Big Sister

Feminist priorities in the late 1970s included ratification of the equal rights amendment (Era) and participation in the 1977 Women's National Conference in Houston, pertaining to the United Nations' International Woman's Year (Iwy). Erin M. Kempker argues in Big Sister that antifeminism belonged to a longer history, beginning in the 1940s, of rightists' deep suspicion of supranational attempts at world government, which seemed to threaten local and family sovereignty. Right-wing women viewed feminists connected to hidden networks of elites resembling “big sister,” a counterpart to George Orwell's Big Brother. Kempker draws her evidence from Indiana, the last state to ratify the Era, in January 1977, before the legislation subsequent defeat. Discussing feminist women and right-wing women alike, the book's chapters move chronologically, from the early Cold War to the Indiana Iwy state meeting in July 1977. Among Big Sister's strengths are Kempker's oral histories of right-wing women and feminists who were active at the time, and deep archival research. She shows how differently feminists and rightists handled differences in their ranks. For conservatives, the urgency of the moment decreased the importance of internal differences. But Indiana feminists' low-key, bipartisan approach to inducing the state legislature to ratify the Era entailed stifling radical and “liberationist” voices in their midst. No matter how moderate feminists seemed, though, they came in for rhetorical punishment from rightists who lumped all feminists in with feminist extremes, as perceived by the Right, as if the mild-mannered Hoosiers had run off to build utopias cleansed of men. Feminists' consequently low morale and internal divisions left them unable to struggle effectively against their antagonists. Republicans eventually deserted them, too, when the national party platform began opposing abortion and the Era in 1980

Brother · Feminism · Political science · Sister · Sociology · State (computer science · Gender Studies · Historical Gender and Feminism Studies · Law

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