The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment, part 8 of 8
In the ideology of American antifeminism, it is almost impossible to separate the distrust of men from the hatred of feminists
Women have always worked. The census of 1890 showed about 25% of adult women working. The poor have no choice, they must work. While the political system can do much to help them, their ability to participate in the political system has been limited by the limits on their civil rights: the right to vote, to assemble, to protest, to promote their own concerns.
In the 1970s the Equal Rights Amendment aimed to grant women full rights, automatically including whatever rights were granted to men. The opposition to the ERA was lead by wealthy women who felt that if the sexes were equal, then they would lose their right to be supported by their husbands -- a right which has existed as a custom among the middle and upper classes but which had never existed among the poor.
"If we want things to remain the same then everything is going to have to change." (Lampedusa)
A strain of progressive thought aims at the conservative goal of trying to maintain what good things now exist. This is what John Kenneth Galbraith meant when he said, in the introduction of his book The Affluent Society, "I am a conservative, that is, I aim to conserve things, and therefore, by some quirk of the language, I am called a Liberal."
He speaks of an intelligent and adaptive kind of conservatism that thinks carefully about what would need to change to rescue the best aspects of what currently exists.
By contrast, it is worth considering how ineffective and stupid reactionary politics are. Perhaps because the wealthy have won the war of social status, yet knowing the war contains much ugliness, they do not want to speak honestly about how they won. Or perhaps those who grow up in such favored circumstances never have a moment to think honestly about why they live at such elevated heights.
In her book, Barbara Ehrenreich makes the point that the campaign against the ERA seems to have been motivated by a great distrust of men, but they anti-feminists didn't feel comfortable making men the villains of their story, so they put the blame on feminism instead. Despite making arguments that suggested that men were irresponsible, stupid, short-sighted, immature, hungry for sex but incapable of commitments, the anti-feminists concluded that the real problem were the women who were asking that women be granted the same civil rights as had been accorded to men.
The anti-feminists were successful in defeating the ERA, but everything else they'd been afraid of came true: the divorce rate went up, the marriage rate went down, more children were born out of wedlock, and two income families became common as it became normal for women to go out and work.
One lesson to take from this is that reactionary politics are either uniquely ineffective, and unable to stop change, or, another possible way to read this history, the goal was always to inflict as much misery as possible on women.
The Hearts of Men
American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment
By Barbara Ehrenreich
Copyright © 1983
Page 145-147
[A conservative conference to fight against the Equal Rights Amendment.]
Most of the celebrants at this event were, in fact, women. Many were middle-aged and middle class, and seemed slightly out of place in floor-length pastel gowns that looked as though they had done prior service in decades of Rotary Club balls; others had the confident look of Sun Belt wealth, their hair frosted, skins tanned. Most of them had been foot soldiers in the campaign against the ERA, and had well-rehearsed reasons for their opposition.
“Women have all the freedom they need already,” said Lillian Smitherman from Winston-Salem, North Carolina, referring all further questions to her husband.
“It would have desexed society,” a stylish thirty-four-year-old from Baltimore told me, “There would be unisex rest rooms.”
Another woman, who had flown to the even from Lake Oswego, Oregon, feared that sexual equality would legitimate “homosexual marriages,” and that the homosexuals, thus encouraged, would start reproducing.
A retired general averred that the ERA would require women to be drafted into combat duty.
Several women said they feared “the destruction of the family” and one tired-looking woman from Boston believed the ERA would lead to a state of unisex anarchy in which “the differences between the sexes would be abolished by law.”
Of all the fanciful arguments used against the ERA in the ten-year campaign for its passage, the most compelling one, and the one that probably did more than any other to mobilize the female opposition, was economic: that equality would take away “the rights women already have,” that is, the “right to be a housewife.” When organized opposition to the ERA surfaced at the beginning of 1973, it was with the stated concern that the ERA would “abrogate the laws that require men to support their families.” And, apart from the lurid possibility of encountering men over mixed-sex urinals, it was this threat that inspired the thousands of women who showed up at state capitols throughout the country to lobby against the ERA and for “the preservation of the family.” A pamphlet from the anti-ERA League of Housewives, an offshoot of the multi-issue antifeminist group which called itself, cheerfully, “Happiness of Womanhood,” asserted that it is
...the right of a woman to be a full-time wife and mother, and to have this right recognized by laws that obligate her husband to provide the primary financial support and a home for her and their children, both during their marriage and when she is a widow.
Mrs. Jacquie Davison, the founder of Happiness of Womanhood, was proud to state that her own husband provided not only for her personal needs, but also - evidently without legal compulsion - for her organizational expenses.
The fact that there are no laws requiring husbands to buy life-insurance policies did not weaken the anti-ERA forces’ insistence on women’s “right” to lifelong support. Nor did the fact, only slightly less accessible to the casual student of the law, that those state laws that do name the husband as primary provider have never been enforced to win a larger share of a husband’s wage for any resident wife. The “rights” and “privileges” that the antifeminists believe are accorded to women by marriage are, at best, private arrangements reinforced by convention; at worst, comforting fantasies. In neither case are they threatened by legal injunctions against sex discrimination. What was a stake in the battle over the ERA was the legitimacy of women’s claim on men’s incomes, and for this there was reason enough to fear - and to judge from the intensity of the opposition, fear enough to abandon reason.
If she read the antifeminist literature available to her, the average woman who lobbied against the ERA with offerings of home-baked bread or future votes was remarkably well-informed about at least one sociological datum, the divorce rate. If, in addition, she did some thinking about her own chances of making a living as a self-supporting wage earner (and she would have to do this thinking on her own because the antifeminist literature is studiously silent about women’s collective disadvantage as wage earners), she would have formed a terrifying sense of her own vulnerability. The slightest outward ripple from the sexual revolution or the human potential movement could be enough to dislodge a husband from his marriage and catapult his ex-wife into sudden, midlife downward mobility.
Faced with such a possibility, a woman could, quite sensibly, decide that the feminist promise of eventual economic equality was so much pie in the sky. Better, perhaps, to check the forces that allow men to think they have no natural obligation to support women, and one of these, clearly, was feminism itself.
In the ideology of American antifeminism, it is almost impossible to separate the distrust of men from the hatred of feminists, or to determine with certainty which is the prior impulse. There is a clear recognition that “men have rebelled,” as anti-ERA leader Kathleen Teague puts it, and sometimes an acknowledgment that their rebellion has inspiration sources other than feminism.
“The man is not responsible anymore,” observes Onalee McGraw, who is credited by the Conservative Digest with being a national pro-family leader. “It’s the whole me-decade thing...humanistic psychology,” she explained in an early 1982 interview, “and men are taking advantage of the situation.”
To antifeminists who focus on the issue of abortion, it is the possibility of sex without babies that has undermined male responsibility. After all, if pregnancy is “a woman’s choice,” as feminists insist, what’s to prevent men from thinking that it’s also a woman’s responsibility? In a 1980 speech offered “in defense of the Christian family,” anti-abortion leader Mrs. Randy Engel presented the view that, “men desire sex without responsibility. They become unmanly and frightened by the thought of having to assume economic responsibility for a family: They instinctively try to escape.”
But the antifeminist analysis of male irresponsibility stops short of questioning the structural insecurity of marriage. Distrust of men takes the socially more acceptable form of resentment directed at the would-be independent women, who, in her selfishness, would undermine other women’s fragile privileges.