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This chapter begins with a brief history of the women’s equal rights movement, and then explores women’s responses to the issue during the 1960s and 1970s. Most of the women examined here were right-wing and actively opposed the ERA, but some supporters are included in the chapter. It explores the clashes between those women who favored the amendment, and those who opposed it. It looks at the reasons why many women joined together to campaign against the ERA, examining such demographic factors as age, social status, and occupation. The chapter ends with a sampling of baby boomers’ reflections on what the conflict over the ERA meant for them.

This chapter focuses on the fourth and final religious signal: engaging in morality politics. Morality politics is an approach that elevates political issues into symbolic, moral battles. The evidence in this chapter comes from Republican and Democratic party platforms since 1932. It considers five issues central to religious conservatives' political engagement: abortion, the Equal Rights Amendment, same-sex relationships, school prayer, and stem-cell research. Analyzing platforms language shows that since 1980 Republicans have increasingly aligned their issue positions with those of religious conservatives, while Democrats have done the opposite. Further, Republicans have elevated the importance of these issues by attacking the courts and calling for constitutional amendments, while also grounding their claims in the language of faith and family. The chapter concludes with an analysis of three Justice Sunday events, which showcase morality politics in its most overt form.

This chapter recounts New Deal and Great Society constitutional development in three chronological steps. The first section outlines the labor and pension debates that gripped Congress and the Court through the 1930s and 1940s, noting how New Dealers built federal labor and welfare protections atop existing state constitutional wage, hours, and pension protections. The second section recounts a similar pattern of convergence as the NAACP, AFL, CIO, and other reform groups worked to amend state constitutions to repeal poll taxes and legislative malapportionment, affirming and elaborating federal Voting Rights Act (VRA) and federal court voting protections. Finally, as the 1973 Equal Rights Amendment failed, reformers entrenched gender equality through state constitutional reform, stifling further attempts at federal reform. In all three cases, state constitutional reform helped address and resolve national constitutional controversies.

This chapter revisits Adkins and considers the feud over protective laws that arose in the women's movement in the 1920s. The clash between friends and foes of the Equal Rights Amendment—and over the protective laws for women workers that it would surely invalidate—fueled women's politics in the 1920s. Both sides claimed precedent-setting accomplishments. In 1923, the National Woman's Party proposed the historic ERA, which incurred conflict that lasted for decades. The social feminist contingent—larger and more powerful—gained favor briefly among congressional lawmakers, expanded the number and strength of state laws, saw the minimum wage gain a foothold, and promoted protection through the federal Women's Bureau. Neither faction, however, achieved the advances it sought. Instead, a fight between factions underscored competing contentions about single-sex protective laws and their effect on women workers.

After gaining the vote in 1920, suffragists faced a new quandary—to attempt to enter the existing male power structure or focus on the broader cause of advancing women by upholding traditional femininity while still exercising the ballot. Efforts to deal with this dilemma can be seen by examining the contents of contemporary periodicals, particularly three from women’s organizations: Equal Rights, the voice of the National Woman Party; the Woman Citizen, produced by the League of Women Voters, and Independent Woman, the bulletin of the National Federation of Business and Professional Women. These publications illustrated the fracturing of the idealism of the suffrage movement when women actually went to the polls and were forced to deal with political realities as well as conflicting ideas of their proper roles.

Chapter 6 explores the “equality versus difference” debate--a defining feature of feminism in modern America--through the lens of Breckinridge’s work in both the national suffrage organization, the National American Woman Suffrage Association, and its successor organization, the League of Women Voters. By exploring Breckinridge’s work with national feminist organizations during and after the suffrage struggle, this chapter highlights both women’s continuous activism and their ideological differences, especially their debate over the Equal Rights Amendment and so-called “protective legislation.”

Chapter 8 follows Breckinridge to the Seventh Pan-American Conference in Montevideo, Uruguay, where she and other women activists in both the United States and Latin America vigorously debated the meaning of women’s equality. Breckinridge’s clashes with Doris Stevens, the U.S. leader of the Inter-American Commission of Women, over the proposed Equal Nationality Treaty and Equal Rights Treaty laid bare the conflicts inherent in Pan-American feminism. At the same time, U.S. and Latin American women’s activists’ diverse understandings of feminism helped to lay the groundwork for the idea that “women’s rights are human rights.”

