“The politics of despair in America has typically been the politics of backlash.”
—SEYMOUR MARTIN LIPSET AND EARL RAAB
I HAVE HOPE FOR the first time in a long time,” declares Paul Weyrich. The “Father of the New Right” gazes out the window at the squalor surrounding his Washington, D.C., office. Homeless families huddle on the sidewalk grates; a half block from Weyrich’s Free Congress Research and Education Foundation, sirens wail and gunshots ring out.
The good cheer of the New Right leader would seem as inappropriate to the times as it is to his location. Isn’t the winter of 1988, after all, a little late for the founder of the Heritage Foundation to be feeling good about America? Wasn’t the New Right movement’s time of hope at the start of the decade, when its leaders drove liberal senators from office, rewrote the Republican party’s platform, and marched triumphantly into Washington? Hasn’t it all been downhill since then?
Weyrich, who has just returned from a college lecture tour, reads the signs differently. “I see great hope because there’s a new receptivity out there for the first time. Ten years ago, when I talked on campuses about the lie of women’s liberation, about withholding sexual gratification, I got an absolutely hostile reaction. People hissed and booed. Now I get great interest. Now at Kent State—Kent State!—I get a nineteen-year-old girl coming up to me afterward with grateful tears in her eyes, and she says, ‘Thank you. Thank you very much.’”
Not only are some college girls listening, the “liberal media” seem to be coming around to Weyrich’s point of view on women. This encourages him the most: “At last the lie of feminism is being understood. Women are discovering they can’t have it all. They are discovering that if they have careers, their children will suffer, their family life will be destroyed. It used to be we were the only ones who were saying it. Now, I read about it everywhere. Even Ms. magazine. Ms.!”
While the New Right movement failed to enact many of the specific legislative measures on its list, it made great strides in the wider—and, in the Reagan and Bush years, increasingly more important—realm of public relations. By the end of the ’80s, men like Weyrich no longer appeared to loom large on the Washington political landscape, but then that’s not where they had intended to wind up. As a New Right minister put it to his fellows at an early strategy session at the Heritage Foundation: “We’re not here to get into politics. We’re here to turn the clock back to 1954 in this country. And once we’ve done it, we’re gonna clear out of this stinking town.” In the final years of the decade, when men like Weyrich picked up their newspapers, it seemed to them that, as their sentiments began to seep into mainstream culture, the hands of time were indeed starting to inch counterclockwise.
If the contemporary backlash had a birthplace, it was here within the ranks of the New Right, where it first took shape as a movement with a clear ideological agenda. The New Right leaders were among the first to articulate the central argument of the backlash—that women’s equality is responsible for women’s unhappiness. They were also the first to lambaste the women’s movement for what would become its two most popularly cited, and contradictory, sins: promoting materialism over moral values (i.e., turning women into greedy yuppies) and dismantling the traditional familial support system (i.e., turning women into welfare mothers). The mainstream would reject their fevered rhetoric and hell-fire imagery, but the heart of their political message survived—to be transubstantiated into the media’s “trends.”
The leaders of the New Right were rural fundamentalist ministers whose congregations were shrinking and electronic preachers whose audience was declining. In the countryside, the steady migration of evangelicals to the suburbs and cities and the indifference of a younger generation were emptying their pews. On the airwaves between 1977 and 1980, at the very time of the “rise” of the New Right, the TV preachers’ audience fell by 1 million viewers. By November 1980, nine of the ten most popular TV preachers had fewer viewers than in February of that same year; Oral Roberts had lost 22 percent of his TV audience, and the PTL Club had lost 11 percent. Even at the peak of Moral Majority’s national prominence in the media, less than 7 percent of Americans surveyed said the organization represented their views. A Harris poll found that no more than 14 percent of the electorate followed the TV evangelists—and half of the followers told pollsters they were considering withdrawing their support.
“Backlash politics,” political scientists Seymour Martin Lipset and Earl Raab observed in their study of this periodic phenomenon in modern American public life, “may be defined as the reaction by groups which are declining in a felt sense of importance, influence, and power.” Unlike classic conservatives, these “pseudoconservatives”—as Theodore Adorno dubbed the constituents of such modern right-wing movements—perceive themselves as social outcasts rather than guardians of the status quo. They are not so much defending a prevailing order as resurrecting an outmoded or imagined one. “America has largely been taken away from them and their kind,” historian Richard Hofstadter wrote, “though they are determined to try to repossess it and to prevent the final destructive act of subversion.” As Weyrich himself observed of his liberal opponents: “They have already succeeded. We are not in power. They are.”
The New Right movement has its counterparts in the last several backlash eras: the American Protective Association of the late 19th century, the Ku Klux Klan revival and Father Coughlin’s right-wing movement in the ’20s and ’30s, the John Birch Society’s anticommunist campaign in the postwar years. The constituents of these crusades were failing farmers who could no longer live off the land, lower-middle-class workers who could not support their families or rural fundamentalists in a secular urban nation. They found their most basic human aspirations thwarted—the yearning to be recognized and valued by their society, the desire to find a firm footing on an unstable economic ladder. If they couldn’t satisfy these fundamental needs, they could at least seek the bitter solace of retribution. As Conservative Caucus founder Howard Phillips declared, “We must prove our ability to get revenge on people who go against us.” The New Right’s prime fundraiser Richard Viguerie vowed to “do an awful lot of punishing.” If they weren’t going to be rewarded in this life, they could at least penalize the people who they suspected had robbed them of good fortune. Every backlash movement has had its preferred scapegoat: for the American Protective Association, Catholics filled the bill. For Father Coughlin’s “social justice” movement, Jews. For the Ku Klux Klan, of course, blacks. And for the New Right, a prime enemy would be feminist women.
In 1980, Weyrich was among the first of many New Right leaders to identify the culprit. In the Conservative Digest, he warned followers of the feminist threat:
[T]here are people who want a different political order, who are not necessarily Marxists. Symbolized by the women’s liberation movement, they believe that the future for their political power lies in the restructuring of the traditional family, and particularly in the downgrading of the male or father role in the traditional family.
That same year, Moral Majority’s Reverend Jerry Falwell issued the same advisory. “The Equal Rights Amendment strikes at the foundation of our entire social structure,” he concluded in Listen, America!, a treatise that devotes page after page to the devastation wreaked by the women’s movement. The feminists had launched a “satanic attack on the home,” Falwell said. And his top priority was crushing these women, starting with the execution of the ERA. “With all my heart,” he vowed, “I want to bury the Equal Rights Amendment once and for all in a deep, dark grave.”
