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AFTER BARRY GOLDWATER’S DEFEAT IN 1964, his key supporters in the Republican Party came under attack by the moderates and the liberals they had so gleefully displaced. Phyllis Schlafly faced that fire head-on. Schlafly had been a central figure in Goldwater’s run for the presidency, first as the author of A Choice Not an Echo and then as the tireless, ardently conservative Vice President of the National Federation of Republican Women (NFRW). With the financial help of a group of wealthy California conservative women, she had also recorded a twenty-minute speech—framed by images of her loving children and husband—in which she asked Americans to vote for Goldwater and reject what she called the dangerously weak national security, communist-appeasing policies of Lyndon Johnson and his secretary of defense Robert McNamara: “Do you want to risk your family and children on the Johnson-McNamara policies?”1 The sponsored address was broadcast all over the country. Schlafly represented all aspects of conservatism in the early 1960s: inspired by her unwavering Catholic faith and by her belief in the character-building, economically sound principles of the free enterprise system, she was an ardent anticommunist who believed that American liberty built on a strong spiritual foundation was God’s gift to the world, which it was humankind’s duty to preserve.
Like many other stalwart conservatives, Schlafly had tied her fortunes to Barry Goldwater’s presidential run. With his failure, his enemies in the Republican Party were also hers. In the post-1964 fallout, the moderate pragmatists in the GOP, the “modern” Republicans who had backed Eisenhower and then Nixon, targeted Schlafly for removal from the party machinery. These GOP moderates succeeded, in the short-term, in purging her from a leadership role. Ironically, her fall from power placed her on the road to her greatest political and personal triumph. From her new position outside the cautious Republican Party apparatus, Schlafly helped engineer the triumph of the “New Right” in American politics.
Well before feminism was revitalized in 1960s America, Phyllis Schlafly proved that a woman—or at least (large caveat) a brilliant and fiercely self-disciplined woman—could do most anything she wanted: run for public office, write important books, find meaningful work. But just because women could triumph in such arenas without the coercive intervention of a paternalistic government does not mean they should, said the self-same Phyllis Schlafly. In a well-ordered, benevolent Christian society—in American society—women should always put their familial duties first, as she believed that she did.
In the 1970s, when American feminists and their supporters attempted to mandate women’s right to full equality under the Constitution, Schlafly stood in their way. She said that a moral order based on family values, not on feminists’ demands for full equality, is what America needed to keep women and their children safe, secure, and spiritually strong. In a dangerous world, in which subversive, immoral, and atheistic forces sought to destroy the American way of life, women guarded those family values and through that guardianship they best proved their virtue and earned their own value. Liberal feminists, Schlafly said, put individuals and not families first. Absolute, legally mandated equality would hurt, not help, women, their families, or American society. Liberal feminists, Schlafly said, want women to be just like men. The women’s libbers even wanted women to fight in wars and die in combat.
Feminists, Schlafly said, failed to understand that God made women and men different from each other because men and women had different roles to play in life. She taught conservatives that family values were at the heart of their multifaceted cause. She showed that family-values politics could create a tidal wave of new conservative women activists. As the threat of domestic communism lost its hold on the American public’s imagination and its centrality in the conservative movement, Schlafly helped conservative Americans see that subversion had a new name. In so doing, she swelled the ranks of conservative activists and voters, building a grassroots movement and a dedicated political base. In the 1970s, when even well-educated, middle-class young women wore blue jeans and learned to speak out loud about their sexual desires, Phyllis Schlafly wore pearls and pumps. She was a lady in a land awash in gutter talk. Her hair was perfect. To her followers, she was an exemplar of disciplined respectability in a time of slovenly permissiveness.
Schlafly had not set out to be the nation’s conservative voice on matters of family life and gender roles. She had built her political reputation on the right as a militant anticommunist. But she perceived in the women’s liberation movement and the general ethos of sixties culture a political opportunity she could not resist. She knew that her people felt themselves drowning in the liberal tide that had washed over the banks of university campuses and big cities and into the homes of America’s broad middle class. The feminists insisted that “the personal is political.” Schlafly and her allies would show feminists and their supporters how right they were by making the battle over women’s equal rights a war about the enduring value of womanhood, motherhood, and wifely duties in America. This was a war conservatives could fight and thought they could win. Once again, conservatives would argue that equality—the liberals’ shibboleth—was not Americans’ primary value; first came the need to maintain a moral order on which society depended. Schlafly, her followers, and her allies believed that moral order depended on sustaining a traditional religious family life in which women’s special and different roles as wives and mothers were not destroyed by the Left’s love of radical, untested change.