This chapter looks at the growth of suburban feminism as a means to consider the persistence of certain elements of suburban liberal activism and ideology in a changed political and economic climate. The increasing wedding of feminism with suburban politics had key trade-offs for the larger cause of women's equality. The sensibility and organizing strategies of suburban liberal politics were both crucial to the success of several campaigns, especially the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). The pivot also helped the movement further earn the notice and attention of politicians eager to win suburban votes. Yet the relationship hardened the middle-class orientation of second-wave feminism and elevated class-blind and consumerist ideas of choice.

During the 1910s suffragists followed closely the congressional debates over political independence for men in the Philippines and Puerto Rico and were intent on juxtaposing national legislation that expanded political autonomy for men in these U.S. island possessions against Congress's failure to pass a woman suffrage amendment to the U.S. constitution. By 1916 it seemed, ironically, that the U.S. colonial possessions might be the next site for woman suffrage victories. The revival of the push for the federal woman suffrage amendment, the Nineteenth Amendment (1920), took place in the context of U.S. efforts to resolve the political status of Puerto Rico and the Philippines.

Even without encouragement from Republican politicians, Christian activists in the mid-1970s launched campaigns against cultural liberalism, uniting evangelicals with conservative Catholics and reshaping the Republican Party. In the early 1970s, Phyllis Schlafly, a Catholic, led evangelical women in a successful campaign against the Equal Rights Amendment. Evangelicals’ opposition to feminism and the sexual revolution also prompted them to join Catholics in speaking out against abortion. During the presidential election of 1976, cultural conservatives forced Gerald Ford to move to the right on abortion and challenged Jimmy Carter after his controversial interview with Playboy. Though an organized Religious Right had not yet developed, evangelicals were discovering their power to influence national politics.

Chapter 3 zeros in on Indiana to investigate how conservativism infused with one-world conspiracism developed there and affected feminist goals like the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). Feminism was alive and well in the state and existing liberal groups formed a coalition that called itself the ERA Coordinating Committee (later renamed Hoosiers for the Equal Rights Amendment) in the early seventies in order to achieve state ratification of the ERA. Feminists adopted a “low key” approach--a strategy to make feminism palatable to the general public in the state. On the right, conservative women effectively transitioned old anticommunist fears to a new target and in editorials described the ERA as communist directed. State ERA ratification riled and rallied the rightwing and made conservatives all the more determined to stop “the planners” in their next showdown, International Women’s Year.

Despite the perception that the national women's movement was moribund, a promising Left Feminist movement was emerging when World War II ended. Cunningham was a leader of this movement in Texas, fighting for women's employment opportunities, equal pay, price controls on consumer goods, and sharing its opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment because it would invalidate protective legislation for women. Cunningham established new organizations such as the People's Legislative Committee and the Texas Democratic Women's State Committee and, with Frankie Randolph, founded the Texas Observer, in an attempt to elect left-liberals like Bob Eckhardt and Ralph Yarborough to office, who would support reform. Cunningham felt betrayed by Lyndon Johnson when he joined with conservative Democrats in 1956 to prevent the left-liberals from gaining control of the Texas Democratic Party.

This chapter examines the factors that motivated northern African Americans to launch the equal rights movement and establish the National Equal Rights League (NERL) late in the Civil War. It also investigates the broad areas of agreement among these activists as well as the issues that divided them. The Pennsylvania State Equal Rights League (PSERL)—one of the most active and influential of the state equal rights organizations—serves as a case study of the cause. The PSERL represented the largest number of African Americans in any northern state. Its extant records are also far more complete than those of the NERL or any of its other state auxiliaries. An examination of these records and those of other state equal rights groups provides valuable insights into the strategy, agenda, progress, and problems of the movement, especially during the second half of the 1860s.