One New Right group after another lined up behind this agenda. The Conservative Caucus deemed the ERA one of “the most destructive pieces of legislation to ever pass Congress,” and to determine which candidates deserved funding, the Committee for the Survival of a Free Congress made each politician’s stance on the ERA the deciding factor. The depiction of feminists as malevolent spirits capable of great evil and national destruction was also a refrain. The opening of the American Christian Cause’s fund-raising newsletter warned, “Satan has taken the reins of the ‘women’s liberation’ movement and will stop at nothing.” The Christian Voice held that “America’s rapid decline as a world power is a direct result” of the feminist campaign for equal rights and reproductive freedom. Feminists, the Voice’s literature advised, are “moral perverts” and “enemies of every decent society.” Feminists are a deadly force, as the commentators on the evangelical 700 Club explained it, precisely because they threatened a transfer of gender power; they “would turn the country over to women.” That the New Right fastened on feminism, not communism or race, was in itself a testament to the strength and standing of the women’s movement in the last decade. As scholar Rosalind Pollack Petchesky observed, “The women’s liberation movement in the 1970s had become the most dynamic force for social change in the country, the one most directly threatening not only to conservative values and interest, but also to significant groups whose ‘way of life’ is challenged by ideas of sexual liberation.” Significantly, the critical New Right groups all got underway within two years after the two biggest victories for women’s rights—Congress’s approval of the ERA in 1972 and the U.S. Supreme Court’s legalization of abortion in 1973.
For the New Right preachers, the force of feminist ideas was also threatening their professional status. Like the late Victorian ministers who led their era’s vanguard against the 19th-century women’s movement, the New Right clergy depended on a mostly female flock of worshipers for their livelihood—and that flock was not only diminishing but becoming increasingly disobedient. In a 1989 survey of about eighteen thousand Christian-identified women in the United States, only 3 percent said they turned to their minister for moral guidance. Frustrated, the pastors tried to at least keep these women quiet. When a researcher tried to conduct a survey of evangelical women, one preacher after another refused to give her access to their female congregations. In their sermons, the New Right ministers invoked one particular Biblical passage with such frequency that it even merited press attention: Ephesians 5:22—24—“The husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is head of the church”—became an almost weekly mantra in many pulpits. In their domestic life, too, as much as the fundamentalist men tried to seal shut the doors, feminist ideas persisted in slipping through the cracks. “Wife beating is on the rise because men are no longer leaders in their homes,” an evangelical minister told a sociologist. “I tell the women they must go back home and be more submissive.”
To the New Right ministers, feminism and the sweeping political forces they associated with it seemed too powerful to rein in, but individual women closer to home made for more convenient and vulnerable whipping girls. Disappointed and embittered with the Carter administration for ignoring their demands for government-legislated school prayer, federally funded religious education, and a host of other objectives that they had hoped a Baptist president would back, fundamentalist leaders went after his sister Ruth Carter Stapleton with the most wrath. In a smear campaign that produced anti-Stapleton tapes, radio sermons, even a book, these men denounced the woman they dubbed “Queen of the Witches.” (Sorcery and sex equality were never far removed in New Right rhetoric.) “They really came after me,” Stapleton would recall later. “They were against women evangelists. Really, they were against women altogether. They said every woman had to be in total submission to the male.”
When the New Right men entered national politics, they brought their feminist witch-hunts with them. Howard Phillips charged that feminists had overrun the capital and were behind “the conscious policy of government to liberate the wife from the leadership of the husband.” Jerry Falwell seemed to see strident feminists everywhere he looked in Washington: even a federal Health and Education advisory committee on women’s needs was “made up of twelve very aggressive, self-proclaimed feminists,” he observed ominously. “Need I say that it is time that moral Americans became informed and involved in helping to preserve family values in our nation? . . . [W]e cannot wait. The twilight of our nation could well be at hand.” Not just the domestic cabinet was in jeopardy, Falwell advised. Feminists were undermining the military and now advancing on international affairs. In Listen, America!, Falwell outlined a global feminist conspiracy—a sinister female web of front organizations spreading its tentacles across the free world. Even the 1979 International Year of the Child had “a darker side,” he maintained: the event was a back door through which scheming socialist-minded women’s-rights activists had “gained access to a worldwide network of governments.”
Mandate for Leadership, the Heritage Foundation’s 1981 master plan for the Reagan administration, warned of the “increasing political leverage of feminist interests” and the infiltration of a “feminist network” into government agencies, and called for a slew of countermeasures to minimize feminist power. Mandate for Leadership II, three years later, was equally preoccupied with conquering the women’s-rights campaign; its authors asserted, “The fight against comparable worth must become a top priority for the next administration.” And Cultural Conservatism, another basic tract in the New Right library, wasted no time singling out “radical forms of feminism” as the source of a long list of social ills, from fractious youths to anti-American sentiments. Feminism’s radical operatives had made deep inroads into our government and schools, Cultural Conservatism warned. “One need not wander over to the Women’s Studies Department” anymore to encounter the “liberationists,” the book’s authors observed; now these pernicious ideas were deeply embedded in college literature departments, law school classes, TV talk shows, and “many a rock video.” Even when the New Right turned to “secular humanism,” they found feminism lurking between the lines. The schoolbooks that incensed them most were the texts portraying women in independent roles. The publications list of the Rock-ford Institute’s Center for the Family in America, a New Right think tank, read like a rap sheet against independent, single, professional, and, of course, feminist, women. In fact, only two of the twenty-one publication titles on its 1989 list didn’t deal with female crimes. Some typical offerings: “Perilous Parallel: Working Wives, Suicidal Husbands,” “Why More Women Working Means Lower Pay for Men,” “The Frightening Growth of the Mother-State-Child Family,” and “The Link Between Mother-Dominated Families and Drug Use.”
“Feminism kind of became the focus of everything,” Edmund Haislmaier, a Heritage Foundation research fellow, recalls. As an economic conservative who did not share his colleagues’ desire for a regressive social revolution, Haislmaier came to observe the in-house antifeminist furor with an uneasy detachment.
In retrospect, I’d have to say they blamed the feminists for an awful lot more than they actually deserved. The women’s movement didn’t really cause the high divorce rate, which had already started before women’s liberation started up. The feminists certainly didn’t have anything to do with disastrous economic policies. But the feminists became this very identifiable target. Ellie Smeal [former president of the National Organization for Women] was a recognizable target; hyperinflation and tax bracketing were not.
Soon after the New Right scored its first set of surprise victories in Congress, an ebullient Paul Weyrich assembled his most trusted advisers at the Heritage Foundation. Their mission: draft a single bill that they could use as a blueprint for the New Right program. It would be their first legislative initiative and an emblem of their cause. They would call it the Family Protection Act. But the bill they eventually introduced to Congress in 1981 had little to do with helping households. In fact, it really had only one objective: dismantling nearly every legal achievement of the women’s movement.
The act’s proposals: eliminate federal laws supporting equal education; forbid “intermingling of the sexes in any sport or other school-related activities;” require marriage and motherhood to be taught as the proper career for girls; deny federal funding to any school using text books portraying women in nontraditional roles; repeal all federal laws protecting battered wives from their husbands; and ban federally funded legal aid for any woman seeking abortion counseling or a divorce. The bill was largely written in the negative; in its long list of federal programs to rescind, the act offered only one real initiative of its own—new tax incentives to induce married women to have babies and stay home. Under this provision of the bill, a husband could set up a tax-deductible retirement fund if his wife earned no money at all that year. Evidently, even a Tupperware-hawking homemaker was suspect.
