Suspect Citizens: Women, Virtue, and Vice in Backlash Politics

Introduction: Moral Guardians but Suspect Citizens: Women, Virtue, and Vice in the Western Political Imaginary

F ive thousand women formed the Jeannette Rankin Brigade Protest on January 15, 1968, when they descended on Washington, D.C., to petition Congress to end the Vietnam War. Protest organizers encouraged participants to use as leverage their traditional roles as mothers and wives to gain a sympathetic hearing from legislators. The New York Radical Feminists (NYRF) rejected this conventional strategy and, carrying picket signs in gloved hands, marched amid thousands to stage a protest within a protest.1 This small band of thirty women dressed all in black walked behind a huge blow-up doll wearing a blank face, blonde curls, and feminine garb. The doll floated above a coffin draped with the trappings of womanhood—curlers, garters, hairspray cans, and S&H Green Stamps. A funeral dirge lamenting women’s traditional roles played in the background. Streamers waved in the air proclaiming , “don’t cry! resist!” and “traditional womanhood is dead!” Dramatizing this point further, the NYRF held a mock burial for Traditional Womanhood later that night at Arlington Cemetery. These events mark how second wave feminism came to identify and challenge Traditional Womanhood as a cultural icon of femininity and morality that obstructs women’s access to equal rights and liberation. Introduction Moral Guardians but Suspect Citizens: Women, Virtue, and Vice in the Western Political Imaginary 2 | Introduction Traditional Womanhood also points to a paradox in the ideological construction of American women’s relationship to the political sphere. Kathie Sarachild (formerly Kathie Amatniek) conveys this paradox in her “Funeral Oration for the Burial of Traditional Womanhood,” which she delivered to the five hundred women who gathered for the mock burial at Arlington Cemetery following the Jeanette Rankin Brigade Protest. Her oration urges women to abandon their traditional sex roles as wives and mothers. Any power derived from these roles, Sarachild declares, “is only a substitute for power. . . . [T]hat it really amounts to nothing politically, is the reason why all of us attending this funeral must bury traditional womanhood tonight” right alongside icons of traditional manhood at the national monument to war.2 This absence of real political power derives from the female submissiveness required of Traditional Womanhood. Despite this politically disempowering sex role, women, however, remain integral to the nation’s political future. Sarachild indicates this incongruity by linking “the woman problem” to other problems confronting American democracy such as the Vietnam War, stating that, “we cannot hope to move toward a better world or even a truly democratic society at home until we begin to solve our own problems.”3 The paradox, then, is that women play a critical part in determining American democracy’s fate, while at the same time, they lack the political power to participate fully in the processes that actually chart the nation’s course. Understanding this paradox and its political implications for women involves unpacking how gendered traits such as female submissiveness animate symbols of women’s political role. Traditional Womanhood’s virtues, such as piety, chastity, and modesty, and vices, such as promiscuity and infidelity, become essential factors in charting the moral dynamics that shape American women’s citizenship. Virtue and vice, as their omission from Sarachild’s oration suggests, however, generally remain marginal to studies of women’s political identity. This book moves virtue and vice to the center of analysis in order to spotlight how morality frames women’s paradoxical relationship to political power. Female virtue, in particular, facilitates the mobilization of backlash politics against women’s progress toward equality and freedom.4 Second wave feminism’s challenge to Traditional Womanhood struck such a deep moral chord within the American polity that nearly three decades Introduction | 3 of backlash politics have ensued. The Right and family values advocates use female virtue as a tool to attempt to preserve the family and women ’s traditional role in it. The New Right formed in response to congressional approval of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) in 1972 and the United States Supreme Court’s legalization of abortion in Roe v. Wade in 1973. The New Right joined ranks behind leaders such as Reverend Jerry Falwell, who formed the Moral Majority, and Phyllis Schlafly, who organized the Eagle Forum. The ERA and abortion rights represented the force of the 1960s Sexual Revolution, a historical marker used by religious and social conservatives to reference a decline in morality, the rise of social problems, and the general decay of the American way of...