Divided We Stand: The Battle Over Women's Rights and Family Values That Polarized American Politics by Marjorie J. Spruill | eBook

Forty years ago, two women's movements drew a line in the sand between liberals and conservatives. The legacy of that rift is still evident today in American politics and social policies.

One of Smithsonian Magazine's "Ten Best History Books of 2017†?

Gloria Steinem was quoted in 2015 (the New Yorker) as saying the National Women's Conference in 1977 "may take the prize as the most important event nobody knows about." After the United Nations established International Women's Year (IWY) in 1975, Congress mandated and funded state conferences to elect delegates to attend the National Women's Conference in Houston in 1977. At that conference, Bella Abzug, Steinem, and other feminists adopted a National Plan of Action, endorsing the hot-button issues of abortion rights, the Equal Rights Amendment, and gay rights--the latter a new issue in national politics. Across town, Phyllis Schlafly, Lottie Beth Hobbs, and the conservative women's movement held a massive rally to protest federally funded feminism and launch a Pro-Family movement.

Although much has been written about the role that social issues have played in politics, little attention has been given to the historical impact of women activists on both sides. DIVIDED WE STAND reveals how the battle between feminists and their conservative challengers divided the nation as Democrats continued to support women's rights and Republicans cast themselves as the party of family values.

The women's rights movement and the conservative women's movement have irrevocably affected the course of modern American history. We cannot fully understand the present without appreciating the events leading up to Houston and thereafter.

Publishers Weekly

12/19/2016
In this parable of how sensible and practical paths toward broader equality get overwhelmed by threat, fear, and bigotry, historian Spruill (New Women of the New South) suggests that the current political landscape of paralyzing divisiveness, hateful rhetoric, and persistent obstructionism took form in 1977, when the two women’s movements of the 1970s, each side purporting to represent the majority or speak for “real” American women, came to a head at the National Women’s Conference in Houston. Incensed that political equality would infringe on their privileges, a small group of opponents to the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) organized and mobilized a bloc of religious and socially conservative women with the threat that an overreaching government was out to destroy the American family and traditional, Bible-based morals. Meanwhile, those in favor of the ERA rallied diverse women with a victorious vision of full human rights. Spruill remains evenhanded in her treatment, tracing the tensions within each group and among their supporters. The lasting outcome of the failed ERA, Spruill reveals, was the embrace of social conservatives into the Republican party. They brought an antiabortion, profamily platform that propelled Reagan to the presidency and has since been a GOP mainstay. Spruill’s narrative is detailed and precise; her blow-by-blow accounts and alternating chapters of moves and countermoves allows for repetition and lacks meaningful analysis, but her rigorous research and intense accuracy will make this an indispensible handbook on the history of the National Women’s Conference and its enduring legacy on American politics. Agent: Lisa Adams, Garamond Agency. (Feb.)

From the Publisher

"Spruill…convincingly traces today’s schisms to events surrounding the National Women's Conference, a four-day gathering in Houston in November 1977. These divergent narratives from 40 years ago offer many lessons to those hoping to maintain the momentum of the Jan. 21 women's marches." - New York Times Book Review

"Marjorie Spruill describes a polarized America that will be recognizable to any consumer of today’s news…A story crucial to understanding American politics over the past 40 years…The question raised by the battle of 1977—who speaks for women?—still bedevils American politics." - Wall Street Journal

"This timely history anatomizes two bitterly opposed women’s movements, tracing a connection between 1977 and 2016." - The New Yorker

"While the shortcomings of the women’s movement in protecting their advances is well-documented in this book, it is the rise of conservative women and how they redirected the Republican Party’s positions that makes the book so interesting. Feminists and supporters of women’s rights will find this difficult to swallow, but this is an important book for them to read." - New York Journal of Books

"Fascinating…DIVIDED WE STAND evokes two movements, two equal mobilizations, struggling over the role of women in America." - The Nation

"The NWC [National Women's Conference] featured people and political trends whose significance is all the greater given the election’s outcome. The book details how the conference provoked a bitter debate between feminists and conservative women activists…[Spruill’s] interviews of key participants both illuminate the narrative and preserve first-hand accounts for future scholars." - Washington Independent Review of Books

"Spruill strives to be evenhanded, pointing out the mistakes and excesses of both sides…DIVIDED WE STAND lucidly explains just how we got so divided." - Dallas Morning News

"Spruill’s project of historical reclamation is an important one … The value of reconstructing those days [of the 1977 National Women’s Conference] and pondering their meaning for the light they might shed on ours is unquestionable." - New York Review of Books

"Noted historian Marjorie J. Spruill has written a well-researched, detailed history of the modern-day fight over women's rights and its 'essential role' in bringing the United States to the fractious state we currently endure . . . Divided We Stand is essential for understanding the recent past as well as the present." - Southwestern Historical Quarterly

Library Journal

01/01/2017
To celebrate the seminal 1977 Houston National Women's Conference (NWC) 40th anniversary, Spruill (history, Univ. of South Carolina) covers decades of the fight for women's rights and the current resulting political polarization. In the 1970s, the need for increased rights rose to the forefront of political and societal consciousness, but it also splintered liberals and conservatives over intrinsic beliefs about women's familial role. According to Spruill, the positive changes peaked at the NWC, and then regressed, causing increased strife in the present day. She specializes in documenting the pivotal role women played during key moments in American history, and her analysis of the NWC is a much-needed update to Alice S. Rossi's Feminists in Politics: A Panel Analysis of the First National Women's Conference. However, without the results of the 2016 presidential race, her thesis on the gradual diminishment of hard-won rights lacks punch. Additionally, the density of information, both biographical and political, all but guarantees the book's relegation to researchers and students, for which it is a seminal work. Index not seen. VERDICT An authoritative history of the women's rights movement across decades arriving at its current incarnation.—Jessica Bushore, Xenia, OH

Kirkus Reviews

★ 2016-11-21
A history of the federal push to bolster women's rights from successive presidents since John F. Kennedy—and the resulting clashes with traditional conservative constituencies.With the culmination of the feminist political agenda in 1977 at Houston's National Women's Conference, there was a swift conservative reaction, led by Illinois political activist Phyllis Schlafly and her organized minions. In this highly detailed but well-focused account, Spruill (History/Univ. of South Carolina; New Women of the New South: The Leaders of the Woman Suffrage Movement in the Southern States, 1993, etc.) reminds us that in the late 1970s, there were two women's movements. The first, supported by both Democrats and Republicans, got its impetus from federally sponsored programs like the Kennedy Commission (1963), which revealed "the inequities in public institutions, and the vulnerable situation of homemakers." Furthermore, writes the author in her assiduously researched narrative, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 became "one of the most important pieces of legislation in advancing gender equity, the basis for many subsequent feminist victories." On the other hand, more conservative and religious women became alarmed by the tilt toward "liberation" from home and hearth as well as the determination by "libbers" to work alongside men, countenance abortion, and, shockingly, love each other. (The support of lesbianism would rive even the most liberal feminist agenda.) For the feminists, the move to become a party with real political clout occurred with the election of Bella Abzug to Congress in 1971 and the forming of the National Women's Political Caucus around the leadership of Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, Shirley Chisholm, and others. As women made staggering inroads into government agencies and other areas under the administrations of Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford (largely thanks to his wife, Betty), the anti-feminists staged a backlash by blocking the Comprehensive Child Development Act of 1971 (publicly funded child care) as the "horrifying first step on the slippery slope toward a godless government invasion of the family." There are countless kernels of amazing achievement and courage throughout this jam-packed, engaging history.

Divided We Stand: The Battle Over Women's Rights and Family Values That Polarized American Politics

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