Divided We Stand: The Battle Over Women's Rights and Family Values That Polarized American Politics by Marjorie J. Spruill (review)

In November 1977, the Albert Thomas Convention Center in downtown Houston, Texas, was transformed into the grandest experiment in civic engagement conducted by women in U.S. history. For four days, two thousand elected delegates from every U.S. state and territory passed a twenty-five plank National Plan of Action, which was then submitted to President Jimmy Carter. Over twenty thousand additional well-wishers, reporters, and international dignitaries observed the proceedings. Historian Marjorie J. Spruill's Divided We Stand: The Battle Over Women's Rights and Family Values That Polarized American Politics is an outstanding study of the National Women's Conference (NWC). Published to coincide with the conference's fortieth anniversary, Divided We Stand is the first book to fully explore this momentous event. Spruill's treatment of "four days that changed the world" highlights how this description works for not only the NWC but also the oppositional Pro Family Rally that brought around fifteen thousand to Houston that same week. Both gatherings, as Spruill sees it, "constituted a major consciousness-raising session" (p. 13).

Spruill attempts to locate the roots of current partisan polarization in these two coinciding events. She traces the rise of a bipartisan "feminist establishment" in government alongside an antistatist, religiously motivated "'family values'" counterforce (pp. 14, 12). The Houston face-off, Spruill suggests, offered the nation "a glimpse of its political future" (p. 13). But if the NWC became a catalyst for new conservatism, it also revealed deep-seated tensions about family, femininity, and federalism.

Spruill begins her story before 1977, drawing focus "to a chain of events that began in 1961" (p. 15). Early chapters map out the institutional building blocks that Democratic and Republican feminists laid, leading to the establishment of the National Commission on the Observance of International Women's Year (IWY) on January 9, 1975. This story features familiar highlights and players, including Esther Peterson, Kathryn "Kay" Clarenbach, Catherine East, Betty Friedan, Jill Ruckelshaus, and Mildred Marcy. Here, Spruill draws on research conducted in presidential libraries, which explains why she emphasizes political insiders pressuring presidential administrations rather than federal resistance to change and the influence of grassroots organizers.

Spruill takes the opposite approach when turning to conservative women's organizing, a less familiar subject. She meticulously creates a narrative by drawing from a swath of oral interviews, published works, and archival collections. She decenters Phyllis Schlafly, debunking the inaccurate assumption that the pro-family rally was her idea. Rather, we learn that the mastermind was Lottie Beth Hobbs, a Church of Christ leader from Fort Worth, Texas, who founded Women Who Want to Be Women. Spruill introduces a broad web of ardent, savvy advocates, including Rosemary Thomson, Connaught "Connie" Marshner, Dorothy "Dot" Malone Slade, and Kathryn Dunaway, among others. These women are the victors in Spruill's story, successfully harnessing center stage in politics from the Ronald Reagan era forward.

For this reason, Spruill directs her attention to the maelstrom sparked by the passage of Public Law 94-167 (the act establishing the National Commission on the Observance of International Women's Year) rather than the feat of this legislative accomplishment itself. She notes that as the Equal Rights Amendment ratification battle narrowed to a few southern states, "the IWY would be fought in every state and territory and in the space of a few months" (p. 137). After attending the IWY in Mexico City, the Democratic representative from New York, Bella Abzug, shepherded $5 million in appropriations through Congress in 1975 to bring the IWY spirit home. What feminists saw as a crowning achievement heralding women's rights as human rights, IWY challengers deemed an egregious abuse of tax dollars for social engineering.

Much of Spruill's study is a play-by-play of "Armageddon...