ◽  
Attitudes And Behavior ◽  
Stated Purpose

Questionnaire data from 100 white women in a Southern city were examined to learn whether women belonging to groups that focus on social change or business and professional concerns were less traditional in their attitudes and behavior patterns than women who affiliate with groups that share common religious beliefs or similar socioeconomic status and whose stated purpose has a social orientation. Women belonging to the first category of groups were more likely than the other women to combine employment with marriage and children, to have help from husbands with household duties, and to support the Equal Rights Amendment.

Women’s Movements in 1968 and beyond

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne M. Valk
Keyword(s):  
Women's Movements ◽  
Third Wave ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
Feminist Activism ◽  
Feminist Organizations ◽  
National Organization For Women ◽  
Second Wave Feminism ◽  
Cultural Feminism ◽  
Feminist Organizing ◽  
Second Wave

This chapter discusses the formation and achievements of feminist organizations in the late 1960s and beyond, including the National Organization for Women and emerging local women’s liberation organizations. It focuses particularly on the ideological and political intersections that link second-wave feminism to other activist causes. It highlights the importance of coalitions and alliances and looks at the raft of ideological stances that separated distinct strands of feminism and separated feminist organizing from other causes. Focusing on specific issues in feminist activism, including campaigns against sexual violence, the movement for abortion rights, and the struggle for the Equal Rights Amendment, the chapter examines the distinctions activists made between liberal, radical and cultural feminism, and charts the intellectual shifts from second-wave to third-wave feminism.

FROM EMMETT TILL TO TRAYVON MARTIN

2018 ◽  
Vol 15 (02) ◽  
pp. 257-294
Author(s):  
Angela Onwuachi-Willig
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Black Men ◽  
Social Order ◽  
White Women ◽  
White Male ◽  
White Men ◽  
White Female ◽  
White Womanhood ◽  
The Way ◽  
Trayvon Martin

AbstractOn February 26, 2012, George Zimmerman, a man of White American and Peruvian descent, shot and killed Trayvon Martin, a Black teenager who was walking back to the home where he was a guest in Sanford, Florida. For many, Trayvon Martin is this generation’s Emmett Till, the fourteen-year-old Black boy who was lynched in Mississippi in 1955 for whistling in a White woman’s presence. In fact, several scholars have highlighted similarities between the Till and Martin tragedies. One unexplored commonality is the manner in which defense counsel in both the Till and Martin trials used the trope of protecting White womanhood to get the jurors to psychologically identify and empathize with the defendants. Employing Multidimensional Masculinities Theory, this essay seeks to expose the role that the protection of White womanhood (and thus the preservation of White manhood) played in the killings of Till and Martin and in each of their killers’ defense strategies at trial. It does so by offering a history of lynching; explaining how White men demonstrated their ownership of White women and their dominance over Blacks by using violence against Black men who threatened the social order; and revealing how the defense attorneys in both the Till and Martin cases manipulated and employed the narrative of the White male protector of White women to facilitate acquittals for their clients. In so doing, it analyzes the transcript from the Till trial, a transcript previously believed to be lost forever until the FBI discovered the transcript upon its re-opening and investigation of the Till murder and released the transcript in 2006. Finally, utilizing excerpts from the trial transcript in the Martin case, this essay reveals how the trope of protecting White womanhood shaped the outcome in the Martin case, even though the stock narrative of needing White female protection from purportedly dangerous Black men was not at all related to the claims about Martin or charges against Zimmerman. In so doing, this essay reveals (1) how White womanhood has been abstracted to encompass not only a specific woman in an incident and to include not only a “man’s” home, but also to include broader spaces like gated communities, and (2) how that reality, coupled with the way that civil rights laws have made it harder for White men to bully Black men and the way that feminism has made it harder to subordinate women, has produced a new masculine anxiety for White men.

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