This chapter focuses on Wells-Barnett's fight against racism in American popular culture. Her leadership in the Negro Fellowship League (NFL) ensured that protest and politics would not be ignored. The league agitated against prejudice and injustice especially in Chicago and Illinois. To fight for rights on the national level, Wells-Barnett affiliated the organization with William Monroe Trotter's Equal Rights League in 1913. To promote political activity, the NFL hosted candidates' forums and urged voter participation. Many of Wells-Barnett's experiences confirmed her 1913 assertion that “when principle and prejudice come into collision, principle retires and leaves prejudice the victor.”

This chapter addresses the view that liberals have failed to marry the demands of identity- and class-based politics. It argues that in the 1970s, liberals built a powerful alliance between feminists and New Deal-style economic reforms that expanded the Democratic coalition and continues to exert influence upon it today. Although feminists failed in many of their symbolic or legal goals—particularly in the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment or federal funding for abortion—they succeeded in passing legislation that vastly improved the lives of homemakers and women workers. The chapter maintains that, surely, incorporation of gender issues into the liberal agenda contributed to the rise of a conservative countermovement, but without equal rights, the universal promise of New Deal economics would remain empty.

The chapter explores how tensions over Doris Stevens’s leadership exploded at the 1933 Seventh International Conference of American States in Montevideo, where Bertha Lutz launched serious challenges against her. There, Lutz allied with representatives from the U.S. State Department and U.S. Women’s and Children’s Bureaus in the new administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, including Sophonisba Breckinridge, who also opposed Stevens’s leadership of the Commission. The conflict between Stevens’s “equal rights” feminism, focused on political and civil rights, versus an inter-American feminism that also encompassed social and economic justice, became even more pronounced in the wake of the Great Depression, Chaco War, and revolutions throughout Latin America. Feminist debates took center stage in Montevideo. There, Lutz promoted women’s social and economic concerns. But her assumptions of U.S./Brazilian exceptionalism prevented her from effectively allying with growing numbers of Spanish-speaking Latin American feminists who opposed Stevens’s vision. The 1933 conference pushed forward the Commission’s treaties for women’s rights, and four Latin American countries signed the Equal Rights Treaty. It also inspired more behind-the-scenes organizing by various Latin American feminists and statesmen, including the formation of a new group, the Unión de Mujeres Americanas, that would later bear fruit.

This chapter explores how Mormons engaged with the politicization of gender roles in its anti-feminist crusade against the Equal Rights Amendment and its anti-homosexuality efforts in sodomy laws. Church leaders joined with an emergent Religious Right that was reshaping American politics. These efforts warned against gender fluidity and sought to protect against it in the law and culture, especially with respect to women working outside the home. But Church leaders also began to adopt moderate feminist reforms, including softening teachings on patriarchal marriage to accommodate egalitarian relationships, birth control, and more permissive sexuality within marriage.

The immediate postwar years saw significant turmoil in the Laundry Workers Joint Board, the result of competitive pressures in the industry, an employer offensive (evidence that in the laundries a postwar “social contract” did not exist), and internal conflict between the leadership and members of the democratic initiative. Chapter 10 demonstrates that the racial tensions that had animated the union since its birth exploded in the late 1940s as work contracted and as LWJB secretary treasurer Louis Simon consolidated his power over the union. Adelmond publicly confronted the leadership and employers for engaging in racist and sexist practices and organized through her own local, where the workers demanded racial justice at home and for people of color abroad fighting colonialism. This chapter reveals that Robinson supported and nurtured the workers’ civil rights unionism by creating educational initiatives; by building alliances with labor and civil rights activists, including the indomitable congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr.; by mentoring workers of color; and by founding and supporting organizations committed to Black women’s empowerment. Adelmond’s and Robinson’s multifaceted postwar organizing illuminates the complex ways in which Black working-class women organized at the intersection of multiple positionalities, a reflection of the simultaneity of race, class, and gender discrimination in the lives, as well as their location within and commitment to diverse goals and movements, including civil rights, women’s rights, and organized labor.