Anti-Feminist, Pro-Life, and Anti-ERA Women

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ronnee Schreiber
Keyword(s):  
Equal Rights Amendment ◽  
Women's Activism ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
Women's Bodies ◽  
Reproductive Health Care ◽  
Class Differences ◽  
National Organizations ◽  
Conservative Women ◽  
Pro Life ◽  
Pro Choice

For more than a century, women have organized for anti-feminist and conservative causes, including opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) and legal abortion. This chapter outlines anti-feminist women’s activism ranging from their opposition to suffrage, to their support for the Ku Klux Klan, to their formation into contemporary national organizations. It examines the fight over the ERA, with special attention paid to the conservative women who opposed it, the tactics they employed, and how racial and class differences among women factored into support for, or opposition to, the amendment’s passage. Finally, an analysis of pro-life women’s activism provides insights into the strategies they use to counter feminist and pro-choice efforts. Talking as women, about women’s interests, enables pro-life groups and actors to tackle pro-choice advocates who have long argued for attention to women’s bodies and lives in reproductive health-care debates.

After Suffrage Comes Equal Rights?

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tracey Jean Boisseau ◽  
Tracy A. Thomas
Keyword(s):  
Federal Legislation ◽  
Women's Employment ◽  
Equal Rights Amendment ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
Women’S Employment ◽  
Nineteenth Amendment ◽  
Conservative Women ◽  
Politically Active ◽  
Principal Contribution ◽  
Strategic Goal

A politicized culture and century-long debate over women’s nature and role may turn out to be the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA)’s principal contribution to American feminism. Despite perceptions that an equal rights amendment was the next logical step following the Nineteenth Amendment, arguments broke out among feminist activists over whether an equal rights amendment would menace important legal victories, such as protective legislation for women’s employment. Yet even after other federal legislation quieted labor advocates’ concerns, virulent disagreement over an equal rights amendment among politicized women continued for years. Only in the late 1960s did politically active women come to embrace the ERA as a strategic goal. Even then the question of women’s differences from men—whether physical, psychological, or social—did not evaporate. Instead, new battle lines between progressive and newly organized conservative women were drawn in ways that doomed the amendment’s ratification chances.

The Battle over the ERA

Big Sister ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 64-89
Author(s):  
Erin M. Kempker
Keyword(s):  
General Public ◽  
The State ◽  
Equal Rights Amendment ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
The Right ◽  
Conservative Women ◽  
International Women's Year

Chapter 3 zeros in on Indiana to investigate how conservativism infused with one-world conspiracism developed there and affected feminist goals like the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). Feminism was alive and well in the state and existing liberal groups formed a coalition that called itself the ERA Coordinating Committee (later renamed Hoosiers for the Equal Rights Amendment) in the early seventies in order to achieve state ratification of the ERA. Feminists adopted a “low key” approach--a strategy to make feminism palatable to the general public in the state. On the right, conservative women effectively transitioned old anticommunist fears to a new target and in editorials described the ERA as communist directed. State ERA ratification riled and rallied the rightwing and made conservatives all the more determined to stop “the planners” in their next showdown, International Women’s Year.

Building Support for the ERA: A Case of “Too Much, Too Late”

1982 ◽  
Vol 15 (04) ◽  
pp. 572-577
Author(s):  
Janet K. Boles
Keyword(s):  
Political Parties ◽  
Public Support ◽  
Equal Rights Amendment ◽  
National Party ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
Party Platforms ◽  
Broad Base ◽  
Lobbying Effort ◽  
National Organizations

A case can be made that non-ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) is a classic example of “snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.” After all, the ERA had received overwhelming support in both houses of Congress, passing by a vote of 354 to 23 in the House and 84 to 8 in the Senate. Both major political parties had repeatedly supported the ERA in their national party platforms; not until 1980 did one party (the Republican) adopt a stance of neutrality. Every President from Truman to Carter had endorsed the amendment. And, by the end of the campaign for state ratification, more than 450 organizations with a total membership of over 50 million were on record in support of the ERA. While the amendment was before Congress in 1970-72, lobbying for the ERA was heavy and well-organized, and no countervailing forces were ever mobilized in any effective way. In view of this broad base of political and public support for the amendment, and little visible opposition, a reasonable prognosis in 1972 was that it would be ratified by the required 38 states long before the original deadline of March 22, 1979, set by Congress.However, the ratification process was far more complex than either political observers or amendment supporters recognized initially. Although an intensive lobbying effort had been waged to push the amendment through Congress, supporters naively believed that it would be quickly ratified in the absence of pre-existing state groups poised to press for passage and without major allocation of national organizations' resources.

Different versus Equal: The 1920s

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nancy Woloch
Keyword(s):  
Women Workers ◽  
Minimum Wage ◽  
Women's Movement ◽  
Equal Rights Amendment ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
State Laws ◽  
Single Sex ◽  
The Social ◽  
National Woman's Party ◽  
Women's Politics

This chapter revisits Adkins and considers the feud over protective laws that arose in the women's movement in the 1920s. The clash between friends and foes of the Equal Rights Amendment—and over the protective laws for women workers that it would surely invalidate—fueled women's politics in the 1920s. Both sides claimed precedent-setting accomplishments. In 1923, the National Woman's Party proposed the historic ERA, which incurred conflict that lasted for decades. The social feminist contingent—larger and more powerful—gained favor briefly among congressional lawmakers, expanded the number and strength of state laws, saw the minimum wage gain a foothold, and promoted protection through the federal Women's Bureau. Neither faction, however, achieved the advances it sought. Instead, a fight between factions underscored competing contentions about single-sex protective laws and their effect on women workers.

Before Reagan: The Development of Abortion’s Partisan Divide

2019 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 1031-1047
Author(s):  
Neil A. O’Brian
Keyword(s):  
Public Opinion ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Republican Party ◽  
Democratic Party ◽  
Political Mobilization ◽  
Vote Choice ◽  
The Political ◽  
Mass Public ◽  
Pro Life ◽  
Pro Choice

What explains the alignment of antiabortion positions within the Republican party? I explore this development among voters, activists, and elites before 1980. By 1970, antiabortion attitudes among ordinary voters correlated with conservative views on a range of noneconomic issues including civil rights, Vietnam, feminism and, by 1972, with Republican presidential vote choice. These attitudes predated the parties taking divergent abortion positions. I argue that because racial conservatives and military hawks entered the Republican coalition before abortion became politically activated, issue overlap among ordinary voters incentivized Republicans to oppose abortion rights once the issue gained salience. Likewise, because proabortion voters generally supported civil rights, once the GOP adopted a Southern strategy, this predisposed pro-choice groups to align with the Democratic party. A core argument is that preexisting public opinion enabled activist leaders to embed the anti (pro) abortion movement in a web of conservative (liberal) causes. A key finding is that the white evangelical laity’s support for conservative abortion policies preceded the political mobilization of evangelical leaders into the pro-life movement. I contend the pro-life movement’s alignment with conservatism and the Republican party was less contingent on elite bargaining, and more rooted in the mass public, than existing scholarship suggests.

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