Review: Marjorie J. Spruill. Divided We Stand: The Battle Over Women’s Rights and Family Values that Polarized American Politics. New York: Bloomsbury, 2017.

Authors

Colleen McDannell

Keywords

Marjorie Spruill, gender, polarization, 1970s, women's rights

Abstract

With polarization in American politics possibly at an all-time high, historians frantically search the past for the origins of our current malady. When did we become so alienated as a people, and why is it that we seemingly cannot understand each other’s behaviors? Marjorie J. Spruill provides another reflection on how we came to be what we are in Divided We Stand: The Battle Over Women’s Rights and Family Values that Polarized American Politics. Spruill sees gender as the theoretical place where we need to begin our exploration and the 1970s as the defining years. Passing up the easy targets like the anticommunism of the 1950s or the civil rights movement of the 1960s, Spruill sets her sights on “Four Days the Changed the World,” the hyperbolic title of the first chapter. The place was Houston, and the activity was the National Women’s Conference organized to observe the International Women’s Year (IWY). It is doubtful that a set of meetings could “change the world,” but even Gloria Steinem called the National Women’s Conference “the most important event nobody knows about” (p. 2).

BYU ScholarsArchive Citation

McDannell, Colleen (2019) "Review: Marjorie J. Spruill. Divided We Stand: The Battle Over Women’s Rights and Family Values that Polarized American Politics. New York: Bloomsbury, 2017.," Mormon Studies Review: Vol. 6: No. 1, Article 25.
Available at: https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/msr2/vol6/iss1/25