All in the Family by Robert O. Self

Author:Robert O. Self
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

10

A STRANGE BUT RIGHTEOUS POWER:

THE BREADWINNER CONSERVATISM OF FORGOTTEN AMERICANS

A year before the 1972 presidential election, John Schmitz, a member of the John Birch Society and a well-known Republican congressman from Orange County, California, warned his colleagues in the House of Representatives of a looming new threat, the Comprehensive Child Development Act, a bill to provide near-universal child care to American families. Schmitz predicted “destruction of the basic family unit” if the bill passed. Other opponents were no less hyperbolic. Senator James Buckley (R-NY) insisted that the legislation would “destroy parental authority and the institution of the family.” Congressman John Rarick (D-LA) said it insulted motherhood and augured the “death of God.” Furious congressional debate over the bill, on behalf of which feminists and welfare rights activists had campaigned passionately, was followed by a popular uproar that prompted President Nixon’s veto.1

Opposition to the Child Development Act had little to do with children. It was, rather, a response to feminism. The fiery rhetoric of Schmitz and his colleagues marked a defining moment in a new antifeminist politics; the child care debate preceded Roe v. Wade by a year and a half and the Equal Rights Amendment controversy by two. Just as Moynihan had claimed in 1965 that the gravest threat to the African American family was black culture’s alleged pathology and welfare dependency, so did many conservatives claim in the early 1970s that the gravest threat to all families was feminism. They charged feminists with appropriating the state to reengineer the family. Opposition to feminism had resonated in Congress since at least the Title VII debate in 1964, but 1971 marked the debut of a more determined and strident antifeminism, forcing the president, despite the presence of advisers favorably disposed to the bill within his administration, to issue a ringing denunciation in his veto message.

To Schmitz and those of like mind, women’s liberation had bullied its way onto the historical stage to lead an assault on the nuclear family. As they saw it, women’s liberationists—rendered derisively as “women’s libbers”—denied differences between men and women and sought an impossible and anyway undesirable equality between the sexes. Worse, they placed the state above the nuclear family and its natural division of labor, which dictated that men labor in the market and women in the home. Even though most feminists, of all sorts, articulated their abiding support for motherhood and the family in these years and insisted that such things as government-supported child care, reproductive rights, and equal employment were not antifamily, their opponents remained incredulous and grew louder as the decade wore on.

The child care debate resounded all the more because of its timing. The Winter Soldier investigations had taken place the previous January and February, William Calley had been convicted of the My Lai murders in late March, and the Dewey Canyon III demonstrations by Vietnam Veterans Against the War had filled the Washington Mall in April. Meanwhile, Congress continued to chew over H.R. 1, the Nixon administration’s Family Assistance Plan (FAP), which had stirred so much contestation over male breadwinning and federal welfare policy.

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