Suburban Liberals, Equal Rights, and Class-Blind Politics in the Post-Civil Rights Era

Many popular and scholarly works treat the 1970s as the nadir of modern liberalism and the civil rights movement.  The evolution of mainstream feminism campaigns of white middle-class suburban liberals activists in metropolitan Boston complicates these assumptions of decline. During this decade, second-wave feminism at the grassroots level achieved its broadest constituency and won a series of legal, social and cultural advancements that drew upon the language of equality and freedom directly influenced by civil rights and postwar liberalism. The efforts of the movement not only illuminates new links between civil rights and feminism, but also the ways in which modern liberalism adapted and transformed during the dawn of the post-Civil Rights and conservative eras.

In the early 1970s, many white middle-class liberal suburbanites in metropolitan Boston who had first become politically active a decade earlier in campaigns for fair housing and civil rights began to shift their attention to the cause of women’s equality. These suburban feminists relied on the contacts, networks and tactics they had established during previous civil rights campaigns. In particular, these white middle-class residents adopted the language and ideology of class-blindness, equality of opportunity, and an interpretation of discrimination in terms of personal prejudice rather than structural inequality that tied feminism directly to earlier civil rights efforts. While successful in securing the passage of legislation like a state Equal Rights Amendment, the tactics of the movement invigorated the forms of class entitlement at the heart of the suburban liberal interpretation of the ideals of equality and freedom of choice. Ultimately, the embrace of this language and ideology offers a way to explore how and why liberal ideas and ideology have persisted, but have failed to produce meaningful solutions to the enduring problems of structural inequality.