Melissa Estes Blair. Revolutionizing Expectations

Melissa Estes Blair’s Revolutionizing Expectations: Women’s Organizations, Feminism, and American Politics, 1965–1980 examines the ways in which liberal women’s groups in Denver, Durham, and Indianapolis advanced feminism in the late twentieth century. Blair argues that these groups not only were critical to the creation and promotion of programs and legislation that helped women gain equality, but also reflected just how widespread feminist ideas and values were at the height of the women’s movement at the end of the century. Even if the organizations and their members failed to identify themselves as feminists, the work they did contributed to the larger movement in the U.S. Blair’s detailed descriptions of the socioeconomic makeup of these three cities provides a compelling case for the significance of grassroots efforts to the larger national movement. Blair explains why and how women’s groups looked different in the three cities, which would dictate how they would ultimately handle feminist issues at the grassroots level. In Durham, Blair notes that more conservative southern gender norms dictated the “quiet, almost undercover nature of feminist work” (41), in which women’s organizations were extremely skilled at bridging the divide between feminist theory and national feminist ideologies and introducing them in programming to a local audience. There was, as she describes it, “behind-closed-doors radicalism” (98) at the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA), but it rarely manifested publicly. In Indianapolis, she explains, the League of Women Voters (LWV) worked with pro- Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) groups, including the National Organization for Women (NOW) to promote passage of the Equal Rights Amendment. Moderates, however, were afraid to work in too close proximity with NOW, which they viewed as more radical. That did create problems, and Blair credits ERA’s defeat in both North Carolina and Indiana to activists’ failure to sustain widespread pressure on the legislature. But in Durham, it was those “closet radicals” in the YWCA who took up feminist causes by sponsoring women-only coffee houses and creating a women’s center that provided important information to the community, including abortion referral. Unlike those two cities, Denver had a history of women working directly with the state government to advance change in a bipartisan way. Blair notes that the NOW chapter was significant for its many Republican members and that many women in this chapter focused more on change through legislation. She credits Colorado women’s familiarity with state government, the receptivity of women legislators, and a legislature more open to discussion of women issues, which explains its early passage of ERA and loosening of abortion restrictions. Because so many women in Denver focused on change through legislation, it was the interracial YWCA that took up sponsorship of programming on issues like reproductive rights and domestic violence, often partnering with NOW.

Feminism · Grassroots · Ideology · League · Lesbian · Liberation movement · Political radicalism · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · Gender Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies