The progressive women’s movement in the United States during the mid-twentieth century enjoyed increased support and success until national politics were dominated by conservatives during the 1980s. This dissertation analyzes the discourse around women’s issues created by two of the largest conservative women’s organizations, Eagle Forum and Concerned Women for America, and one of the largest feminist organizations, the National Organization for Women, during the 1980s. Each of these organizations created documents that then circulated within corresponding publics: the grassroots antifeminist public, the evangelical women’s political public, and the liberal feminist public, respectively. Public sphere theory, especially as it is used in the field of rhetoric, would postulate that the proliferation of publics debating women’s issues during this time period would provide space for divergent ideas and voices to be heard in the public sphere, and thus create a better functioning democracy. However, this case study uses the newsletters of these organizations to show that, in fact, the introduction and growing influence of conservative women required a response from the liberal feminist public, and the resulting interaction between these three publics actually shrank the discursive space. More radical ideas—both to the right and to the left of these three organizations’ views—then faced higher obstacles to entering public discourse. I conclude, then, that rhetoricians can use public sphere theory to account for the ways that publics interact to create exclusion as well as inclusion. I also argue that newsletters as a genre have had a historically important, but varied, relationship with publics.

Last modified

• 02/20/2018

Creator

• Anndrea Michelle Mathers

DOI

• https://doi.org/10.21985/N2G399

Subject

• Communication Studies

Keyword

• women's politics
• religious women
• counterpublics
• 1980s
• newsletters

Date created

• 2016-01-01

Resource type

• Dissertation

Rights statement

• In Copyright