Phyllis Schlafly, born in St. Louis in 1924 to a devout Catholic family, could well have been, given her family’s economic travails during the Great Depression, a New Deal Democrat. Her father, John Stewart, lost his job in 1930 and never regained secure full-time employment in the private sector. Her mother, Dadie, became the family’s primary breadwinner, working in the poorly paid women’s sector of the economy, first as a department store clerk, then public school teacher, and finally as a librarian. If narrowly defined economic self-interest alone determined political consciousness, the Stewarts, daughter Phyllis included, should have been Roosevelt Democrats. But Phyllis’s mother and father scorned New Deal work relief programs and social provision policies. They rejected what they considered to be Roosevelt’s undermining of the free enterprise system. Though facing adversity, the Stewarts continued to believe that hard work, self-discipline, and adherence to religious faith were the means by which a virtuous life was earned and a moral order was established and maintained. Phyllis inherited those beliefs and never found reason to doubt them.2
Schlafly (still Phyllis Stewart) began her political work in the immediate postwar years in the anti–New Deal, Taftian, economic conservative cause. She had not set out to find employment defending the free enterprise system. After a stellar academic career that had ended triumphantly with an M.A. degree in political science at Radcliffe College, earned before she had even turned twenty-one (Schlafly had won a scholarship to attend Radcliffe but her coursework was largely done at all-male Harvard, which had only in 1943 begun to allow Radcliffe women to attend Harvard classes), Schlafly went to Washington, D.C., in 1945, planning to work for the federal government. Facing a tightening job market and stiff competition from returning veterans who received preferential treatment in government hiring, she became instead a researcher at the American Enterprise Association (later the American Enterprise Institute).
A better job for Schlafly’s political education would be hard to imagine. The AEA had been formed in 1943 by a group of powerful New York City–based businessmen who had been mulling over how to respond to the primacy of New Deal economics in national policymaking. They were far from the only businessmen infuriated by New Dealers’ success in disciplining the free enterprise system and raising taxes on the wealthy. The men who led the National Association of Manufacturers, the Chamber of Commerce, and many other probusiness organizations and trade associations fought actively in the political trenches, producing tracts aimed at shifting public opinion, testifying at hearings, and lobbying members of the government. A few of American’s richest men, some of whom had been active in the anti-Roosevelt American Liberty League, such as General Motors’s Alfred Sloan, took another tack, starting foundations to battle the leftist turn. The Sloan Foundation poured money into educational efforts aimed at teaching young people that the free enterprise system, not big government, produced economic security and guaranteed individual liberty. The AEA, however, was the only group that brought together conservative academicians with leading businessmen to produce rigorous analysis of economic legislation and broad economic policy.
Rather than embrace a narrow politics of economic self-interest as did the Chamber of Commerce or aim at changing mass public opinion as did the Sloan Foundation, the AEA vowed to prove to key government decision makers and influential (and intellectually oriented) members of the public how and why specific promarket policies benefited American society and why most business regulation and taxes hurt the American people. The AEA, in other words, was an innovative probusiness, conservative think tank. Schlafly only worked for one year at the AEA, but as her biographer Donald Critchlow observes, it was there—not at Harvard—that she was educated as a political conservative: “Her religious faith, now combined with a well-formed conservative ideology, created a formidable political outlook.”3 Schlafly also learned how to take complex ideas about politics and policy and communicate them in striking and simple phrases that nonexperts, whether they were congressional representatives or voters, could grasp and appreciate.