Other “family” legislative proposals from the New Right would follow in the next several years, and they were virtually all aimed at slapping down female independence wherever it showed its face: a complete ban on abortion, even if it meant the woman’s death; censorship of all birth control information until marriage; a “chastity” bill; revocation of the Equal Pay Act and other equal employment laws; and, of course, defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment.
In the 1980 election, the New Right would figure in the national presidential campaign almost exclusively on the basis of its opposition to women’s rights. Their most substantial effect on the Republican party was forcing its leaders to draft a platform that opposed legal abortion and the Equal Rights Amendment—the first time since 1940 that the ERA failed to receive the GOP’s endorsement. The Republican convention’s acceptance of the New Right’s antifeminist agenda that year, in fact, carved one of the only clear dividing lines between two national party platforms whose boundaries were blurring on so many other fronts, from foreign policy to law and order. And their candidate for top office distinguished himself most clearly from his predecessors by his views on women’s rights: Reagan was the first president to oppose the ERA since Congress passed it—and the first ever to back a “Human Life Amendment” banning abortion and even some types of birth control.
Yet strangely, most chroniclers of the New Right’s errand into the capital—supporters and opponents alike—characterized feminism as a “fringe” issue. Press accounts, even those emanating from liberal and leftist journals, generally presented the right-wing movement’s opposition to abortion and the ERA as distracting sidelights to the meatier, more “important” policy aims—decreasing government regulation, cutting the budget, bolstering defense. The first round of history books on the movement were no better. Richard G. Hutcheson, Jr.’s God in the White House, a typical account, allotted only two pages to the ERA and explored every possible cause for the right wing’s mobilization except feminism, from Watergate to the “new narcissism.” “[T]he ‘hearth and home’ issues” on the New Right agenda, Alan Crawford concluded in Thunder on the Right, were merely “nonpolitical, fringe issues at best.”
But while these commentators judged the New Right’s attack on the women’s movement to be a sideshow, the players in the right-wing fundamentalist drama knew better. For them, public punishment of autonomous feminist women was no less than the main event.
“We are different from previous generations of conservatives,” Weyrich said in a speech in 1980. “We are no longer working to preserve the status quo. We are radicals, working to overturn the present power structure of the country.” They were also the “new macho preachers,” as they were soon dubbed, swaggering and spouting a tough line from the TV screen. Reverend James Robison, “God’s Angry Man,” boasted of his past violent exploits (including the claim that he “planned rapes”); Reverend Tim LaHaye liked to tell the press about his days as a military man when he would “punch anyone’s lights out.” As they emphasized repeatedly in their texts and speeches, they were “warriors,” marching into enemy territory behind a barrel-chested Christ holding high the flag. “Jesus was not a pacifist,” Falwell liked to say. “He was not a sissy.”
Yet the fundamentalist soldiers had trooped to Washington precisely because they feared they had already become the “weak men” that Falwell’s writings repeatedly and anxiously derided. As much as the New Right warriors billed themselves aggressive and free agents of change, their maneuvers were all reactions against what they saw as the dominant enemy—the proponents of women’s rights. Despite the verbal bravado, the New Right was wholly dependent on another movement for its identity. This is, of course, the situation for any conservative group attempting to preserve or resurrect a threatened way of life. “Paradoxically, conservatism requires liberalism for its meaning,” political writer Sidney Blumenthal observed in The Rise of the Counter-Establishment. “Though [conservatives] have a sense of mission, they have difficulty rising above the adversarial stance.” But the New Right men found themselves in a position of dependency that was doubly demeaning: not only were they reacting rather than acting, they were reacting against women. At least John Birchers could picture themselves beating back the advances of Communist thugs. The New Right preachers faced the embarrassing task of fending off the ladies.
There seemed no escape from this posture of passivity built into a backlash movement. But the New Right men finally found a way. “For twenty years, the most important battle in the civil rights field has been for control of the language,” Mandate for Leadership II asserted—especially, such words as “equality” and “opportunity.” “The secret to victory, whether in court or in congress, has been to control the definition of these terms.” By relabeling the terms of the debate over equality, they discovered, they might verbally finesse their way into command. By switching the lines of power through a sort of semantic reversal, they might pull off a coup by euphemism. And in this case, words would speak louder than actions.
Under this linguistic strategy, the New Right relabeled its resistance to women’s newly acquired reproductive rights as “pro-life;” its opposition to women’s newly embraced sexual freedom became “pro-chastity;” and its hostility to women’s mass entry into the work force became “pro-motherhood.” Finally, the New Right renamed itself—its regressive and negative stance against the progress of women’s rights became “pro-family.” Before, the anti-ERA group Eagle Forum had formally dubbed itself “An Alternative to Women’s Lib.” But after the 1980 election, it changed its motto to “Leading the Pro-Family Movement Since 1972.” Before, Weyrich had no choice but to describe his enemy as “women’s liberation.” But now, Weyrich could refer to his nemesis as “the antifamily movement.” Now he was in charge—and the feminists would have to react to his program.
This Orwellian wordplay not only painted the New Right leaders out of their passive corner; it also served to conceal their anger at women’s rising independence. This was a fruitful marketing tool, as they would draw more sympathy from the press and more followers from the public if they marched under the banner of traditional family values. In the ’20s, the Ku Klux Klan had built support with a similar rhetorical maneuver, downplaying their racism and recasting it as patriotism; they weren’t lynching blacks, they were moral reformers defending the flag.
The New Right leaders’ language was, in many respects, as hollow as the Klan’s. These “pro-life” advocates torched inhabited family-planning clinics, championed the death penalty, and called the atom bomb “a marvelous gift that was given to our country by a wise God.” These “pro-motherhood” crusaders campaigned against virtually every federal program that assisted mothers, from prenatal services to infant feeding programs. Under the banner of “family rights,” these spokesmen lobbied only for every man’s right to rule supreme at home—to exercise what Falwell called the husband’s “God-given responsibility to lead his family.”
While the “pro-family” strategy allowed the New Right men to launch an indirect attack against women’s rights, they also went for the direct hit—using female intermediaries. When they wanted to lob an especially large verbal stone at feminists, they ducked behind a New Right woman. “Women’s liberationists operate as Typhoid Marys carrying a germ,” said their most famous spokeswoman, Phyllis Schlafly. “Feminism is more than an illness,” asserted Beverly LaHaye, founder of the New Right’s Concerned Women for America. “It is a philosophy of death.” In time-honored fashion, antifeminist male leaders had enlisted women to handle the heavy lifting in the campaign against their own rights.
