These Truths: A History of the United States

by Jill Lepore

Beginning in 1973, and well into the 1990s, real earnings for all but the very wealthiest Americans remained flat, or declined. The real wages of the average male worker dropped by 10 percent. To make up for shrinking family income, more married women began working outside of the home. They began arguing for government-supported child care. Soon, three out of four women between twenty-five and fifty-four were working for pay.33 More women worked, but, for most Americans, family incomes did not rise as a result. Liberals blamed conservatives, conservatives blamed liberals, and Schlafly convinced a lot of people to blame feminists. “Women’s lib is a total assault on the role of the American woman as wife and mother, and on the family as the basic unit of society,” she wrote in 1972.