Schlafly decided to return to St. Louis, where she immediately continued her rapidly developing interest in conservative politics She worked as campaign manager for a Republican congressional challenger to an incumbent liberal Democrat and also as a researcher for a politically minded banker. Her congressional candidate lost, but Schlafly’s commitment to Republican Party political activism had begun, just as her work at the bank helped her to develop her writing and research skills in the conservative cause. By 1949, Schlafly had become a force in local, probusiness, conservative politics. She was a whirlwind, and she was only twenty-four years old.
Schlafly never intended to pursue a career single-mindedly. In October 1949, she married Fred Schlafly, a prosperous, highly accomplished, and politically conservative much older man. While she, herself, was a good deal older than the average bride of her era (about half of all women married in 1949 were twenty or younger), she was not exactly an old maid. Once married, she immediately quit her paid position and became Mrs. Schlafly, happily creating a home across the Mississippi from St. Louis in Alton, Illinois. The Catholic couple began having children, six in all. Schlafly was, to be anachronistic, a stay-at-home wife and mother but of a highly unusual kind. Schlafly’s husband was a well-connected and intellectually sophisticated Senator Taft–supporting Republican. The Schlaflys’ marriage was built, in part, on their companionate political passions. He respected her beliefs and admired her talents; from the beginning he urged her to continue her political work. With his encouragement and permission, she did continue that work, even as she raised her six children. In 1952, defying the gender conventions of the times, Mrs. Schlafly ran for Congress. The local county Republican Party leadership had wanted her well-to-do lawyer husband to run, not her. But after Fred turned them down, they looked to Phyllis, who at twenty-seven had already become a highly visible and effective political figure in the community, serving as a volunteer for the Illinois Federation of Republican Women and the Daughters of the American Revolution. With her husband’s blessing, Schlafly said yes.
Schlafly ran as a housewife candidate with her toddler in tow. She made her status as a woman, a wife, and a mother central to her campaign. While she commanded an extraordinary body of facts and figures to support her political stands, she positioned herself publicly not as a onetime Washington, D.C., policy expert or young but experienced political veteran, but as a married lady whose mission was simply to bring to Congress the commonsense virtue that her sex and wifely status taught her. So, she would say, “as a housewife, I am greatly concerned about the fact that we have the highest prices and highest taxes in our country’s history.” In a similar vein, “I feel very disturbed about the corrupt situation in politics. I think that women should get into politics and do something about it.” And most pointedly, “In former years … a woman’s place was in the home. Today, American women must stand together if we are to protect our home.”4
There was nothing cynical about the traditional feminine persona Schlafly offered voters, one that she would, in essence, maintain over the course of her political life. It was not, in other words, a persona crafted for political manipulation. Her feminist critics in the 1970s could never understand this about Schlafly. They thought that, at a minimum, she was a hypocrite. How could a woman, they said, be so dedicated to public life, so outspoken in her opinions, so energetic in her political organizing, book writing, and speech giving and yet reject the feminist cause that stood above all for making sure every woman had the opportunity to participate fully, fairly, and equally in all aspects of American life? What these feminist critics did not understand was that Schlafly never thought of herself as an exemplar of women’s absolute right to seek self-fulfillment and equality in American society. She saw herself as a follower of a very different kind of American tradition. In Schlafly’s 1952 congressional race—and thereafter—she drew on the venerable and respected American tradition of “republican motherhood.”
Dating back to the nation’s founding, a variety of women (and men, too) have argued that women are by nature and social position more capable of protecting the nation’s virtue than are men. Politically driven men, the argument goes, are motivated by personal ambition for high office and the need of economic advancement in a competitive marketplace to be fierce partisans; their goal, too often, is naked or cloaked self-interest. The Constitution, with its relentless attention to governmental checks and balances, was in part structured by the Founders in accord with this premise. Because, the argument continues, women are different by nature (less ambitious and selfish, more nurturing and altruistic), and because women have for religious and cultural reasons been long excluded from so many individualistic endeavors, instead earning their socially respected and religiously inspired place in life through the caring for others (children, husband, and elderly parents), they have traditionally been shielded from the corrupting hunt for personal power and gain. One of nineteenth-century America’s best-known female public figures, Catherine Beecher, was so fixed on the vital role women needed to play in bringing virtue to the American citizenry that she fought the effort to allow women to vote in the United States. In a famous and widely reprinted 1871 speech, “Address to the Christian Women of America,” she warned that allowing women to participate in the hurly-burly world of partisan politics would only harm the nation. Once women could vote and participate fully in the pitched battles of party politics, she feared, they would lose their special role as selfless nurturers; their ability to speak disinterestedly in behalf of the nation’s virtue would be lost in the swamp of special-interest pleading and self-interest.5 Whatever the merits of this claim, women deployed it in the service of various political purposes, ranging from Beecher’s antisuffrage stance to Jane Addams’s Progressive Era argument that women’s selfless virtue made them natural urban reformers.
