Women at War: Feminists and Antifeminist Christians in the 1970s

Born in 1967 into a Church of Christ family in Kansas, I would not hear the word feminism or the names of Betty Friedan or Gloria Steinem until college. But I knew that God hated “women’s libbers,” because they were ugly, hated kids, wanted to destroy my family, and thought my mom was a loser. My dad also assured us—my mom, two brothers, and me—that women’s libbers would rudely cut in front of you in line.

My mom, a mother of three without a college degree, was a housewife in the 1970s. I don’t know whether she had heard of feminism, Friedan, or Steinem. But she could not have known that “Battling Bella”—the flamboyantly feminist Congresswoman Bella Abzug—helped to pass more equitable divorce policies that would, by the 1980s, apply to her. Nor could she have anticipated that the term “displaced homemaker,” coined by feminist Tanya Melich in 1974, would describe her by the end of the decade. (p. 122)

And I did not know this: my blue-collar, fundamentalist Christian family occupied ground zero in the war over sex roles, work, and family that would define two antagonistic women’s movements and dramatically realign relations between Democrats and Republicans.

This history that I lived through in nearly complete ignorance is the subject of two fascinating new books that, together, show how mainstream women’s rights activists embraced family values but nevertheless became identified as the family’s number-one enemies. The story involves idealists and cynics, as well as celebrity activists, politicized homemakers, prominent politicians, first ladies, and even U.S. presidents. In the end, it shows us yet another phase of a repeating modern narrative: expectations that women would unite aggravated differences between them, incited attacks among and between them, and invited sensationalist media coverage as well as cynical exploitation by politicians who transformed disagreements among women into polarizing wedge issues.

Professors of History Kristen Swinth and Marjorie Spruill approach their subjects with different questions. Swinth asks: Why are feminists blamed for “today’s superwoman dilemma” (p. 2)? In other words, when women struggle to “have it all” with regard to career and family, but fail or feel dissatisfied with the result, why is feminism held accountable? By contrast, Marjorie Spruill aims to explain why, given that Republicans and Democrats both supported the modern women’s rights movement in 1970, “by 1980, the GOP had sided with the…women’s movement…that positioned family values in opposition to women’s rights” (p. 2). The answers to both of these questions involve the “new postindustrial order” that made “wage work increasingly insecure and a ‘family wage’ for men increasingly rare” (Swinth, p. 4). Spruill describes the women’s rights movement as “more a result than a cause” of these changes, while Swinth credits feminists with offering “the first viable alternative to the dominant gender and family arrangement” (Spruill, pp. 71–2; Swinth, pp. 5, 10). Feminism provided a solution to the demise of the male breadwinner. But both authors are less interested in investigating this than in exploring the tangled relationships between women’s rights and families’ “needs.”

In Feminism’s Forgotten Fight, Swinth emphasizes that mainstream feminists did not simply adopt a male model of liberation—one that would free women of domestic responsibilities and the “having-it-all” juggling act that men escaped (p. 24). Swinth shows that from the first, feminists addressed “the very issues of work and family” that they have since been blamed for ignoring. (p. 2) She does so by bringing together a number of activist strands often treated separately by scholars, including activism around welfare rights, housework, childcare, and maternity. In the process, Swinth writes a history...