From Red Dirt to Red State: Oklahoma and the Equal Rights Amendment, 1972-1982

Abstract

This thesis details the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) debate in Oklahoma from 1972 to 1982. It is a multifaceted story of how both local and national factors, race, religion, family ties, gender norms, politics, and feminism played out in a state bombarded by the Christian Right in the mid and late 1970s. Most importantly, the fight to ratify the ERA in the state was about the politics of perception. Oklahoma feminists were not just debating the ERA, they were fighting to define womanhood and the rights that should go along with it. The end of the ERA in 1982 marked the political transformation of Oklahoma from a blue state to one of overwhelmingly conservative and red for the first time in the state’s history.