I’m dreading the upcoming presidential election. In 2016, I watched friends, family and neighbors rally around a man who spewed racism and bragged about sexually assaulting women. When they elected him president of the United States, I was devastated. Consequently, my impulse is to check out emotionally from the current election season.
But earlier this month, I felt the push to find ways to engage. Lessons I’ve learned from writing the history of Exponent II, the longest-running independent publication for Mormon women and gender minorities, are giving me hope for a path forward.
On March 7, President Joe Biden delivered the State of the Union address. Afterward, Alabama Sen. Katie Britt offered a GOP rebuttal from her kitchen table. Her performance has been analyzed and parodied as overly dramatic and disingenuous, but her arguments focused on the safety of her children and family. In her words, I heard echoes of a powerful woman from 1970s politics: Phyllis Schlafly.
Schlafly rose to national prominence in the mid-1970s as a conservative activist and leader of the STOP ERA movement. Stop Taking Our Privileges (STOP) opposed the Equal Rights Amendment, arguing in part that it would hurt families by taking women out of the home. Schlafly herself was highly educated, had run for public office, led a nonprofit organization, and became an attorney. She used her platform to discourage these opportunities for other women. Her anti-ERA efforts were successful.
The ERA met little opposition before Schlafly led a conservative coalition that fought state by state to stop the amendment’s ratification. In this coalition, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and other Christian organizations were joined by the likes of the John Birch Society and the Ku Klux Klan to fight the ERA. Importantly, however, most individuals lobbying against the ERA would never have considered themselves aligned with those extremist groups — they saw themselves as protecting families.
As a modern feminist, I am baffled when I look back and see women vote against their own interests. But watching Sen. Britt and hearing the echoes of Schlafly, it struck me that my condescension will not be a winning argument against the forces working to roll back women’s rights today.
Feminists have seen this film before, and we didn’t like the ending. If we want a different ending, we have to act differently.
I appreciated Meg Conley’s analysis in her piece, “We Should Take Katie Britt Seriously.” She writes, “[Britt] is weaponizing the kitchen table because she understands its power. Which is more than I can say for many of the Democrats.” Republicans may weaponize “family values,” but Democrats often underestimate the power of the home. Neither party passes essential protections for families such as universal child care or universal paid parental leave. Even when Democrats had the votes, they failed to codify abortion rights.
Feminism is not inherently partisan, but laws are often passed strictly on partisan lines. Extremists push legislatures further right to the detriment of gender, racial and social equality. Feminists are watching the fruits of the conservative coalition’s 50-year campaign to roll back the gains of the Women’s Rights and Civil Rights movements and are again fighting for basic bodily autonomy.
This election season, the GOP is changing its messaging to court voters, particularly women, who may be wary of Donald Trump. They are looking to successful movements like STOP ERA and are employing formerly winning strategies. Will it work again? Maybe. And when feminists mock women like Britt without addressing the needs she touches on, it will help the GOP.
Feminists will have to get better at communicating and partnering with moderate and conservative-leaning people for whom the term “feminist” has never quite fit.
When they started their newspaper in 1974, the founders of Exponent II — Boston-area Mormon housewives, graduate students and young professionals — sought to make room for women who sometimes felt excluded from the divisive rhetoric of the women’s movement. They founded their paper on the “dual platforms of Mormonism and feminism” and sought to “bring Mormon women into closer friendship” by providing an “open platform for the exchange of news and life views.” What did this require? Balanced perspectives, nuance and room for disagreement while staying in connection with one another. They had to prioritize community among both ardent feminists and those wary of “women’s lib.”
Feminist rhetoric did not always value home and family, but Exponent II worked for a feminism that included women whose commitment to home and family was a core part of their identity. A prime example is when articles on a single page included two seemingly opposite perspectives about working mothers. In “Truly Brave Women,” Kathryn Ann Anderson argues that mothers of young children must prioritize the care of those children and stay home with them for that season of life. In “A Working Mother,” Judy Dushku writes about a mother who is a doctor and relies on hired child care and partnership with her husband to balance career and family.
Was Anderson’s article feminist? Perhaps not, but it was certainly a position to which many Mormon women could relate. Respectfully addressing multiple perspectives was important feminist work. By including the first article, their audience was more likely to read the second as well. In avoiding ideological purity, the paper allowed a wider swath of readers to listen deeply to one another’s experiences.
The anti-feminist movement has been effective at both building coalitions and wielding power. Feminists have ground to recover. We will have to be better at building coalitions. This does not mean a both-sidedism that insists on giving time to arguments that dehumanize marginalized individuals but rather making room for difference to find common ground.
The work takes place in person and online. We have to listen to other people’s stories and respond with empathy. We have to remember there is no “online you” and “real you” — what we say to strangers on the internet still counts. We have to broaden our news sources to become better at speaking a shared language and identifying common values. We have to build community with neighbors whose yard signs or bumper stickers may lead us to assume we wouldn’t be friends. Excellent non-partisan organizations are engaging in this work, and they will need more of us to move out of apathy.
Feminists will disregard the Sen. Katie Britts of the world to our own demise.
Katie Ludlow Rich
Katie Ludlow Rich is a writer and independent scholar living in Saratoga Springs. She is a co-editor of the forthcoming book, “Fifty Years of Exponent II (Signature Books, 2024).” Find her on Instagram at @katieludlowrich.
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