For Their Own Interests: How International Women's Year Radicalized Conservative Women in Northwestern Oklahoma, 1975-1977

Abstract

In 1977, the United States hosted a series of domestic conferences dedicated to the betterment of women called International Women’s Year. However, many voters from both major political parties opposed this effort. Women who contested IWY were overwhelmingly political conservatives, often aligned with the emerging New Right amid shifting US politics. Oklahoma offers a unique perspective from which to consider the changing nature of conservatism and to analyze rural conservatism. For Oklahoma women, IWY provided a rare opportunity to take direct political action. Many feminists and liberals dismissed conservative women as acting against their own best interests. However, a closer examination of politically active conservative women reveals that they acted through their own agency. These women influenced the broader conservative movement even as it changed them. IWY acted as a laboratory for the distillation of modern conservative ideology. This gendered political battle refined nascent rural conservatism of antigovernment sentiment and antifeminist, traditionalist social opinions into a cohesive, actionable political ideology, an extension of rural social, cultural, and religious identities rooted in a heteronormative, nuclear concept of “the family.” I contest a purely ideological explanation for the rise of rural conservatism, instead showing how Oklahomans’ conservative ideas changed over time as a result of place, personal interest, and traditionalist beliefs rooted in local communities. Using a microhistory approach to engage embodied place and geography, this paper reconstructs IWY through the communications, networks, and individual lives of conservative women living in northwestern Oklahoma. Using letters, obituaries, news articles, and secondary sources, I created detailed biographical sketches for the most active IWY opponents in OK Congressional District 6. Chapter one examines how initial rejection of IWY was often a result of fiscal conservatism and regional anti-government opinion. Chapter two presents how rural conservative women’s opposition to IWY changed over time.