“His masculinity may be threatened by your paycheck”: Conservative Women's Defense of Marriage in the Age of Stagflation

“Have you ever looked so sexy in the morning that your husband called in late to the office? At least you can make him wish he could stay home,” wrote Marabel Morgan winkingly to her readers in 1973. Such utterances, when placed in context, offer a glimpse into the economic anxieties and eroticized fantasies about marriage and the family wage that suffused conservative women’s thought. Morgan’s bestselling book found popularity at the very moment that the United States moved toward record levels of inflation, unemployment and a deep economic recession. She was part of a powerful cultural movement spearheaded by conservative Evangelical women who sought to preserve the institution of marriage and gendered divisions of labor by repudiating feminism and the ERA. While popular commentators and scholars alike have noted that this brand of anti-feminism was a reaction to women’s liberation and an outgrowth of conservative Evangelicalism, what has been overlooked is how these same expressions were also responses to the economic downturn in the United States during the 1970s. Marriage became the preeminent site for conservative women to interpret often invisible economic transformations that destabilized their lives.

This paper focuses on the economic discourses within anti-ERA rhetoric and in the bestselling advice manuals of conservative luminaries such as Phyllis Schlafly, Anita Bryant, Marabel Morgan and Darien Cooper. Written between 1970 and 1980, their texts offer important clues as to why many women found feminism and the ERA threatening to their marriages and why they worked so hard to preserve economic and intimate relationships that were patriarchal. Through this lens, I spotlight conservative women’s possessive investment in traditional divisions of wage, domestic and emotional labor and the intimate stakes they had in maintaining their economic and social subordination.