Yet in mounting their attack on a public stage, the New Right women had to speak up and display independent strength—exhibitions that revealed them to be anything but the ideal models of passive and sequestered womanhood that they were supposedly saluting. These female leaders who relayed the movement’s most noxious antifeminist sentiments to public ears embraced far more of the feminist platform than either they or their male leaders let on—or perhaps realized.
Schlafly was only the earliest, most well known, and extreme, example. The woman who opposed the ERA because it “would take away the marvelous legal rights of a woman to be a full-time wife and mother in the house supported by her husband” was a Harvard-educated lawyer, author of nine books and a two-time congressional candidate. And she was far more favorably disposed to the agenda of the women’s movement than her public reputation suggested. In her antifeminist treatise, The Power of the Positive Woman, she actually gives an approving nod to feminist-inspired equal-rights legislation and ’70s-era federal sex discrimination suits that paved the way for “a future in which [the American woman’s] educational and employment options are unlimited.” All the women her book points to as positive role models are, in fact, stereotypical Superwomen: Olympic athletes, powerful political leaders, and ambitious business executives. To her mind, Margaret Thatcher is “surely one of the outstanding Positive Women in the world.” At times, Schlafly almost sounds as if she is lauding the other side’s accomplishments. “The Positive Woman in America today,” she writes gleefully, “has a near-infinite opportunity to control her own destiny, to reach new heights of achievement, and to motivate and influence others.”
The New Right women’s organizations that emerged in the late ’70s and early ’80s weren’t mere adjuncts to the male-led lobby. In fact, they often modeled the structure of their “auxiliary” groups more on women’s rights organizations than the male New Right hierarchies. And they borrowed political tactics and rhetoric, too, from feminist events, speeches, and literature. It was the 1977 International Women’s Year in Houston, which endorsed an essentially feminist platform, that first provoked the New Right women who attended to speak up and organize. Out of the conference, a host of New Right women’s groups sprang up and eventually consolidated into the National Pro-Family Coalition. President Carter’s 1979 White House Conference on Families, another feminist-minded gathering, served as the coalition’s springboard into national politics. This time, when the feminist agenda dominated the conference, the New Right women produced a shadow conference with a similar format—and they staged a walkout, formed an “alternative” assembly, and set their own agenda.
For many of these women, the experience was an exhilarating first brush with political activism, a liberating discovery of their public voice. “IWY was our ‘boot camp,’” Rosemary Thomson, author of The Price of Liberty and coordinator of the Eagle Forum’s contingent at the White House Conference on Families, proudly told a sociologist after the showdown. “Now we’re ready for the offensive in the battle for our families and our faith.” A national organizer for the Eagle Forum explained, “I had never given a speech, written a speech, testified, never been on radio, never been on television. . . . [Y]ou start getting some self-confidence. You beat a lawyer in a debate a couple of times and you start thinking, ‘Well, gee, that’s pretty good. I didn’t know I could do that.’”
Ultimately, however, the New Right turned the rising confidence and aspirations of these women to its own ends. The movement needed both articulate intellectuals to occupy the podiums and adroit organizers to fill the stands; the New Right women provided both. Two women in particular, Connaught “Connie” Marshner, the highest level woman in the Heritage Foundation, and Beverly LaHaye, the director of Concerned Women of America, the largest female New Right group, would take on the direction of these respective missions.
A woman’s nature is, simply, other-oriented. . . . Women are ordained by their nature to spend themselves in meeting the needs of others.
CONNAUGHT C. MARSHNER,The New Traditional Woman, 1982
If anywhere along the line, from 1979 to 1984, someone had said to me, ‘You should spend more time with your kids,’ I would have been highly offended.
CONNAUGHT C. MARSHNER, INTERVIEW, 1988
“Oh yeah, the Family Protection Act,” Connie Marshner is recalling. “I wrote the fact sheet on it. I sold it. I became its chief marketer.” Just after supper one evening in the spring of 1988, Marshner is sitting in the living room of her home in a suburb of Washington, D.C. Her husband, Bill, clears the table and then retreats to the kitchen to wash the dishes. She was too busy working today to cook, she explains, so it was takeout Chinese food for dinner again. While she balances her newborn in one hand and a pile of research papers in the other, she recalls the first heady days when she sat down to write the Family Protection Act.
“I was becoming so caught up in politics. I remember, I was in this neighborhood [child care] co-op at the time, but it quickly became clear I was never going to repay the favor. I was just too busy. Finally, well, the other mothers basically asked me to leave.”
Marshner’s political career began in 1971, at the University of South Carolina; undergraduate Connie Coyne was majoring in English and secondary education, but spending all her time at the campus chapter of Young Americans for Freedom, a conservative political organization. Right after college, she became an assistant to the editor of YAF’s magazine, the New Guard. When her boss moved to YAF’s Capitol Hill office, he offered her a job as his secretary. She quickly accepted, but she had no intention of staying in the clerical pool. Soon after her arrival, the boss gave her a paper, an attack on a child care bill, to type; she took it home instead and wrote, as she recalls, “the definitive analysis of what was wrong with it.” Her paper “became the conservative critique of Mondale’s Child Development bill that eventually led to its defeat.”
By Connie Marshner’s own analysis, aspects of her youthful conservatism—like her insistence that she attend Sunday school regularly—began as “child rebellion,” a desire to irk her more liberal and only nominally Catholic parents. But at the same time that she was fighting her elders, she was absorbing their advice for future use. Her mother, a frustrated homemaker married to a navy officer, told her two daughters not to follow in her footsteps. “Mother read Friedan’s Feminine Mystique when it first came out,” Marshner says, “and I remember her saying, ‘You won’t understand how awful married life is until you read it.’ Mother was always saying to me, ‘You don’t want to marry and ruin your life. Be independent.’
“Her father, too, urged Connie and her older sister, who would become a lawyer, to get a good education and steer clear of low-paying “women’s work.” She recalls, “My father was very wise. He told me, ‘Don’t learn shorthand.’” The Coynes encouraged their daughters to appreciate the value of self-sufficiency—a lesson Connie would carry into adulthood. “It never occurred to me to be helpless,” she says. “I guess someone who is taught to be helpless needs to be liberated. But I was never taught that.”
As a young woman, she was so set on maintaining her independence that “I was determined never to marry.” But then she met Bill Marshner at a church service in the early ’70s. They were wed in 1973. That same year, the Heritage Foundation was established as the New Right’s first think tank. Connie Marshner’s former boss at YAF, and a Heritage founder, recommended her to the foundation’s organizers. She accepted their offer—a researcher’s job—and she and Bill moved to a Washington apartment convenient to her office.
