Traditional Womanhood Is in a Fight for Its Dependence
Two women for autonomy - and one for submission
On Tuesday when we were all in shock over Supreme Court Justice Alito’s leaked deathblow to Roe v Wade, our daughter asked me if I’d seen Elizabeth Warren’s reaction. “It’s a cellphone video,” she told me. “Someone had to guide her to her car, she was so angry at what the Court conservatives had done.”
I found it online right away. In the video, Warren says with her fist in the air, “I am angry because we have reached the culmination of what Republicans have been fighting for, angling for, for decades now, and we are going to fight back! … The United States Congress can keep Roe v Wade the law of the land and they just need to do it.”
That afternoon in her Politics Chat on Facebook, historian Heather Cox Richardson talked about how abortion became politicized in America.
Midway in the video she says that in 1970 when four students were killed at Kent State, a spokesman for President Richard Nixon called the students “thugs”. With this, Nixon lost his middle-class base, the “Silent Majority” who supported the Vietnam war. What was Nixon to do?
Fellow Republican Pat Buchanan, who hated the New Deal and civil rights legislation, advised Nixon to split the country with “positive polarization”.
“Rile up the country”, Buchanan said. This way Nixon could pick up the Catholic working-class Democrats who were uncomfortable with expanding abortion and other civil rights.
So Nixon announced he personally opposed abortion. Remember, the right to reproductive choice was very popular in America, especially after doctors pointed out the profound public health crisis being caused by illegal abortions in states with laws against abortion.
Nixon said that the women who claimed they had a right to a legal abortion (as a matter between a woman and her doctor), were “feminist” women who were rejecting traditional American society.
In this way Nixon turned a public health crisis into an attack on the feminist women who were demanding equality in the 1970’s. Thus begins the GOP’s political use of abortion to stand in for women’s rights in general.
Enter Phyllis Schlafly.
“What I am defending is the real rights of women," Schlafly said in 1977. "A woman should have the right to be in the home as a wife and mother.”
Schlafly was a lawyer, mother of six, and a Catholic who believed that men’s and women’s roles were complementary, not equal, and should be well defined. She has been called “a social movement entrepreneur [who] mobilized conservatives on the issue [of abortion]. She, thus, contributed to the conservative shift in reproductive politics.”
She said,
News flash: one reason a woman gets married is to be supported by her husband while caring for her children at home. So long as her husband earns a good income, she doesn’t care about the pay gap between them.
Because the reason for a woman’s existence is the creation of family, she said, abortion had no place in this picture.
With anti-abortion rhetoric she lobbied the Republican party away from its pro-Equal Rights Amendment (the ERA was in the 1940 Republican Party platform). In return, Schlafly brought new single-issue voters to the GOP.
I find it uncanny in 2022 that you might hear another of Phyllis Schlafly’s statements at any school board meeting in America. She said,
The United States is the world’s most stunning example of a nation that has peaceably and successfully assimilated people from many disparate cultures. So why are some people trying to separate us into factions, emphasizing what divides us instead of what unites us? (1995)
Pat Buchanan’s brilliant idea for Richard Nixon in 1971 has become the environment we live in today. And some of us know that our environment is in dire need of protection.
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Being so angry, I am at a loss for appropriate words! I can't calm down.
It all boils down to.... democrat's victory at the polls. Now, if every person who showed up to protest would show up to vote and support their local party, we would see a different outcome today. Anger is good if it is use as fuel!