Schlafly was an heir to this flexible, gendered political tradition, which until at least the 1960s was not seen by most Americans as particularly liberal or conservative. Even after the advent of the women’s movement, a small number of women on the Left argued that women had a different, more nurturing, less belligerent nature than men and that it was this special nature—not their individual ability and character—that made women valuable political activists. Like most everything Schlafly did, she used this gendered tradition extraordinarily well. Even so, claiming that her special role as nurturing woman gave her a vital understanding of the nation’s political problems carried with it risks. Especially on the Right, many men, and some women, too, were dismissive of the claims that women had a legitimate role to play in national public life, even the somewhat self-abnegating role of “republican mother.” During the long years of the Roosevelt era, for example, a number of the more vituperative members of the “Old Right” had tremendous fun viciously mocking First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt for her energetic efforts to look after the less fortunate among the American people. The anticommunist, anti–New Dealer Gerald Smith was among the wittiest of her many hecklers. His parody of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven,” attacked Mrs. Roosevelt for “Never sitting, never quitting, [n]ever knitting.” Along the same lines, an exacerbated Smith accused President Roosevelt of being less than a man for his inability to make his wife “stay home at least one-half of the time.”6 Schlafly faced some of this sexist vitriol, as well, and by no means just from fellow conservatives.
Both her Republican primary challenger and her eventual Democratic opponent tried to use her sex against her. Schlafly shrugged off the attacks from her Republican primary adversary, winning her party’s nomination but losing in the general election to her Democratic rival. She, at least, believed that her sex had nothing to do with the outcome, arguing that she may have lost some votes as a woman but that she probably picked up a few, as well; she lost, she said reasonably enough, because her district leaned heavily Democratic. Still, gender issues always surrounded Schlafly, and she knew it. She was not blind to or always accepting of the restrictions gendered conventions and men’s actions placed on her. But rather than struggle for a society in which women were freed from binding restraints, she took her new political experiences and ever-improving communication skills and threw herself into a fight for the values she believed were most important to the nation: a morally sound and religiously strong society. In the 1950s and 1960s, she believed that anticommunism was the cause that spoke most directly to that fight.
In the fight against communism, Schlafly was politically active throughout the 1950s and 1960s both in women-only organizations, especially the National Federation of Republican Women and the Daughters of the American Revolution, and in work that seemingly took her well outside of traditional female activities. She walked a thin line between a protofeminist engagement with the public world on egalitarian terms and a traditionalist understanding of women’s roles. Schlafly’s many anticommunist activities gave her good opportunity to manage this balancing act.
Not unlike the morally charged abolitionist struggle of the nineteenth century and the prohibition cause of the early twentieth, the right-wing anticommunist movement provided ample room for women to participate in accord with traditional gender roles. Historian Michelle Nickerson argues that while men dominated the leadership ranks of the cause, women filled the grassroots, activist base. These women worried about Soviet foreign policy, but they acted much more directly to stop what they perceived to be domestic communist subversion. Lucille Cardin Crain, for example, published the Educational Reviewer, a quarterly bulletin that warned concerned readers about a multitude of school textbooks that she believed to be communistic. PTA meetings in conservative bastions such as Southern California were filled with “citizen-housewives” who came together to hear speakers (usually men) warn about such dangers as “How the Communist Menace Influences the Minds and Thinking of Our Youth.” These wives and mothers dedicated themselves to ridding their children’s schools of teachers they perceived to be communists and of the kind of textbooks about which Crain had warned them.7
Phyllis Schlafly shared in these concerns about the Red infiltration of schools, libraries, and anywhere else vulnerable minds were at risk. She, like many other women active in the school textbook fights, ardently believed (as did William Buckley) that neither education nor civil society, in general, were places where Americans, especially the young, should work out their own views through an exposure to wide-open debate. Schools, in particular, should be places where young people were educated to be patriotic citizens. In a speech to the DAR, she stated her position in characteristically blunt fashion: “It is part of the Communist strategy … to destroy the feeling of pride we have when we see the Stars and Stripes unfurled.… In order to save our religion, our freedom, and our Constitution, we need the alertness of vigilantes, the fidelity of 100 percent Americans, the spirit of the flag-waver, the fervor of the nationalists, and the courage of our super-patriots.”8 Throughout the 1950s, Schlafly worked hard locally to warn people about the threat of communist subversion, collaborating with numerous Catholic and civic groups to spread information about the threat and to sponsor anticommunist speakers. Her concerns, however, were always about both the threat of domestic subversion and the danger—imminent, apocalyptic danger, she believed—of Soviet attack.
