The battle over women's rights

Book review: <i>Divided We Stand</i>

DIVIDED WE STAND

The Battle Over Women’s Rights and Family Values That Polarized American Politics

Marjorie J Spruill 

Bloomsbury

436 pages; $33

Among feminists, Donald Trump’s election has prompted unprecedented soul-searching about What Went Wrong. The revelation that a majority of white women helped put Mr Trump over the top cut especially deep. The initial mystery — how could women vote for that man? — gave way to betrayal: How could they do this to other women? Then, after some Kübler-Ross stages of grief, and a few million pink pussy hats, came the questions: How to harness the euphoric rage of the record-breaking women’s marches? How to make tangible progress, not merely prevent further losses?

To answer these riddles requires understanding how we got here, and Marjorie J Spruill’s Divided We Stand offers a detailed if sometimes dense primer. Ms Spruill, a professor of women’s, Southern and modern American history at the University of South Carolina, convincingly traces today’s schisms to events surrounding the National Women’s Conference, a four-day gathering in Houston in November 1977. At the time, Ms. magazine called the event — a federally funded initiative to identify a national women’s rights agenda — “Four Days That Changed the World.” So why is it that today, as Gloria Steinem recently observed, the conference “may take the prize as the most important event nobody knows about”?

The event drew an estimated 20,000 activists, celebrities and other luminaries for a raucous political-convention-cum-consciousness-raising session. The delegates enacted 26 policy resolutions calling not just for ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment (then just three states shy of the 38 needed) but a wide range of measures including accessible child care, elimination of discriminatory insurance and credit practices, reform of divorce and rape laws, federal funding for abortion and — most controversially — civil rights for lesbians. Those “planks” later were bundled as a National Plan of Action and presented to President Jimmy Carter, amid much fanfare, in a report entitled “The Spirit of Houston.”

The conference had an unintended, equally revolutionary consequence, though: The unleashing of a women-led “family values” coalition that cast feminism not just as erroneous policy but as moral transgression. Led by Phyllis Schlafly, a small but savvy coalition of foot soldiers mobilised against the conference’s aims. These activists found common cause in their deep religiosity and opposition to feminism’s perceived diminishment of “real” womanhood. And although their leadership denied it, the group also had ties to white supremacists. Divided We Stand argues that the potency of these advocates and their successors reshaped not just the nation’s gender politics, but the politics of the Democratic and Republican Parties as well. The Houston conference originated with a 1975 executive order issued by President Ford, charging a National Commission on the Observance of International Women’s Year (IWY Commission) that would, as Ford put it, “infuse the Declaration of Independence with new meaning and promise for women here and around the world.” Later that year, Congress tasked the commission with holding conferences in all 50 states to elect the delegates.

The state conferences that convened in the summer of 1977 proved to be anything but unified, and documenting that turmoil takes up much of Ms Spruill’s attention. Members of the Schlafly coalition — which called itself the IWY Citizens Review Committee, or CRC — doggedly attended each meeting, disrupting the proceedings and attempting to win inclusion among the representatives who would travel to Houston.

The chapters detailing these competing events are the best in Divided We Stand. The feminists’ conference was steeped in symbolism, starting with the lighting of a “torch of freedom” in Seneca Falls, New York — site of the 1848 women’s conference marking the beginning of first-wave feminism — that over the next six weeks was carried to Houston by a relay of runners including icons like Billie Jean King. Speakers included three first ladies — Rosalynn Carter, Betty Ford and Lady Bird Johnson — as well as Coretta Scott King, the Texas representative Barbara Jordan, the anthropologist Margaret Mead, and fiery political newcomers like Ann Richards and Maxine Waters.

In contrast, the family values rally was as much a religious revival as a political event. A sign placed next to the podium said it all: “Women’s Libbers, E.R.A. LESBIANS, REPENT. Read the BIBLE while YOUR [sic] ABLE.” Many of the attendees — who were nearly all white — were men. 

These divergent narratives from 40 years ago offer many lessons to those hoping to maintain the momentum of the January 21 women’s marches. Two of the most salient: Forge unity out of diversity and hold elected officials accountable. Women were vocal participants in the overflow crowds at congressional town halls held during last month’s recess, women-centric media are educating readers about grassroots activism and thousands of women have begun preparing to run for office. But perhaps the most auspicious sign came from the Republican representative Dave Brat of Virginia: He recently complained that “the women are in my grill no matter where I go.”

©2017 The New York Times News Service