Again, Connie Marshner quickly transformed her lowly assignment into a more influential position. When her superiors saw “how good I was at handling reporters’ phone calls,” they promoted the twenty-two-year-old to education director. She began generating a steady stream of articles and monographs opposing government subsidies for child care, decrying the baleful influence of feminism in textbooks, and advocating government policies that would discourage women from seeking fulfillment outside the home. Both cerebral and pragmatic, Marshner fortified her writings with scholarly references—among them, infant mortality rates in 18th-century Paris and the limits of Malthusian theory—and then used hardheaded business logic to win points with corporate leaders. Abortion, for example, was bad for commerce; one in five fewer babies, she told a group of executives, meant they would sell “five fewer Star Wars toy sets—which translates to fifty or more individual Star Wars action figures.”
In the winter of 1974, she discovered she was pregnant. “I assumed I would give it [the job] all up, but then we were dirt poor so I didn’t.” Bill was in graduate school and she had no maternity medical benefits; her emergency delivery and seven-day hospital stay nearly wiped out their savings. In 1976, she was pregnant again. By then, she was holding down two jobs—as a research consultant for the Heritage Foundation and a field coordinator for the Committee for Survival of a Free Congress. And she had just accepted a publisher’s advance to write a book on education. Bill, meanwhile, was enrolled in a divinity graduate program in Texas. Rather than move west and sacrifice her work, Marshner stayed on in Washington and sent her one-year-old son to her mother’s house in Baltimore. In the final months of the pregnancy she rejoined her family in Texas, so that her husband could handle the child care and cooking—“thank goodness for Bill”—while she finished the book, writing into the night. “I was typing the final draft when I went into labor,” she recalls.
After Bill’s graduation, they moved back to Washington. Her career was prospering. “The book really changed my status in the conservative movement,” she says, and when Weyrich decided, after the 1978 election, to organize a major conference for new congressmen, he put her in charge. At the opening session, she delivered a speech that would, as she points out, prove “prophetic.” The topic: “Why social issues are going to be important in the 1980s.” Marshner smiles as she recalls the moment: “It was a case of ‘You heard it here first.’”
Also prominent in her memories of the conference is a small but telling incident:
At the conference breakfast, I was sitting at the table with Paul and the other newly elected congressmen. And one of them asks for everyone’s opinion on a particular subject, but he skips over me. Then he picks up the schedule and sees my name as the next speaker and he looks at me strangely, and all of a sudden, I realize, Oh, he thought I was Weyrich’s secretary.
A decade later, that moment is still sharp in her mind, yet she says the congressman’s slight barely bothered her. “I mean, I wasn’t pleased. It did teach me a lesson that men in politics, they think of girls as something to take orders. But I guess I have a funny mind; I forget people like that. I’m not one to hold a grudge.”
Marshner is able, if not exactly to forget the insult, then at least to salve its personal sting—by not counting herself as one of the “girls.” She seems to picture herself seated on the other side of the table, one of the honorary men, dispatching those “orders” to women. She got there out of sheer talent. “My experience in the job market was not anything that made me feel discriminated against. Everything I’ve gotten has been through merit.” She is the “exception” that proves the rule: her gender lacks ability, not opportunity, to make it in public life.
Campaigns for women’s rights, therefore, are “silly,” she says, because merit will always win out. If most women haven’t made it, that’s because most women don’t have what it takes. Judging by her writings and speeches, Marshner takes a dim and often disdainful view of her sex, a perspective she shares with Schlafly, who addresses housewives in her books as a camp counselor might sulky Girl Scouts. Just quit whining and be “cheerful” even if you don’t feel like it, she orders them in The Power of the Positive Woman. When Marshner refers to women, she uses a distancing second or third person, as if she doesn’t include herself in their numbers. “Women need to know that somebody will have the authority and make the decision”—and “your job,” she lectures women, “is to be happy with it.” When Marshner and Schlafly trained women for the protest rally at the White House Conference on Families, Marshner recalls that she was most impressed by Schlafly’s ability to “control the women. . . . When she said jump, they did.” Women need that direction from above, Marshner says: “You know, it’s very hard to organize women because they tend to be catty. They get all sidetracked on who will get what title. They just waste a lot of time.”
By 1979, Marshner had become director of the Free Congress Foundation’s “family policy” division and founding executive editor of the Family Protection Report. Then, the year of President Reagan’s election, Weyrich appointed Marshner to the “team of four,” an elite group that traveled across the country, hand-picking and training state leaders to foment grass-roots action. “In 1980, I was on ninety-nine airplanes,” she says. “I kept track.”
Meanwhile, her husband had found a job at a small college in Front Royal, Virginia. Connie didn’t want to move there, so she rented an apartment for herself in Washington. Then she persuaded an aunt in California to move to Front Royal to help Bill look after the kids. She visited on weekends. “Bill saw more of them than I did,” she says. “We had not only a commuter marriage but a commuter motherhood. And this was before it was fashionable! I guess I was ahead of my time.”
After the 1980 election, Marshner chaired a half-dozen advisory panels, directed a staff of five employees, continued giving speeches around the country, and debated everyone from abortion-rights activist Kate Michelman to former Sen. George McGovern. In 1982, the local county chairman asked her to run for the Virginia House of Delegates. She turned it down, but not out of a sense of feminine propriety. “I was intrigued but I was too busy saving the country to worry about one district in Virginia,” she says. Her third child was born the following year—and Weyrich, concerned that she might take time off, proposed that she set up a nursery in a spare office. “Paul was very accommodating,” recalls Marshner.
That year, with her career approaching its zenith—she bought a car phone to field all her business calls—Marshner spoke before the Family Forum conference in Washington, D.C. Her subject: “Who Is the New Traditional Woman?” Her answer sounded a lot like the New Traditionalist ad copy that Good Housekeeping would later script: “She is new,” Marshner said of this feminine icon, “because she is of the current era, with all its pressures and fast pace and rapid change. She is traditional because, in the face of unremitting cultural change, she is oriented around the eternal truths of faith and family.” Marshner drew no connection between the positive, “new” aspects of women’s lives and the fruits of feminism. In fact, Marshner told her listeners that the women’s rights movement was the enemy of the New Traditionalist. It had unleashed “a new image of women: a drab, macho feminism of hard-faced women who were bound and determined to carve their place in the world, no matter whose bodies they have to climb over to do it.” The archetypal macho feminist, she said, was the bad mother in the film Kramer vs. Kramer, who put her husband in charge of their child and went off to find herself. “Macho feminism has deceived women,” she said, “in that it convinced them that they would be happy only if they were treated like men, and that included treating themselves like men.”
Marshner delivered similar rallying calls for the traditional family at the 1984 Family Forums II and III in San Francisco and in Dallas, deliveries timed to coincide with the presidential political conventions in these cities. Then she flew back to the office—to accept the title of executive vice president of the Free Congress Foundation, making her the highest-ranking woman in the New Right Washington establishment.
Marshner’s own interest in the housewifely duties of traditional family life, as she freely admits, remains limited. “I’m no good with little kids and I’m a terrible housekeeper,” she says. “To me, it’s very unrewarding, unfulfilling work. By contrast, what I’m doing in Washington has real tangible rewards, accomplishments.” Yet neither she nor her husband believes this makes her a “macho feminist.”
