Schlafly vs Steinem Social Conservatism against the Feminist Movement

1
Brown v. Board of Education (1954) was the big court case in the post-war era: it changed the dynamic of schools from one of racial segregation to integration. As Klarman (2007) notes, integration was going to happen naturally on its own, as the war had led to more accepting attitudes between the races. However, the Court decision created some uproar and pushed the issue. This created tension and the Civil Rights Movement ran into issues in the South, where opposition in places like Birmingham led to Martin Luther King’s imprisonment. His impassioned letter from a Birmingham jail helped to win more support for the Civil Rights Movement.
In 1964 the Civil Rights Act was passed and it was meant to end the dispute once and for all; however, Malcolm X would be assassinated the following year and Martin Luther King would be assassinated four years later. Along with the assassinations of the Kennedy brothers, these two would cap off a turbulent decade that left a lot of issues unresolved and the nation reeling from war in Vietnam. The rise of the Black Panthers as a militant black power group preceded the current movements of Black Lives Matter and Antifa. Race relations today are not black and white, as not all black people support Black Lives Matter, and many are moving to support the Trump presidency, suggesting that race relations are more complex today than they were a half century ago. The Civil Rights Movement set out to achieve equality among the races; yet, the criminal justice system is still affected by systematic racism, as pointed out by Angela Davis (2012) and others. The for-profit prison industrial complex creates a conflict of interest in the justice system and in policing, and all this is evidence that the goals of the Civil Rights Movement were reached in lip service only.
References
Davis, A. (2012). The Meaning of Freedom. San Francisco, CA: City Light Books.
Klarman, M. (2007). Brown v Board of Education and the Civil Rights Moment. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
2
During the 1960s, the United States had become anything but a more open, more tolerant – in a word, freer – country. President Kennedy was assassinated in 1963 after taking the world to the brink of nuclear war with the Soviet Union. President Johnson accelerated the war in Vietnam, which prompted anger among many who did not see the point of fighting a losing battle in Asia. Robert Kennedy was assassinated in 1968 while running for president. President Nixon would end up resigning in the early 1970s for the Watergate scandal. Both MLK and Malcolm X were assassinated in the 1960s. The decade was turbulent, vicious, and revolutionary. Although the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed, thus supposedly ensuring equal rights among the races in the US, the reality was that tension continued.
The draft was ongoing and this angered young people who saw the US exploiting them and their youth for some unexplainable reason. Young people did not consider themselves free at all. The Cold War was raging and this led to paranoia about Communists in the US government. Tolerance is not a word that would accurately describe the 1960s, unless one is talking about the Hippie Movement that took place at the end of the decade. This was largely a drug-fueled counter-culture movement. It was not really a political movement or one that resulted in a more open and tolerant and freer society. Many people despise the Hippie Movement. In short, the 1960s was a contentious decade, full of murder and assassination, war, anger, resentment, and revolution. The Feminist Movement also got going under Betty Friedan (1963) who wrote the Feminine Mystique, which advocated for women to leave the house and get involved in the workplace. This too met with a lot of pushback. The decade was simply one of social and political upheaval. Walls everywhere were coming down—so perhaps in that sense it could be argued that it was becoming a more “open” society—but a lot of people were not happy about all this change, and it shows in what took place in the 1970s.
References
Friedan, B. (1963). The Feminine Mystique. NY: W. W. Norton.
3
The debate over the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) focused getting equal rights for men and women. Women felt they were being discriminated against in the workplace. The ERA was meant to end gender discrimination. Gloria Steinem, founder of Ms. Magazine argued in favor of the ERA in front of Congress in the 1970s. She was a leading Feminist throughout the 1970s.
On the opposing side was Phyllis Schlafly, who advocated for traditional roles for women. Schlafly argued that the ERA would actually make it worse for women because it would strip them of protective laws that kept them from being eligible for the draft; it would deny them protection against sexual assault and alimony (US History, 2020). Schlafley argued that women would no longer be able to receive alimony because the ERA would see this as gender discrimination.
Schlafly defined freedom for women in terms of traditional norms and protective laws. Steinem defined freedom for women in terms of liberation—social, political, economic, sexual. Both sides went to extremes to frame the issues when what it was really about was banning gender discrimination in the workplace. However, what the debate showed was that push-back against the Feminist Movement was gaining by the 1970s, and social conservatism under Schlafly and then President Reagan would come to dominate the next decade. The country would not shift back over to progressivism until the 1990s under President Clinton when the first wave of political correctness would get going. The push and pull between political correctness (in which gender equity as defined by the Feminist Movement is situated) and traditional conservative family values got going with the ERA and the Steinem/Schlafly debates in the 1970s.
References
US History. (2020). The Equal Rights Amendment. Retrieved from https://www.ushistory.org/us/57c.asp