West of Feminism: The Equal Rights Amendment Campaign in the American West, 1972-1982

Abstract

In “West of Feminism: Gender, Religion, and the Politics of the Equal Rights Amendment Campaign in the American West, 1972-1982,” I argue that the battle to ratify the ERA was not carried out within organizations or through feminists on the East Coast, where the amendment had already passed, but instead the unratified western states of Arizona, Nevada, Oklahoma, and Utah. In these states, pro-ERA activists, especially movement leaders, drew on pioneer and suffrage imagery to campaign for the amendment, and utilized their statuses as mothers and religious people to distance themselves from “radical” feminism. This fear of radicals and feminism, two all-encompassing terms for liberalism by conservative, anti-ERA leaders like Phyllis Schlafly highly influenced women’s rights activists in the West and put them on the defensive. Yet the ERA debate in the unratified western states shows that western activists did not retreat from the feminist platform, as other scholars have argued, but instead their leaders rejected the term feminism as a strategic attempt to pursue gender equality in the region. This version of feminism, which invoked the legacy of suffrage and extended older rhetoric about political motherhood, is what I call western feminism. This project reenvisions the role and geography of second wave feminism’s pinnacle piece of legislation, the ERA, and illuminates the forgotten role of feminism in the long history of the western women’s rights movement.