In 1958, Schlafly partnered with her husband and her husband’s sister to join her religious faith to the anticommunist cause. They formed a national Catholic organization, the Mindszenty Foundation, dedicated to fighting communism. Named after a Catholic cardinal who had been imprisoned in brutal conditions in Hungary, the foundation had two, interconnected goals: to inform Catholics of the persecution of their coreligionists in communist-governed nations and to alert them to the threat communism posed to them within the United States. Members of the advisory board, as well as a cofounder of the group, Father C. Stephen Dunker, were all Catholic clerics who had personally suffered at the hands of Chinese, Soviet, or east European communist dictatorships before making their way to safety in the United States.
Many of these clerics took a strong line not only against the ongoing religious persecution in communist nations but at any hint of perceived communist subversion within the United States. Given their own experiences at the hands of the communists, these were not men given to couching their anticommunism in a carefully discriminating fashion. They were perfect allies for Schlafly’s crusade. For example, advisory board member Most Reverend Cuthbert M. O’Gara made his anticommunist reputation in the late 1950s by accusing the American Catholic Church of allowing communists to subvert Catholic schools. After this charge was politely dismissed in a private letter to O’Gara by the leadership of the National Catholic Educational Association, O’Gara blasted back, “I am amazed that your letter is such a complete admission of your ignorance of what is actually going on in educational circles.” He then attacked the anticommunist credentials of the NCEA official and insisted that every single Catholic college should be investigated for Red infiltration; every professor and every relevant assigned book should be examined, and parents of every student should be offered the opportunity to challenge the dedication of every school’s anticommunist efforts. Men such as O’Gara made the foundation controversial within the American Catholic Church (so much so that cofounder Father Dunker was forced to leave the foundation by his Church superiors). Nonetheless, the foundation had chapters all over the United States and regularly sponsored anticommunist events that drew thousands of spectators, making it a major force on the Catholic anticommunist Right and a contributor to the larger anticommunist conservative movement.
