“In such a culture of anti-feminism or "family values," as its supporters proclaimed, women remained shielded from the harder decisions of life and were allowed to be morally passive in times of public crisis. Equality thus meant more than just a fair wage. It meant choice, which is, of course, what feminism was supposed to champion. But southern white culture depended on political monopolies, hierarchy, and social control. Choice was kryptonite.
In the "Grand Bargain" of southern white womanhood, oppression is coded as privilege, whether experienced or aspirational. Southern white women are often still portrayed as polite and beautiful and charming, and they are defined in opposition to feminists, who are denounced as overly ambitious, greedy, manipulative, and untrustworthy. That sacred goodness associated with southern white womanhood renders southern white women ill-suited for the rough terrain of political life, or so the story goes, narrated time and again by men and women justifying and promoting "The Not-So-New Southern Sexism”. Yet southern white women who embrace this ideology can rally for "family values" because those values are patriarchal or traditional or biblical and because those values are all southern. The Republican establishment took notice of this energy and slogan quickly, politicizing abortion and gay rights, both of which they associated with feminism, and recycling the anti–big government rhetoric aimed at halting the federal enforcement of African American rights and applying it to the federal enforcement clauses included in the ERA. "As the new racism (mostly) replaced the old in politics” historian Kiera V. Williams has noted, "sexism ascended." By the 1978 midterm elections, which saw victories for a new cohort of southern, white, male Republicans such as Thad Cochran in Mississippi and Newt Gingrich in Georgia,47 the Long Southern Strategy seemed to be making a comeback. Two years later, after forty years of supporting some version of the ERA, the GOP dropped it from their 1980 platform. At the fork in the road, they turned right again.”
–Angie Maxwell and Todd Shields, The Long Southern Strategy p. 15















