Graduation Year
2024
Document Type
Open Access Senior Thesis
Degree Name
Bachelor of Arts
Department
Politics and International Relations
Reader 1
Vanessa Tyson
Reader 2
Mar Golub
Terms of Use & License Information
Rights Information
© 2023 Sadie N Matz
Abstract
A staggering number of White women voted for Trump in 2016. Why did this demographic, whose racial and gender identity so closely resembled that of the Democratic candidate, deny themselves descriptive representation in the Oval Office? A closer look at the political history of feminism and anti-feminism reveals that these results should not have been surprising. The sexual liberation movement of the 1960s, the fight over the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970s, and the rise of neoliberalism in the 1980s cultivated an environment that made political conservatism attractive to White women of the 20th century, priming White women of the 21st to support the Republican party. This paper conducts a dialogue analysis of a sample of Phyllis Schlafly’s written work to show that Schlafly’s rhetoric and agenda bear a substantial resemblance to the contemporary political disposition of White women in the United States. The analysis provides evidence that anti-feminist resistance to second-wave feminism primed White women as a social group to align with the Republican party in the 21st century.
Recommended Citation
Matz, Sadie N., "What's Up With White Women?: Anti-Feminist Resistance to Second-Wave Feminism and the Rise of the Conservative Woman" (2024). Scripps Senior Theses. 2371.
https://scholarship.claremont.edu/scripps_theses/2371
