The Problem with Anita
Total Women, Trad Wives, and Antigay Politics
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After last week’s post about the Slowe-Burrill House, I intended to write next about the lesbian separatist collective known as The Furies, the townhouse for which was recently designated a National Historic Landmark. You’ll see that post soon, I promise.
My writing plans changed after news broke last night that anti-gay instigator Anita Bryant had died. National news outlets learned of Bryant’s death after family members posted an obituary in The Oklahoman on January 9, but she died about a month ago, on December 16, 2024, at age 84. Today, I want to reflect on the responsibility she carries for fanning the flames of antigay hatred in this country.
Bryant is best known for her successful efforts to overturn a gay rights ordinance in Miami-Dade County in 1977. What is less well understood is how significant the conservative evangelical pro-marriage movement was to her beliefs—and to her influence. Then as now, conservatives touted an idealized version of the “Christian” family. This family was comprised of a heterosexual parental pair and their obedient children, protected by the father’s strength and nurtured by the mother’s domestic expertise. Just as importantly, promotion of this “traditional” family went hand in hand with efforts to diminish or completely erase LGBTQ+ legal rights, often through viciously false characterizations of queer people as predatory dangers to children.
A quick overview of Bryant’s life: born in 1940, she was crowned Miss Oklahoma when she was 18 and went on to have a hugely successful career as a recording artist, mostly on the gospel circuit. She joined Bob Hope for USO tours in Vietnam, sang at President Lyndon Johnson’s funeral, and performed at the 1971 Super Bowl. By the 1970s she had lucrative contracts as a spokesperson for Florida Orange Juice and Coca-Cola. Her fame/notoriety exploded in 1977 when she publicly opposed a new gay rights ordinance in Miami-Dade County.
Bryant was one of several conservative Christian women who became leaders in the conservative movement while insisting that they had nothing to do with “politics.” (See Emily Johnson’s book, listed in the sources, for a deeper dive into this topic.) Instead, she spoke as a “wife and mother” who wanted to protect her children from harm. In this way, women like Bryant who came from communities that denigrated women’s leadership as a violation of God’s patriarchal order could justify their prominent public work. This stance also softened their rhetoric, reframing overt hostility toward lesbian and gay people as the protective actions of a mother.
One of her role models in this regard was Marabel Morgan, who created the “Total Woman” seminar program in the early 1970s to teach other Christian wives how to tailor their bodies, sexual behaviors, and household management strategies to the needs of their husbands. Bryant was a graduate of the Total Woman seminar; when Morgan published her ideas as The Total Woman—which went on to become the 1973 nonfiction bestseller—she dedicated it to Bryant. The Total Woman was one of several seminars and best-selling books in the 1970s that taught ideals of wifely submission in order to bring the entire household to Christ. (I write about these efforts in my first book, More Perfect Unions.)
That ideal also resonates in today’s phenomenon of the “trad wife,” a social media-born trend with young Christian women (often but not always Mormon) extolling the joys of marriage, giving up careers for homemaking (baking their own bread, sewing the children’s clothes), and full-time childrearing—typically presented to followers as completely independent of paid household laborers or childcare providers. (For a brilliant distillation of what the “trad wife” is and why it’s so problematic, read Lane Anderson, “Ballerina Farm and the weird Christian Nationalist dream,” Matriarchy Report, August 4, 2024.) It is easy to see how the trad wife phenomenon pushes against feminist efforts to achieve gender parity in the workplace or a social safety net that supports all family structures. What we can also see is how integral this version of female subordination is to campaigns against sexual equality writ large. Few people exposed the virulent antigay animus at the heart of conservative Christian marriage ideals better than Anita Bryant.
