“Stop Taking Our Privileges”: Phyllis Schlafly’s Narrative of Traditional Womanhood and the Fight for Socioeconomic Hegemony in the 1970s–1980s

Abstract

In 1972, when the U.S. feminist movement was proposing to implement gender equality through the Equal Rights Amendment, conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly launched a countermovement in order to revalue a woman’s place in the home. Arguing in favor a sexual division of labor, she defended the traditional vision of the family. According to Schlafly, marriage and motherhood provide women with advantages which they didn’t want to give up in exchange for equality. With the intention of defending their socioeconomic and cultural power, conservative women engaged in a political battle for their rights as housewives.