Schlafly played a major role in the foundation’s efforts. She oversaw its very successful education programs and continuously warned followers through its publications to beware of communist influences in television, the movies, and public institutions. The Cardinal Mindszenty Foundation, at both the national and chapter level, proudly followed the broad-brush style of anticommunist attack made famous by Senator Joe McCarthy and vigorously defended by William Buckley.9
During the late 1950s and early 1960s, anticommunist work, often through the foundation, took up much of Schlafly’s nonfamily time, even as she remained a vital actor in local civic and Republican Party affairs. She wrote, researched, worked the phones, and gave speeches locally, honing her organizational and communication skills, while she also baked her own bread, cooked meals, shopped, breastfed each of her babies, and kept a careful eye on her children’s education and social life. Friends and family were in awe: “You’d call Phyllis and while she was on the telephone talking to you, she’d be typing and there would be a gurgling, cooing sound from one baby on her lap, and the noises of two of three others close by playing games.” Another noted: “She’s able to shut out everything else.… Very few women are. If the kids are running around and spilling the jam and cocoa, you feel that you have to go and see what is going. She is totally able to let them go on with the jam and the cocoa and not get up.” Then, too, at the Schlafly household the children were expected to do their part, which included not spilling the jam and cocoa while their mother was busy. A onetime summer helper with the children was a bit more ambivalent about the situation. Recalling the emphasis on punctuality, proper dress, carefully maintained and kept schedules, and the general importance of discipline and order, she characterized the household as “old-fashioned, sort of like I imagine it was in Victorian England.” Schlafly would probably have been pleased with that description.10
Not surprisingly, both Phyllis and Fred Schlafly were early supporters of Senator Barry Goldwater. Fred Schlafly was good friends with fellow Catholic lawyer Clarence Manion, who had led the Goldwater boomlet in 1960; at Manion’s urging, both had joined the Draft Goldwater Committee.11 Phyllis Schlafly was a powerful advocate for Goldwater in the Illinois Federation of Republican Women, which she headed in 1960. At the 1960 Republican convention, she invited Goldwater to speak at the Illinois Federation luncheon, where she introduced him as a “living lesson in the virtue of standing firm on principle, even if you are a minority of one.”12
Between the 1960 and 1964 presidential elections, Schlafly kept to her busy schedule fighting communism and raising her family. She was particularly successful in her leadership of the IFRW, where she brought in thousands of new members, in part, by warning them that subversive forces planned to destroy the moral and spiritual fabric of American society. The federation, she wrote in late 1962, stood at the ramparts defending America’s four most vital freedoms: “Freedom to Keep our Religious Heritage, Freedom from Obscenity, Freedom from Criminal Attack, and Freedom from Communist Conspiracy.”13 Schlafly, like many of her less articulate conservative women allies, was incensed that the Supreme Court, led by the modern Republican Chief Justice Earl Warren, had recently issued rulings banning prayer in public schools and limiting the government’s right to censor sexually explicit materials such as books and movies.
During the early 1960s, the civil rights movement captured the moral imagination and political heart of many Americans who believed that the struggle against racial disenfranchisement, legally mandated segregation, and endemic discrimination was the central battle for freedom and equality of their time. Schlafly was indifferent or opposed to all aspects of that cause, which she perceived to be divisive, disorderly, and socialistic if not completely communistic. She believed far greater issues were at stake in the United States: left-wingers meant to destroy Americans’ moral fiber and leave them defenseless against a growing communist peril. Throughout Illinois, white women responded to her call to defend their America against the darkening tide of secularism, communism, criminality, and moral relativism.
As the 1964 election drew closer, Schlafly began focusing more on Goldwater’s nomination. In June 1963, she made her first major appearance in the national mass media, blasting the liberal New York governor and presidential hopeful, Nelson Rockefeller, on moral grounds in Time magazine: “I’ve been taking a private poll of Republican women I meet all over [Illinois], and their reaction is nearly unanimous—they’re disgusted with Rockefeller.… The party is not so hard up that it can’t find somebody who stuck by his own family.”14 Schlafly announced her support for Goldwater immediately after he wrote to her and other activist supporters declaring his candidacy; she put herself forward as a GOP convention delegate. In early 1964, while pregnant, she decided she could best help Goldwater by writing a book attacking the Rockefeller wing of the Republican Party, which she and fellow conservatives feared would find a way to steal the nomination from Goldwater. She memorably titled the book A Choice Not an Echo.
Schlafly banged out the short book in a few weeks’ time. Her theme was unrelentingly pounded home in chapter after chapter: East Coast internationalist moneyed elites, since 1936, had stolen the Republican presidential nomination from the conservative rank and file who made up the Republican Party. Robert Taft, in 1952, had been the most egregious victim of this carefully engineered theft. “The kingmakers,” as Schlafly deftly labeled the conspirators, were far more dedicated to furthering their own international economic interests than they were in protecting the American people from Soviet communism. She named names, including Morgan banker Thomas Lamont; Governor Nelson Rockefeller’s banker brother, David Rockefeller; and GM president Alfred Sloan (an odd choice, given that he strongly supported Robert Taft in 1952!). “A small group of secret kingmakers,” she revealed, “using hidden persuaders and psychological warfare techniques manipulated the Republican National Convention to nominate candidates who would sidestep and suppress the key issues.”15 The kingmakers’ tricks included use of Gallup polls, which rely on numbers “so few that the exact number is a dark secret which Gallup will not reveal.”16 Her tone throughout was not meant to calm the soul.
