White men’s self-positioning as protectors of white womanhood underpinned both anti-ERA and bathroom-panic rhetoric.

Evidence

This blending of racism and the perceived sexual vulnerability of white women had a long history in the South, even if historical evidence irrefutably demonstrates that it was black women who had reason to fear white men’s sexual aggression, not the other way around. But with the civil rights movement ending legal separation by race, white fears of imagined black male aggression reached a fevered pitch. That anti-ERA rhetoric focusing on the vulnerability of women found expression in racist terms is not altogether surprising. White men had long positioned themselves as protectors of white womanhood—a tradition that cultivated male bravado, and one that could easily spill over into racial aggression. Opponents’ fixation on unisex bathrooms caught many feminists off guard, but it pointed to deeper social anxieties that this new movement for “equal rights” was tapping into. It also prefigured the furor on the Right, and the evangelical Right in particular, over transgender people and bathrooms in our own time. — Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne, 168

Categorization

• XREF: Direct line to the modern evangelical panic over transgender bathroom access — connects to the book’s continuity thesis about militant patriarchal protection.
• SEED: Angle: the ‘bathroom panic’ as a through-line from desegregation-era restroom fears to transgender bathroom bills — showing the same archetype (threatened white womanhood) recast across eras.