1970s US Gender Roles and Social Change in Public Discourse around Congresswomen’s Marriages

In the 1970s, the election of younger, married women to the U.S. Congress sparked an outburst of public discourse about these representatives of changing gender roles and economic patterns in the society more broadly. Discussion of political spouses included reactionary antifeminist expressions, but the phenomenon also captivated people of many political and cultural persuasions, including feminist reporters and politicians. The political husband was “a rarity no longer,” but he highlighted changing gender norms and resultant anxieties and transformations surrounding the roles of wives and husbands, both on and off Capitol Hill. In both the realms of marriage and electoral politics, gendered contestations over paid-versus-unremunerated labor, domination and subordination, access to institutional resources, and the breadwinner model of masculinity upended traditional assumptions about men’s and women’s roles. In the figures of women politicians and their husbands, these realms intersected. They served as screens onto which to project larger cultural anxieties about gender, power, the home, and the state.