I have a new piece in this month’s Women’s Review of Books, reviewing Nancy L. Cohen’s fascinating recent book, Delirium: How the Sexual Counterrevolution Is Polarizing America.
Reading Nancy Cohen’s Delirium in the same week as the 2012 Republican convention in Tampa, Florida, last summer was a time- bending experience. As the convention sought to counter the image Democrats had painted of a party-wide Republican “war on women” by having a stream of accomplished women promote its reactionary platform, Cohen’s description of the Women Who Want to Be Women, an early 1970s antifeminist group that paved the way for the Christian right, seemed revelatory. When the candidate’s wife, Ann Romney, shouted from the podium, “I love you, women!” her smile stretched nearly as wide as her arms, she seemed to be recapitulating the role that the antifeminist icon Phyllis Schlafly had played years before, in first bringing her conservative women allies into the Republican tent.
Back then, Schlafly, a well-to-do corporate lawyer’s wife, had appealed to apolitical fundamentalist women reared on the doctrine of female submission to help her overthrow the Equal Rights Amendment. Now, their political descendants cheered Romney, an upper-crust, stay-at-home mother, clad in Nancy Reagan red, as “a real First Lady,” delivering a domesticated womanhood the heartland could appreciate.
Read the whole review. (pdf)
