The Original Culture Warriors; For lower-middle-class women serving coffee to bosses, full-time motherhood wasn't the concentration camp described by feminists.
Even as we tremble at the edge of a fiscal cliff, the culture war insists on our attention. Abortion, contraception, gay and women's rights, and welfare have all returned to shake up an election season that was supposed to be a simple economy slugfest. Robert O. Self's "All in the Family" could help explain why. Mr. Self, a professor of history at Brown University, has heroically researched the history of the culture wars from the early 1960s to the present. He offers a provocative analysis that accounts for today's alliance between small-government and social conservatives, on the one hand, and welfare-state and social liberals, on the other.</br></br>Mr. Self begins his history by describing "breadwinner liberalism" as the status quo of the early and mid-1960s. The architects of the Great Society assumed the primacy of male-earner and female-homemaker families. Labor unions fought for a family wage for their predominantly male membership, the Moynihan Report (1965) raised alarms about black male unemployment, and the first efforts at affirmative action took the form of quotas in municipal contracts for male construction workers. In all these cases "women were largely an afterthought," Mr. Self writes. Breadwinner liberalism, he argues, was based on a model of "masculine individualism": hardworking, striving, self-reliant.</br></br>By the late 1960s, male breadwinners were beset from all sides. Their antiwar sons grew their hair long and scoffed at verities about masculine honor. Gays, going public early in the decade as self-defined "homophiles," challenged presumptions about masculine sexuality. Traditional men watched anxiously as their wives brought home paychecks and as women generally demanded relief from sexual harassment, low pay and pink-collar ghettos. Men soon saw their daughters demonstrating for abortion rights. Between the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and various court decisions, it seemed as if the government, the courts and their own families all agreed: The traditional male-headed family was an anachronism.</br></br>But, the author concludes, breadwinning men weren't disappearing; they and their female supporters were just changing political parties. For many lower-middle-class women serving coffee to bosses and stocking grocery shelves, full-time motherhood wasn't the concentration camp described by feminists. They found a voice in antifeminists like Phyllis Schlafly, who almost single-handedly stopped the Equal Rights Amendment in the late 1970s. Catholic women and men organized groups to oppose abortion and were soon joined by evangelicals. Other grass-root groups emerged, some in support of Vietnam veterans and others celebrating what came to be known as family values. What was taking shape was the profound class and cultural divide that vexes our politics to this day.</br></br>In a vivid chapter, Mr. Self describes the 1972 Democratic National Convention, a pivotal moment in the reshaping of political alignments. AFL-CIO President George Meany railed that, in the party platform, "there were no steelworkers, no pipe fitters, and worst of all, no plumbers." Instead there were feminists, radical blacks, Chicanos and gays--co-conspirators in a left-wing attack on breadwinner liberalism. In reaction, a constellation of religious, white, "ethnic" and anti-feminist objectors joined forces to create "breadwinner conservatism." By 1980, with the help of a vigorous evangelical revival, these one-time Democrats helped elect Ronald Reagan president.