In 1987, pregnant with her fourth child, it looked like Marshner might finally take her own advice: she decided to take a break from Washington politics. Weyrich again tried to talk her out of it; by now, the foundation depended heavily on her literary and speaking talents. But this time she turned him down. The harrowing 1984 death of her infant daughter, born with a congenital heart defect, haunted her. She wanted to be home for the new baby.
“Marshner’s out of it now,” Weyrich says, when asked about her in early 1988, waving a dismissive hand in the air. “She just left to have her fourth child. Okay, she’s still executive editor of the Family Protection Report. But basically she’s out of it. She’s a classic example of what I’m talking about—women just can’t do it all. . . . Every single one of the girls I’ve had here who’ve had children has left.” As he speaks, four women are hard at work in their offices down the hall—from his finance manager to his vice president of operations to his secretary. All of them have children; several are even single mothers.
Marshner also didn’t take time off to devote herself to traditional housekeeping. She immediately set up an office at the house, accepted a post as general editor for a Christian publishing house, began freelancing numerous articles and landed a contract for her fourth book—this one against day care. “I’m going to look at the data on the effects of day care,” she says, “and talk to mothers who use it about why they regret it.” Now that she is home, she seems quick to judge women who aren’t. “When you have a child, that has got to be your priority. If you don’t, sooner or later you will pay the price, either in maladjustment or your own consciousness.”
The woman she judges most harshly, and unfairly, is herself; the backlash ideas she helped unleash have come back to roost in her own psyche. She wonders now if her preoccupation with her career might have “caused” her daughter’s heart defect. “I think the boys would probably have been happier if I stayed home,” she says. The boys, however, who are listening from the living room couch, disagree. “Those were great days,” sighs Mike, who is twelve. “I liked it when you worked.”
The woman who is truly Spirit-filled will want to be totally submissive to her husband . . . This is a truly liberated woman. Submission is God’s design for women.
BEVERLY LAHAYE,The Spirit-Controlled Woman
God didn’t make me to be a nobody.
BEVERLY LAHAYE, INTERVIEW, 1988
The founder of Concerned Women for America always tells the press the same story of her antifeminist “awakening”: One evening in 1978 in her San Diego living room, Beverly LaHaye was nestled at the side of her husband, Moral Majority co-founder Tim LaHaye; they were watching the evening news. Barbara Walters was interviewing Betty Friedan, and when the feminist leader suggested that she represented many women in America, LaHaye leapt to her stockinged feet and declared, “Betty Friedan doesn’t speak for me and I bet she doesn’t speak for the majority of women in this country.” She vowed then and there to rally other “submissive” women who believe, like her, that “the women’s liberation movement is destroying the family and threatening the survival of our nation.”
Shortly thereafter, she chaired a meeting for this purpose at a local church. “I didn’t know if anyone would even show up,” she says, “but twelve hundred women filled that room. I couldn’t believe it! The only way I could explain it is that the majority of women out there do not agree with Betty Friedan and the ERA.” There was, however, a more likely explanation for the big turnout: by 1978, Beverly LaHaye’s name guaranteed a crowd in the evangelical community—and not because of her opposition to feminism.
The real awakening of Beverly LaHaye had occurred two decades before this electronic encounter with Betty Friedan, at a 1965 motivational conference for Sunday school teachers. At the time, LaHaye was a “fearful, introverted” housewife who clung to her husband’s side and was so shy that “it was difficult for me to entertain in our home,” much less venture outside it. She was the Submissive Woman she would later celebrate, and she did not enjoy it. “I refused most invitations to speak to women’s groups because I felt very inadequate and questioned if I really had anything to say to them,” she wrote in The Spirit-Controlled Woman, in a chapter titled “The Missing Dimension.” Its contents could have as easily belonged to the famous chapter in Friedan’s Feminine Mystique, “The Problem That Has No Name”:
One very well-meaning lady said to me in the early days of our ministry, “Mrs. LaHaye, our last pastor’s wife was an author; what do you do?” That was a heavy question for a fearful twenty-seven-year-old woman to cope with. And I began to wonder, “What did I do?” Oh yes, I was a good mother to my four children, I could keep house reasonably well, my husband adored me, but what could I do that would be eternally effective in the lives of other women? The answer seemed to come back to me. “Very little!” There was something missing in my life.
Likewise, LaHaye’s analysis of housework might sound familiar to early readers of Ms. She wrote:
When her youngest child was still in diapers, LaHaye went back to work, full-time, as a teletype operator for Merrill Lynch. “Thirty years ago, ministers didn’t get paid very much. We couldn’t survive, so I had to go to work,” she explains. But that wasn’t the only reason. “I liked working there. It was kind of exciting. You had to get there at six A.M. because that’s when the stock market opened in New York. They paid well. And I enjoyed it.” She hired a “housekeeper,” as she calls her nanny, a black single mother who “couldn’t find work because she lacked job skills.”
In my case it was not the major problems that succeeded in wearing me down; it was the smoldering resentment caused from the endless little tasks that had to be repeated over and over again and seemed so futile. Day after day I would perform the same routine procedures: picking up dirty socks, hanging up wet towels, closing closet doors, turning off lights that had been left on, creating a path through the clutter of toys.
The teletype job helped build her confidence, but it was the changes triggered by the 1965 Sunday school conference that finally supplied “the missing dimension” in her life. The speaker, the popular Christian psychologist Henry Brandt, talked to the teachers about every human being’s basic need for self-improvement and expression. The words stirred dormant passions within the young preacher’s wife. “Down deep in my heart, I felt I would like to stand up and express myself,” she says later. “And I never thought that would change.”
The psychologist’s words got her thinking about a way to overcome her fears. So did a Biblical passage that he alluded to—a line from Timothy that promised the Holy Spirit would deliver disciples not only love but “power.” “This is what I needed!” LaHaye said to herself, as she later wrote. If she had “a new power within,” she reasoned, maybe she could combat her timidity and develop “confidence.” In the months that followed, LaHaye began to cobble together a self-improvement plan that was part pop-psychology and part religion, founded on the principles of assertiveness training and buttressed by Christian dogma. As she diagnosed the problem later in a self-help book for Christian women, she and many other housewives suffered from “a rather poor self-image,” “passivity,” and a “sense of inferiority.” She wanted to assert herself and exert “strength,” but she wanted to do it without challenging the church or threatening her husband. And she found she could, if she made it clear that she was seeking only “spiritual power.” It was acceptable to crave authority by framing it as a desire for “access to the power of the Holy Spirit.” No one in the evangelical community could object to her ambitions, as long as they were holy.
