Throughout U.S. history, there has been an undercurrent of opposition to any measures that might advance gender equality. As early as the 1790s, Mary Wollstonecraft's famous treatise, Vindication of the Rights of Women, was met with a hailstorm of criticism for suggesting that women had a rightful place outside the home. Similarly, Francis Wright, a renowned lecturer who advocated for equal education and enhanced legal rights for women in the 1820s, was denounced as a proponent of atheism and free love. Only during periods of sustained agitation in support of expanded rights for women, however, has antiwomen's rights sentiment crystallized into organized antifeminist politics. Thus, the two major waves of antifeminist activity coincide with the two waves of the women's rights movement: the campaign to secure female suffrage in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the feminist movement of the late twentieth century. In both periods, those holding a traditional view of women's place in the home and family tried to advance their cause by joining with other conservative groups to forestall efforts to extend women's rights.
A campaign of opposition began almost as soon as the doors closed on the first national women's rights convention in 1848. Calls for marital equality and improved educational opportunities, better working conditions, and additional legal rights for women were met with a flurry of publications, sermons, and lectures denouncing such demands as a repudiation of women's natural place as domestic caretakers and submissive wives. By the 1870s, as the battle for the vote became a center-piece of women's rights agitation, those opposed to extending the franchise to women also became organized and public. Often headed by the wives of socially prominent politicians and business leaders, committees against female suffrage worked actively to block state and municipal suffrage efforts by testifying at legislative hearings, distributing pamphlets, and deluging newspapers with letters expressing opposition to women's right to vote.
In 1911 state antisuffrage associations formed the National Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage (NAOWS). At its height in the years 1911 to 1916, the NAOWS claimed a membership of 350,000 devoted to home and national defense against women's suffrage, feminism, and socialism. Antisuffragists maintained that extending the vote to women would reduce the special protections and routes of influence available to women, destroy the family, and increase the number of socialist-leaning voters. These sentiments dovetailed with the fears of many Southern whites that female suffrage would undermine the Jim Crow restrictions that had effectively disenfranchised African American voters in the South and the apprehension of industrial and business leaders, especially brewers, that women would vote in favor of social and political reform and for prohibiting the sale of liquor.
With the passage of the Woman's Suffrage Amendment in 1920, women's rights agitation, and thus antifeminist counteractivity, sharply declined. Nearly fifty years later, antifeminist organizers resurfaced, as a new wave of feminism began to challenge the second-class status of women in law, education, politics, family, and the work force. Antifeminists in this period primarily organized in opposition to two feminist demands: passage of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to the U.S. Constitution, and the legalization of abortion.
The major vehicle through which antifeminists organized to oppose passage of the ERA was STOP-ERA, a nationwide group headed by longtime conservative leader Phyllis Schlafly. The organized effort to defeat the ERA bore many similarities to the fight against women's vote earlier in the century. Like the antisuffragists, Schlafly and her followers deluged state legislators and the media with visits, letters, and pamphlets warning that dire consequences would result if the U.S. Constitution was amended to accord equality to women. Many of the arguments wielded against the ERA were also reminiscent of those used by antisuffragist forces. According to its opponents, the ERA would erode the duty of men to support their wives and children financially, prohibit sex-segregated restrooms, allow women to be drafted into military service, sanction homosexual marriage, and generally threaten the family. Schlafly and others paradoxically also argued that the ERA was unnecessary since women had been granted legal protection and equal rights through earlier statutes and judicial decisions.
If their tactics were similar, the constituencies of anti-ERA forces differed significantly from those of the antisuffrage movement a half-century earlier. While the antisuffrage movement was composed largely of the wives of wealthy and socially prominent men, the typical rank-and-file member of STOP-ERA was a white middle-aged rural and religiously devout housewife married to a working-or lower-middle-class man. In contrast, many anti-ERA leaders, including Schlafly, were upper-middle-class career women or were men with professional occupations. Just as antisuffragists were supported by people with business and political interests who feared women's votes, so did the anti-ERA movement find common cause with corporate leaders and others who worried about the financial consequences of gender equality.
The other major focus of modern organized antifeminist sentiment has been manifest in opposition to feminist demands for abortion rights. In 1973 the U.S. Supreme Court issued a decision in the Roe v. Wade case that greatly limited the ability of states to restrict abortions. Antifeminist groups reacted immediately and strongly, insisting that legalized abortion, like the ERA, would undermine respect for women's traditional roles as homemakers and mothers. Antifeminists thus allied with conservative religious leaders who opposed abortion on moral grounds and right-wing politicians who wanted to protect traditional patriarchal family arrangements. The efforts of antiabortion forces to overturn the Supreme Court decision have been unsuccessful to date. Constant, intense pressure on legislators and judges—together with both violent and nonviolent harassment of abortion clinics and their personnel and clients—has, however, resulted in legal and financial repercussions that have made abortion inaccessible to many women.
Cynthia D. Kinnard, Antifeminism in American Thought: An Annotated Bibliography (Boston: G. K. Hall & Co., 1986); Jane J. Mansbridge, Why We Lost the ERA (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986).
Kathleen M. Blee
See also
Conservatism and the Right Wing.
