Revolutionizing Expectations: Women’s Organizations, Feminism, and American Politics, 1965–1980 by Melissa Estes Blair (review)

The 1960s and 1970s were transformative years for American women. While historians have largely dispensed with the “second wave” as a framework for women’s activism in those years, there is still important work to do in taking stock of what happened, understanding why it mattered, and piecing together a usable past from its particulars. In Revolutionizing Expectations: Women’s Organizations, Feminism, and American Politics, 1965–1980, Melissa Estes Blair adds welcome texture to these efforts. With great attention to detail, Blair excavates the “‘pre-feminist’ work” of women’s organizations that shaped the prospects for more explicit feminist activism in local communities (p. 44).

In five thematic and roughly chronological chapters, Blair examines the Durham, Indianapolis, and Denver branches of the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA) and the League of Women Voters (LWV) between 1965 and 1980. Her analysis of these overlooked pockets of women’s civic engagement reveals how feminist ideas could take unexpected paths to expression. These women “fold[ed] feminist work into a broad liberal agenda” that included school desegregation, environmentalism, antipoverty work, and more (p. 5). Revolutionizing Expectations provides new insights about grassroots politics in these years, as activists “mediated between the women’s movement and local conditions” (p. 39). In conservative contexts such as Durham, North Carolina, where explicitly feminist groups struggled to coalesce, YWCA and LWV women applied feminist ideas to the problems in their communities. In Indianapolis, women’s groups built an unlikely coalition that won an even more unlikely Equal Rights Amendment victory in their state. Denver’s relatively welcoming social and legal climate proved a double-edged sword for women’s activists. Embedded as they were in local government, feminists had no outside group to sustain their activism once conservative ideas and officials started to gain momentum. By burrowing down to the grass roots in each of these case studies, Blair gives readers a good sense of feminism’s local flavor.

The book’s final chapter, which details conservative women’s challenges to their more moderate sisters’ political dominion, offers a substantial scholarly contribution. As Blair explains, liberal women’s authority was grounded in their alleged nonpartisan expertise. But the conservative women who gained new prominence in the late 1970s collapsed the conceptual and political space that had sustained previous liberal feminist engagement. Conservative women publicly challenged their liberal counterparts, adopting highly gendered and even “emotional” approaches to women’s issues that framed liberal politics as an assault on imperiled domestic traditions (p. 129). This tension “gave the lie once and for all to the notion that all women felt the same way about issues” (p. 6). It also pulled liberal women’s groups’ political platform out from under them. By 1980, women’s politics had become partisan politics.

Blair joins a cohort of historians who have sought to tell truer stories about women’s activism in these years by looking to the grass roots. Their work has yielded important insights, but this approach has its limits. Blair writes that she “tell[s] a national story” by “studying cities in different parts of the country and finding similar experiences in each” (p. 4). But had she chosen three other “medium-sized cities” with equally deep archives, the rich details that drive her narrative could have been the building blocks of a much different story (p. 4). Greater attention to the national YWCA and LWV and their relationships to the various chapters could also have broadened the book’s explanatory potential. Perhaps we might move toward new synthesis, placing the knowledge gleaned by local studies such as Blair’s alongside more national developments in our efforts to capture the spectrum of women’s politics in such vital but contested years—no matter our label for them.