Although LaHaye was quick to label her take-charge desires a “spiritual submission to God,” the steps she outlined in her writings about it later were suspiciously action-oriented. Her semantic strategy was the opposite of that of her New Right male peers; while they concealed their feelings of weakness in active-sounding terminology, LaHaye hid her newly assertive self behind a screen of passive-sounding rhetoric. The New Right male leaders falsely claimed to be in command; she falsely claimed to have no interest in taking the helm.
By tapping “spiritual power,” LaHaye wrote in The Spirit-Controlled Woman, a fundamentalist woman could “step forth in all confidence,” “overcome her passivity,” and become “a capable person.” In LaHaye’s version of spiritual growth, self-confidence was next to godliness and timidity a black mark on the soul. A spirit-controlled woman must “recognize her fearfulness as a sin and cope with it accordingly.” Through such inversions of religious tenets, she could dare to concentrate on building self-esteem, an independent identity and a public voice—all the while claiming to be doing it only through, and for, Jesus.
LaHaye’s journey toward spiritually mediated liberation began in earnest the day she forced herself to accept an invitation to talk before a women’s church club. She told them about her confidence-boosting ideas, and to her amazement the women applauded and crowded around afterward, seeking her counsel. She agreed to talk to other women’s groups. Her popularity grew quickly on the Christian speaking circuit. With her husband, she began directing “Family Life Seminars,” hosting a weekly cable television program and a live call-in radio talk show on family living. Soon a publisher approached her with a proposal to write a self-help book for Christian women. “I said, ‘Oh no, I’m not a writer,’” she recalls. “Then I thought, wait a minute. I can do that.” The Spirit-Controlled Woman, published in 1976, sold more than a half-million copies. In the next decade, LaHaye wrote five more books for Christian women, self-development tracts with chapter titles like “You Can Help Yourself” and “Can a Courageous Woman Be Silenced?”
At the same time that she was busy writing The Spirit-Controlled Woman, LaHaye was finishing up a long-term book project with her husband, Tim. In 1976, against the advice of all their fellow Christian marriage counselors, the LaHayes finally published The Act of Marriage, a sex manual. The book instantly became the evangelical equivalent of The Joy of Sex; it was read by millions. The Act of Marriage: The Beauty of Sexual Love was a revolutionary document for evangelical readers, both for its frank and graphic content (it covered foreplay, lubrication, and multiple orgasms—in remarkable detail) and for its female perspective on sexual pleasure. Not only did the book teach Christian men how to gratify their wives in bed, it informed them in no uncertain terms that an orgasm is every woman’s right: “Modern research has made it abundantly clear that all married women are capable of orgasmic ecstasy. No Christian woman should settle for less.” The book’s observations often suggested that a female hand was wielding the authorial pen: “Regrettably some husbands are carryovers from the Dark Ages, like the one who told his frustrated wife, ‘Nice girls aren’t supposed to climax.’ Today’s wife knows better.” The manual urged women to check their submissive behavior at the bedroom door:
“Many women are much too passive in lovemaking. . . . Lovemaking is a contact sport that requires two active people.” The LaHayes even declared the vaginal orgasm a myth, sang the praises of clitoral stimulation—“Your heavenly Father placed [your clitoris] there for your enjoyment”—and referred dubious readers to a Biblical passage that they said justified their enthusiasm (Song of Solomon 2:6: “Let his left hand be under my head and his right hand embrace me”). As if all this weren’t enough, the authors actually endorsed birth control, and for this reason: to maximize women’s enjoyment of sex.
The Act of Marriage may have read as if Beverly LaHaye were on the verge of a feminist conversion, and one worthy of Germaine Greer. And, indeed, in other arenas, too, she seemed to be endorsing basic feminist tenets. She declared herself a supporter of equal rights for women, said she was “totally in favor” of pay equity, and called herself a firm believer in “a woman’s right to be free from sexual harassment on the job.” Yet she was never prepared to take the final steps, which had the potential of separating her from her church, husband, and social universe. Instead, in the years following the book’s publication, she wound up leading a countercharge against the women’s movement. Having introduced equal rights to the evangelical bedroom, she now moved to fight it on all other fronts. Having attracted a huge following by telling women to “step forth in all confidence,” she now mobilized her female army for a campaign to chase themselves home.
In drawing women to her new cause, LaHaye played on both traditionalist fears and feminist aspirations. She emphasized how changes in women’s status might threaten their traditional marriages and leave them “unprotected.” At the same time, she gave hundreds of thousands of Christian women an acceptable outlet for the assertiveness that she had recognized as fundamental to human growth and that she had helped foster. “I discovered an organization where I could think, use my brain,” said Cheryl Hook, a Chicago homemaker, who was spending thirty hours a week on CWA activities. By working for Concerned Women for America, women could be vocal and forceful—without setting off any alarms at home or in the pews. They were, after all, only speaking up for their sex’s right to stay quietly at home.
After founding Concerned Women for America in 1979, LaHaye set up a national network that could dispatch hundreds of thousands of women on short notice. She organized what she claimed was the nation’s largest women’s group (estimates range from 150,000 to a half-million members) into two thousand “prayer/action chapters”—with the accent on action. Even the prayers were notably this-worldly in sentiment. “Father, we pray that money being considered by the legislature is not used for teenage pregnancy,” began one, served up at a 1986 breakfast prayer meeting in a Maryland hotel. “We ask that You confuse the plans of our enemy, particularly our enemy Planned Parenthood.” LaHaye used her network to swamp Congress with bags of letters and to detail hundreds of out-of-state women to “local” antiabortion protests around the nation. In 1986, her rapid-response team descended on Vermont and, with the aid of a $350,000 war chest, helped defeat the state’s Equal Rights Amendment.
In the press, Concerned Women for America was often described as the Moral Majority’s ladies’ club, a sort of Daughters of the New-Right Revolution. The characterization wasn’t entirely unjust; the CWA women were certainly treated like auxiliaries by the New Right and the Reagan administration, who often deployed them tactically as fund-raising and letter-writing foot soldiers. New Right leaders, in fact, originally funded Concerned Women for America in hopes that the organization would generate reinforcement troops. Tim LaHaye offered his wife as a safe figurehead; the board members of Moral Majority packed CWA’s board of directors with their wives, who, they assumed, would do their bidding.
But as time went by, Concerned Women for America evolved from a spousal service society into a one-woman fiefdom. Beverly LaHaye’s unchallenged authority became the envy of men like Paul Weyrich. “She has the kind of loyalty from her people,” he said, “where literally she can call them up and say, ‘Don’t do that,’ and they’ll drop it.” Much to their chagrin, the New Right male leaders were unable to command the same kind of obedience from LaHaye herself. She refused to support candidates as they specified. When Falwell, Ed McAteer of the Religious Roundtable, and the other top men of the New Right endorsed Bush, LaHaye broke the united front and backed Jack Kemp. Later, she abruptly yanked her endorsement after Kemp annoyed her. His offense: he sent a letter to CWA members over her signature, calling him the “only true conservative,” without asking her permission first.