In an over-the-top touch consistent with the conspiracy theory–mongering of the John Birch Society and allied organizations, Schlafly devoted a chapter to a kind of parallel and/or overlapping set of kingmakers, the “Bilderberg group.” These well-connected, rich and powerful men from North America and Europe, she suggested, conspired (successfully?) to control the world’s political economy, as well as America’s destiny. If that there were not enough, Schlafly also revealed, in a pitch-perfect, antielitist note, that they swilled “wines imported directly from France.”17
The Bilderbergers did exist. Starting in 1954 and continuing for many years thereafter, a high-powered and well-connected group of North American and European academics, diplomats, journalists, and businessmen met annually—and privately—to discuss world affairs and improve relations between their allied nations. But as Schlafly knew, they were hardly secret puppet masters controlling the fate of the free world. Schlafly, somewhat cynically, threw in the Bilderberg connection to give her readers some red meat to chew on. She admitted as much to a friend: “This is the sort of thing that our people lap up and love.”18 Regardless of the conspiracy theory fillip, factual errors, and inflated language, enough truth resided in her larger point—at least since the mid 1930s, East Coast wealthy internationalists played a major role in selecting GOP presidential candidates—to keep the book in the land of the politically rational (or as Schlafly titled one chapter, “Who’s Looney Now?”). And she certainly was right that Governor Nelson Rockefeller and a host of other East Coast–based Republican liberals and moderates were desperate to stop the nomination of cowboy conservative Barry Goldwater.
Schlafly, in accord with the grassroots style of the conservative anti-communist movement, self-published the book and marketed it herself to fellow activists. Like Goldwater’s Conscience of a Conservative, it was eagerly embraced by conservatives all over the country. The kingmaker theme, as was her main purpose, helped fire-up grassroots conservatives against East Coast super-moneybags Nelson Rockefeller. Schlafly also inspired Goldwater supporters with a populist defense of his intellectual gifts. Rather than fight liberals’ claim that Goldwater was too simple-minded to become president of the United States, Schlafly embraced the critique and turned it against Goldwater’s enemies, calling them a bunch of elitist “eggheads” too smart for their own good—or for the country’s. Sure, she said, Goldwater saw things in a simple, straightforward, commonsense way. That was a good thing. “Egghead reasoning,” she wrote, claims that the president “must have sophisticated—not simple solutions. Contrary to this argument, civilization progresses, freedom is won and problems are solved because we have wonderful people who think up simple solutions!”19 Often marketed in bulk numbers to activist groups around the country, particularly in hotly contested California, A Choice Not an Echo sold an astonishing 3.5 million copies in 1964. According to one survey, 93 percent of convention delegates said they had read Schlafly’s book, and 26 percent said that it had led them to support Goldwater.20
The book, with its front cover photo of the attractive author in her characteristic pearl necklace, made Schlafly a celebrity among conservatives. She was in great demand as a speaker and was feted at the convention. She starred, as noted, in a televised testimonial for Goldwater; “These are the six reasons I am voting for Barry Goldwater,” she began after viewers had seen her children playing with their father. Schlafly was a television natural. Between the convention and the election, Schlafly pushed hard on the anticommunist front by coauthoring a book with retired navy Admiral Chester Ward, called The Gravediggers. She self-published the book and used the same cover design that had worked so well for A Choice Not an Echo—a simple title above the now well-known photo of a smiling, pearl-necklaced Mrs. Schlafly. The Gravediggers argued that liberal President Lyndon Johnson and his kind were laying the groundwork for a Soviet military defeat of the United States. “American gravediggers,” she reported, “are not communists. They are card-carrying liberals. They will not commit the crime. They will merely dig the grave.”21 The Soviets, she explained, supplied these liberals with “made-in-Moscow slogans” aimed at sapping Americans’ ability to maintain the massive “fire-power” needed to stop a Soviet attack on the United States. “Slogans are Communists’ best gimmick,” she explained; they “are injected into our communication system by Soviet agents and their dupes to poison our pipelines of information.”22 President Johnson, though no communist, played a key role in this pipeline poisoning, while Barry Goldwater, “the irreplaceable man,” was all that stood between the Soviets and “the lives of your children.”23 Schlafly sold some two million copies of the book.24
Schlafly seemed on her way to national prominence as a Republican Party star and conservative spokeswoman on the communist threat. She had been elected first vice president of the National Federation of Republican Women, with its half million members, shortly before the presidential election, and she expected to be elevated auto-matically—as had been the rule for several years—to the presidency of the organization when the sitting president left office in 1966. But Goldwater’s crushing defeat put all party conservatives on the defensive, and Republican moderates and liberals did their best to take back the GOP from the Goldwater crowd. Their success was limited, but they did take down Phyllis Schlafly.
