UCLA Center for the Study of Women

Debate over “family values” is now a staple in American politics. My paper examines how that came to be. I focus on New York state from the 1970s through the 1980s when feminist activism and an emerging conservative family values movement competed side-by-side to define the family. Conservative activists, most of whom were white, suburban homemakers, helped shift New York’s political culture to the Right—forcing feminists and politicians across all parties to frame their definition of family values along more conservative lines, especially with regard to issues such as state-subsidized daycare, the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), and abortion.

My paper follows several important histories about the rise of political conservatism in postwar America. These works disproportionately explore how race and Cold War geopolitics influenced this trend, but few consider gender as I do. Yet, instead of focusing on a single conservative female activist (e.g., Phyllis Schlafly) or issue (e.g., abortion or the ERA) as some scholars have done, I more broadly examine how women on both the left and the right debated the above-mentioned issues in the 1970 and 1980s. I conclude that such debate ultimately produced a popular conception of feminism as “anti-family,” while linking family values to [white] middle-to-upper class nuclear families, heterosexual marriage, and traditional gender roles.