In 1983, LaHaye moved her office from San Diego to Washington, D.C., where she built up a twenty-six-person Capitol Hill staff, launched a five-attorney legal division to take on the courts and wielded a $6 million annual budget. She began jetting around the country, then the world. One year she went to Costa Rica nine times. While on the road, LaHaye dispatched orders via her new car phone. And she made it clear she would have no successors; by 1987, she had become president for life.
• • •
“I THINK the women’s movement really hurt women because it taught them to put the value on the career instead of the family,” Beverly LaHaye says. She has granted an interview in her Washington, D.C., office. It is her sixth today, she reports.
As might be expected, the business cards on the desk of this champion of femininity are pink. So are her nails, the chairs arranged around her boardroom table and the frilly window curtains. Yet she wears a well-tailored suit. On the wall behind her hangs a framed photograph of Ronald Reagan and herself, clasping hands. Some of her other decorative choices lean to the presidential, too: an Oval Office—size desk and a large American flag stationed at its side. A large mirror hangs at a strange angle on the opposite wall—but it’s not for applying pink lipstick. “Mrs. LaHaye had that mirror put up there like that,” Rebecca Hagelin, spokeswoman for Concerned Women for America, explains, “so she can look at it from her desk and see Capitol Hill.”
“Feminism really blotted out motherhood,” LaHaye asserts from be-hind her desk. “Family must come first for a woman; it’s just not natural any other way.” Just then, LaHaye’s personal assistant slips into the office, bearing a Filofax. Apologizing for the interruption, the assistant proceeds to review LaHaye’s traveling schedule: “This weekend you’re out of town till Sunday,” she says, reading from the Filofax. “On the 5th, it’s your National Day of Prayer speech, then the 6th is St. Louis, the 7th through the 8th is Florida, the 9th through the 17th Costa Rica, the 18th that speech in New Jersey, the 19th Washington again, the 27th and the 28th Massachusetts. . . .”
LaHaye approves the itinerary, the assistant departs, and the director of Concerned Women for America returns to her defense of traditional motherhood. “Women must put family as their top priority. If that means giving up the career, then so be it. It’s just the natural way. It’s built into us as women.” What of her own long bouts away from home? “Oh well, my children are grown. When my children were growing up, it was another matter,” she says, her early-morning work shifts at Merrill Lynch conveniently forgotten.
“These career women, what’s happening to them is their biological clocks are going off,” she says, supporting her antifeminist precepts with evidence from popular culture rather than the Bible. By the late ’80s, the backlash was so widespread that LaHaye could find as many useful media buzzwords as scriptural quotations. (Her latest antifeminist book, The Restless Woman, would invoke the all-popular trends of “postfeminism” and “baby hunger,” footnoting not Heritage Foundation tracts but the New York Times and Glamour.) Career women, she continues in the same vein, “looked up one day from their desks and they realized they couldn’t have it all. . . . That’s why the trend is that more and more women are leaving the work force.” Asked for evidence to support this “trend,” she says, “I don’t have the statistics in front of me, but I read about it in the paper. . . . Look at the movies. They’re all about having babies now. Like Three Men and a Baby.”
LaHaye excuses herself: she has a “management meeting” she must attend. She grants permission to talk to a few women on staff; no one is allowed to speak without clearance from the top. Elizabeth Kepler, director of legislative affairs, is one of the women on the approved list, and she has just breezed in from “the Hill,” where she’s been lobbying all week against federally funded day care.
“I just love it, absolutely love it,” Kepler says, flopping into a chair. She furtively pokes some pesky shoulder pads back into place as she talks. “I was drawn to Washington for the excitement. You know, power. How people come into power, how they use that power.”
How did she wind up at Concerned Women for America? “To be honest, I was more interested in the general process of Washington politics than this organization itself.” She hastens to add that she is in “total agreement” with the organization’s goals of restoring women’s traditional roles. But would she personally like to go back to the roles women were limited to in her mother’s day? She shakes her head. “It would be frustrating. I’m glad I live in the time I do.”
At twenty-seven, Kepler is single, and describes herself as “very content” and in “no rush” to wed. Unlike some of her more liberal counterparts in mainstream professional careers, she finds the talk of man shortages and biological clocks “pretty silly.” If she does have children, she’s not sure she would quit her job. Although she is lobbying this week against federally supported child care, she says she would not be averse to leaving her own child in day care, though she prefers a “family-based” center. Her explanation is couched in pseudofeminist terms. “I just think that the federal government shouldn’t tell us what kind of day care our children should have. I believe women should have a choice.”
Down the hall, Susan Larson, director of management, is reviewing office reports. Recently wed, she advocates a return to traditional marriage. But accepting the CWA post meant putting her career before her husband’s; he followed her to Washington—without any job prospects. And in her house, she adds, “I change the car oil and my husband does the laundry.”
In another room, publicity director Rebecca Hagelin is on the phone to her husband. “Now, let’s see, the carpet needs to be vacuumed,” she instructs. “And if you could straighten up the living room a bit.” It’s past six P.M., and Hagelin is still at the office. Her husband is at home making dinner, taking care of their baby and preparing the house for guests that evening. The Hagelins might have found the blueprint for their domestic arrangement in an early-’70s manual for liberated couples: they split the chores and trade off child care. “See, I really wanted to have a baby, but I really wanted to work,” Hagelin says. “I love to work.” She likes the fifty-fifty arrangement. “That’s the way it is in the ’80s, it’s not an either-or situation. It really is possible to have it all.”
• • •
THE NEW Right women were, in some respects, the reverse image of their more progressive “yuppie” sisters who got trapped in the backlash eddies. While mainstream professional women were more likely to voice feminist principles while struggling internally with the self-doubts and recriminations that the backlash generated, the New Right women were voicing antifeminist views—while internalizing the message of the women’s movement and quietly incorporating its tenets of self-determination, equality, and freedom of choice into their private behavior.
If the right-wing activists at Concerned Women for America seemed less anxiety-ridden about the “price” of their own liberation than the average liberal career woman, maybe that’s because these New Right women were, ironically, facing less resistance in their world. As long as these women raised their voices only to parrot the Moral Majority line, as long as they split the chores only so they could have more time to fight equal rights legislation, the New Right male leaders (and their New Right husbands) were happy to applaud and encourage the women’s mock “independence.” The women always played by their men’s rules, and for that they enjoyed the esteem and blessings of their subculture. On the other hand, working and single women in the mainstream, who were more authentically independent, had no such cheering squad to buoy their spirits; they were undermined daily by a popular culture that parodied their lifestyle, heaped pity and ridicule on their choices, and berated their feminist “mistakes.”
The activists of Concerned Women for America could report to their offices in their suits, issue press releases demanding that women return to the home, and never see a contradiction. By divorcing their personal liberation from their public stands on sexual politics, they could privately take advantage of feminism while publicly deploring its influence. They could indeed “have it all”—by working to prevent all other women from having that same opportunity.