What Are “Women’s Issues?”: Interview with Emily S. Johnson Part II

Andy Seal: Among the women you write about, only Beverly LaHaye saw herself as an explicitly political actor (not including Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann, of course). I very much appreciated how you both acknowledged the political effects of all these women’s actions while still seeking to remain open to the way Morgan, Bakker, and even Bryant thought of themselves as nonpolitical. In other words, I didn’t feel that you imposed your own decision about where to draw the line between the political and the nonpolitical. How did you try to walk that line between explicitly contradicting them (and labeling them political actors) and explicitly affirming their worldviews and self-understandings?

Emily S.Johnson: When I started this project, I took a very “I know it when I see it” approach to the idea of politics. This tended to include anything that related to what would later become issues in the “culture wars” of the 1980s and 1990s – including gender roles, homosexuality, and the idea of the United States as a “Christian nation.”

As I continued to work, I realized that my understanding of politics was very much historically rooted in the time period that I was studying. One of the key insights of the left in the 1960s and 1970s was the idea that politics were embedded not just in elections and policy making but in everyday interactions. As the feminist movement put it – “the personal is political.” We tend to accept this idea implicitly now, that power isn’t just a top-down phenomenon, but rather something that plays out in the ways that we all treat each other and experience the world on a daily basis.

In the 1970s, though, this was still very much contested. Outside of leftist movements, many people deeply resented what they saw as an incursion of politics into things that they had previously enjoyed without controversy. Understanding this is a crucial part of understanding the conservative populism of the era, which at least initially appealed to people as a kind of anti-political political rhetoric. The “Silent Majority” rhetoric was essentially premised on mobilizing people politically based on their resentment about the politicization of everything.

So, in the book, I had to honor that complexity in order to accurately describe the political shift that was happening at the time. I tried to do this by explaining what was at stake for each woman in framing her work as political or apolitical and by exploring the historical contexts that informed her understanding of those boundaries. In that sense, each woman’s particular history offers insight into how conservative Christians more broadly were struggling with their own relationship to politics during a period in which ideas about the political realm were in flux.

AS: You note at a couple of junctures that your study focuses on evangelical Protestant women, even though the New Christian Right was fueled to a large extent by new alliances of convenience with Catholics and Mormons. First, were there analogous Catholic or Mormon women whose stories might parallel those of Morgan, LaHaye, Bryant, and Bakker? (Louise Day Hicks comes to mind.) And second, why did you choose to focus on evangelical Protestants?

ESJ: I wanted this book to be rigorous in its treatment of religious history as well as political and intellectual histories. In order to do that, I needed to embed my analysis in the theological traditions that informed my subjects. It seemed most realistic to focus on the dominant strand in this movement, which is evangelical Protestantism. (And which is diverse and complicated in itself!)

New alliances between different groups of Christians were absolutely crucial to this movement, but evangelical Protestants were in the majority. They also had a cultural privilege that allowed them to shape the rhetoric of the movement in a way that Catholics and Mormons could not. For example, a keystone of the New Christian Right is the idea that the United States is a fundamentally Christian nation. Catholics and Mormons can join in on that rhetoric, but they are also aware of long histories of anti-Catholicism and anti-Mormonism in the United States. Evangelicals are much more comfortable connecting their particular religious history to the religious history of the nation as a whole. As a result, much of the theological and political language of the movement is implicitly evangelical even when it purports to be ecumenical.

Mormon and Catholic women aren’t totally absent from the book. I explore the messy and often ambivalent religious alliances that characterized this movement, and in order to do so, I talk about Mormon women like author Helen Andelin and Catholic women like activist Phyllis Schlafly. That said, there’s certainly more work to be done in this arena.

AS: In your chapter on Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann, you make a really striking argument about how important it is that we resist the tendency to assume that everyone agrees that “women’s issues” are liberal and “family values” are conservative. To me, it seemed like you were saying that this framing limits the analytical clarity we can attain while thinking about the political history of highly divisive issues, for instance, abortion. With the “women=liberal” vs. “family=conservative” framing, the conservative position on abortion seems to be an unequivocal elevation of the family over the woman, while the liberal position would be the converse—an unequivocal elevation of the woman over the family. Is that a fair reading of your argument, and if so, what are we missing if we use the “women=liberal” vs. “family=conservative” framing?

ESJ: The main thing is that this framing is not politically neutral, but when we take it for granted, we treat it as if it is. Feminists have fought hard for the right to claim that feminism represents all women’s interests just as social conservatives have fought hard to lay claim to the politics of family. In both cases, these are useful political slogans, but they bulldoze over nuances on both sides. If we’re more thoughtful about the political frameworks that we take for granted, I think we can start thinking about politics in much more productive ways.

For example, collapsing the idea of “feminism” with the idea of “women’s issues” effectively turns conservative women into a paradox. You can see this in a lot of contemporary conversations about abortion, for example, which highlight men’s leadership on anti-abortion bills and ignore women’s significant contributions to the pro-life movement. This is obviously undesirable if you are a conservative woman; everyone wants to see their work represented. But it’s also bad for people on the other side, who can’t hope to effectively oppose a movement that they fundamentally misunderstand.

But even that framework buys into a binary understanding of this issue that isn’t wholly accurate. Polling data shows that most Americans, whether they identify as pro-life or pro-choice, support legal abortion under certain circumstances. Most also want to see policies that would limit the number of abortions, either through sex education or support for new parents. When we buy into the idea that this is an issue of pro-life men against feminist women, it’s impossible to see these nuances. When we see these nuances, this deeply fractious issue seems more approachable.