Women's Movements & "Family Values" (was Re: religious crackpots in public life)

Yoshie Furuhashi furuhashi.1 at osu.edu
Sun Jul 9 08:24:07 PDT 2000



>On Sat, 08 Jul 2000 13:14:05 -0500 Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote:
>
> > There's some problem with the direction of causality here. Was it Ken that
> > suggested a link between the women's movement and religiosity as
>a backlash?
> > "Family Values" (which I'm reasonably sure were never invoked
>before the last 20 or
> > 30 years) seem definitely to be aimed at the women's movement --
>and defenders of
> > family values then reach for religious support for what is
>essentially not a
> > religious but a social issue (if the two can be divided that neatly??).
>
>Large segments of the women's movement, in the early part of the century, were
>campaigning for family values: ie. women's place is in the home. These
>organizations tend to get less press than the more progressive movements.
>
>ken

The target of the conservative backlash that we should be concerned about is the achievements of what is called second-wave feminism. No fundamentalist Christian now is targeting the Women's Christian Temperance Union (which is as dead as Stalinism).

To describe women's movements in the late nineteenth-century and early twentieth century as "campaigning for family values" as you do is misleading. Suffrage leaders like Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton drew parallels between prostitution and marriage, arguing that in both institutions women engaged in sexual relations in return for economic support. Marriage and divorce laws trapped women in unhappy relationships and made it impossible for them to escape drunken or sexually abusive husbands. So, Stanton called for more liberal divorce laws while Anthony emphasized that women should become self-supporting in order to prevent unhappy marriages. Our contemporary "family values" advocates dislike liberal divorce laws, which they think have helped to create a host of social problems, especially for children.

Even the Women's Christian Temperance Union, while using the _rhetoric_ of "home protection," etc., under the leadership of Frances Willard _in fact_ championed woman suffrage (as well as Populism, "Christian Socialism," etc.), and woman suffrage contradicted the "family values" as defined by the dominant ideology of the day.

More importantly, in the late nineteenth century, the WCTU, the anarchist "Free Love" movement, etc. attacked the sexual double standard that allowed *men* to be sexually and otherwise abusive toward women, whereas our contemporary "family values" crowd have attacked *women's* sexual & reproductive freedoms (as well as gay men's, in that they cannot tolerate what is perceived as gender non-conforminty). A big difference.

Yoshie



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