Women have been powerful drivers of book controversies. One woman in particular, Norma Gabler, re-defined the current strategy and logic behind modern book bans. Called “education’s public enemy number one,” by critics in 1980, Gabler led the crusade against the so-called secular trend in school textbooks throughout the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Even though Norma and her husband Mel worked together, Norma was the public face of their efforts for decades.
It all began in 1961 in Longview, Texas, when Gabler’s son presented his school textbook and pointed out that the words “one nation under God” were missing from the Gettysburg Address.
“Well, I’m Irish, and that got my Irish up,” Gabler reported in a 1982 article.
Angered by what she considered a factual and moral omission, Gabler, a devout Baptist, drove nearly five hours to Austin, the state capital, to complain to the State Board of Education.
After her trip to Austin, Gabler’s activism snowballed. She began regularly raising objections at the Texas textbook committee hearings, which advised the state’s Board of Education on which textbooks to adopt. It wasn’t until 1974, over a decade after she began, that she saw the fruits of her labor. That year, science textbooks contained a notice stating that evolution was a theory, not a fact. Her persistence, and ability to rally other Christian women to complain at committee hearings, had finally started to pay off.
At the same time as Gabler, other American women—from the left and the right—led disputes over educational material. In West Virginia, mother and school board member Alice Moore protested textbooks she considered anti-American, anti-God, and anti-white. Over the course of a year, thousands of other parents and organizations joined Moore’s protests, which eventually turned violent. Elsewhere, second-wave feminists argued that schools needed to rid curricula of gender stereotypes, and that women’s accomplishments ought to be more prominently cited in history books.
Norma and Mel Gabler went on to sway which books Texas adopted for the public-school curriculum. At the time, Texas was the largest textbook buyer in the nation and books for the entire state were selected centrally by the State Board of Education. As such, publishers relied on the Gablers’ evaluation of textbooks for sales. Because the Texas market was so big, other states also adopted their approved textbooks, meaning Texas—and the Gablers—often decided the curriculum for other states too.
The material Norma Gabler opposed included what she deemed “gutter language,” “secular humanism,” evolution, women’s liberation, and socialism. She advocated for the free market and Christianity. At the same time, other right-wing Christian women across the nation also became politically mobilized. They sought to curb the erosion of so-called Christian values from different areas of American culture, including education, television and movies, and books.