‘Mrs America’ fought for the dignity of housewives

‘Mrs America’ is a much discussed new series depicting the battle that raged in the United States in the 1970s over a proposed amendment to the US Constitution called the ‘Equal Rights Amendment’. This proposed to outlaw discrimination on the basis of sex. The ‘Mrs America’ of the series is the real-life Phyllis Schlafly (played by Cate Blanchett (pictured)) who launched a successful campaign to defeat the ERA. On the other side are the leading feminists of the day, such as Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem.

Why would anyone oppose the ERA? Schlafly said that if America ever had conscription again (American involvement in the Vietnam war had just ended), women would be drafted along with men and have to fight in frontline positions, otherwise you would be treating the two sexes differently.

She said single-sex schools and colleges would be outlawed. She said that women would no longer be more likely than men to gain custody of the children in the event of divorce.

She was right about all those things, of course. They would all have followed logically from the ERA, and in fact if you watch clips from the time of Schlafly debating Freidan, Friedan doesn’t deny that women could be forced into frontline combat positions, instead she argued (if I’m interpreting her correctly), that conscription was now only a remote possibility. (Richard Nixon had abolished the draft a few years before).

But in a way, the much bigger battle at stake was over the role of women in society, and in particular whether there was still an honoured place for the traditional housewife. Schlafly, despite being a full-time political campaigner, believed that there should be. Some of the leading feminists of the day believed otherwise, including Friedan.

The book that made Friedan’s name ‘The Feminine Mystique’, caused a sensation when it was published in 1963.

At the time, once a woman married, she was expected to give up work and devote herself full-time to home and family. Friedan led the rebellion against this, and it resonated with many women.

The trouble is that Friedan was too disparaging of the traditional housewife. As Christina Hoff Sommers explains, Friedan believed the job of housewife, was intrinsically unworthy and undignified, an occupation best suited to “feeble-minded girls.” She called the suburban home a “comfortable concentration camp” where women suffer a “slow death of mind and spirit.” Like the inmates of the camps, she said, American suburban housewives had become “walking corpses.”

As Mary Kenny explained in a  recent talk to The Iona Institute, another leading feminist, Simone De Beauvoir was also extremely contemptuous towards motherhood.

De Beauvoir, according to Mary, “especially anathemises pregnancy as turning a woman into ‘the plaything of nature’. She deplores the way in which nature begins to introduce changes to a woman’s body which lessens or annuls her ‘autonomy’. Woman simply becomes a vessel, in De Beauvoir’s eyes, as she is ‘doomed to the continuity of the species’, to house the ‘parasite’ within. The ‘painful burden of pregnancy’ is the yoke from which woman must break free (as is the bourgeois oppression of marriage and the family). Marriage, she wrote is a survival of a ‘dead way of life’.”

It was one thing to free women from the home, it was quite another to disparage any woman who would wish to devote herself to the domestic sphere in such a way. Did feminists really think many women wouldn’t feel annoyed and insulted?

The same issue still burns today. What should happen to the domestic sphere – the home – and what should we think about women (or men) who want to devote themselves full-time to their families? What supports (if any) should they receive? Do feminist groups in Ireland ever offer real moral or practical support to the traditional homemaker or would they prefer they were all in paid employment?

If the answer is the latter, then how can leading feminist groups really claim to equally support the different priorities different women place on home versus work? In fact, wouldn’t they be coming down on the side of one set of women only? Is that defensible? If feminism is really ‘pro-choice’, how can it not support the choice of women who still want to be full-time homemakers? 

Of course, one big difference between today and the 1970s, is that the traditional homemaker no longer seems to have any truly prominent champions. That would have pleased Freidan no end.

PS. ‘Mrs America’ is full of inaccuracies that bias viewers against Schlafly and towards her feminist antagonists. More on that here and here