In 1977, Bryant created the organization Save Our Children to demonstrate her opposition to the “militant homosexuality” embodied in a new Miami-Dade County anti-discrimination law, which had been broadened to include gays and lesbians. Bryant explained that such a measure, simply by barring discrimination against gays and lesbians, sent the message that these people (and what they did) were “normal.” And she reiterated, again and again, that she spoke out not as an activist but as a wife and mother, categories that she and others suggested necessarily existed outside of politics. Even though she enjoyed national celebrity and had the support of Jerry Falwell, Tim LaHaye, the Southern Baptist Convention, Pat Robertson and his 700 Club, and other major vehicles of the Christian Right, Bryant claimed that her organization involved apolitical wives and mothers. Being political, by contrast, was something that feminists and homosexuals did. She launched her campaign, she explained, “in opposition to a well-organized, highly-financed, and political militant group of homosexual activists. . . .There was nothing political or militant in our motives.” That insistence barely masked the clearly political work of leading a campaign to repeal a county ordinance.
A core belief of Bryant’s crusade was that gay and lesbian teachers would use nefarious means to turn otherwise straight children toward sexual deviance. “Homosexuals cannot reproduce, so they must recruit,” she explained. We hear echoes of that logic in the “Don’t Say Gay” laws passed in the last few years, with lawmakers and activists falsely asserting that queer teachers and LGBTQ+ subject matter threaten the safety of children.
Bryant repeatedly identified her campaign as a moral cause. Many of her fellow protestors undoubtedly agreed that the Miami-Dade County ordinance condoned “the sadistic sexual rituals and abominable practices” that homosexuals allegedly favored but that Christianity deemed “aberrant.” On June 7, 1977, approximately 45% of registered voters in Miami-Dade County went to the polls and voted, 69.3% to 30.6%, to repeal the gay rights ordinance that had passed that January.
Following her 1977 campaign, Bryant established the Anita Bryant Ministries, a clinic for counseling gays and lesbians “back” to heterosexuality and to Christ. (The Ministries’ website describes that work as “encouraging others to live with faith and purpose.”) The ministry was one of a growing number of Christian programs offering what is now known as “conversion therapy,” a disproved and dangerous form of counseling that seeks to turn queer people straight while bringing them into a born-again Christian faith.
Yet as historian Eric Gonzaba and others have argued, Bryant’s antics instigated a wave of protests by gay people and their allies, who organized as never before to stop similar measures from passing in other states and municipalities across the country. Protestors hounded Bryant at public appearances (including an infamous press conference where a protestor hit Bryant in the face with a pie). Gay rights activists launched a boycott of Florida orange juice, and Bryant was fired as the industry’s spokesperson. (You can see some examples of activists’ protest t-shirts at the “Wearing Gay History” exhibit.)
Part of the problem with “trad wives,” in other words, is not “merely” that they represent a retreat from feminism and a celebration of patriarchy. As if that weren’t bad enough, we know enough of history to recognize these paeans to “traditional” marriage as fundamental to efforts to eliminate equal rights for LGBTQ+ people, enforce heterosexual orthodoxy, and embed a deeply conservative version of Christianity within American law. I find the whole “trad wife” phenomenon annoying, in other words, but I also find it alarming.
Please check out my book, Fierce Desires: A New History of Sex and Sexuality in America (W. W. Norton, 2024) — on “best of” lists for the New Yorker, Washington Post, and Kirkus Reviews!
Sources
Bryant, Anita. The Anita Bryant Story: The Survival of Our Nation's Families and the Threat of Militant Homosexuality. Revell, 1977.
Davis, Rebecca L. More Perfect Unions: The American Search for Marital Bliss. Harvard University Press, 2010.
Herman, Ellen. Psychiatry, Psychology, and Homosexuality. Chelsea House Publishers, 1995.
Johnson, Emily. This Is Our Message: Women’s Leadership in the New Christian Right. Oxford University Press, 2019.
Stell, William. “From Neighbors to Activists: Evangelical Gay Activism in the Late 1970s.” Journal of the History of Sexuality 31, no. 3 (2022), DOI: 10.7560/JHS31303.