Schlafly faced opposition within the Republican Party not from the “kingmakers” she described so vividly in A Choice Not an Echo but from pragmatists who believed that the GOP risked becoming a permanent minority party if it did not move away from the Right and back to the Eisenhower-like middle-of-the road. These pragmatic party stalwarts were joined by the diminishing number of GOP liberals who felt vindicated by the margin of Goldwater’s defeat. A group of these Republican liberals, who had banded together in 1962 to form the Ripon Society, even hoped that Goldwater’s defeat would mean their revival. They argued that the GOP, as represented by Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt, was and should continue to be America’s progressive party; its future lay not with southern reactionaries but with “the new middle classes of the suburbs of the North and West … the young college graduates and professional men and women of our great university centers—more concerned with ‘opportunity’ than ‘security.’ ”25 (This provocative idea, an updated Taftian economic conservatism joined to social progressivism went nowhere at the time but would be reinvented by a later generation of Republican activists—conservatives—in the early 1990s.) In 1965, the pragmatists, with the liberals’ support, deposed Goldwater’s Republican National Committee chairman and replaced him with one of their own. But the general party mood was not fratricidal. Most Republicans (with the exception of a good many of the liberal faction) simply felt that the party had gotten a bit too wild and that it was time to swallow a few aspirins and get back to the business of winning elections. Unity, not more ideological battling, they believed, was the best anodyne. The tried-and-true scrapper Richard Nixon would be the immediate beneficiary of this party-building campaign.
Mrs. Schlafly failed to fit in with this unity campaign. She was perceived by many of the modern Republicans and all of the liberals as an uncompromising champion of the divisive conservative die-hards or as one of Schlafly’s key opponents in the NFRW put it, “the nut fringe.”26 During the Republican convention back in July 1964, Schlafly had publicly accused “anti-Goldwater” Republicans of working “to break up the party and support Lyndon Johnson in the fall election.” In a published interview, she told the Young Republicans of California that these apostates were “small in number and will not be any great loss.”27 While Barry Goldwater himself had expressed similar sentiments, in the postelection hangover era Schlafly’s outspoken comments made her a target of the party unifiers. Instead of ascending automatically into the presidency of the NFRW, Schlafly found herself in a political war.
She lost that war, which dragged on through 1966 and into the spring of 1967. The battle was covered by the national mass media, which treated the contest as a major marker in the Republicans’ post-Goldwater direction. The New York Times titled its first of several articles “GOP Women Face Right-Wing Test: Meet This Week to Elect a New Head in Bitter Fight.” Time magazine, in the sort of sexism that was typical of the era, recognized the ideological stakes but treated the contest as a cat fight: “There was none of that man-to-man, shake-hands-and-come-out-fighting spirit that marks male contests for power. But then, the two contenders for the presidency of the National Federation of Republican Women were, naturally, women, and in politics the dame game is not the same as the masculine variety. Nor is it very ladylike.” According to the Times, Schlafly blamed “New York liberals” for the fight; one of her followers, quoted in Time magazine, was less polite, pointing her finger at “the liberal rats.” Schlafly’s opponent, a Californian businesswoman and pioneering aviatrix, simply accused Schlafly of being too divisive a figure to lead the NFRW. Demonstrating the tangled gender politics of the time, the anti-Schlafly faction cited in the magazine story also argued that “any responsible mother with all those children ought to be home with her family.”28 Schlafly countered, “It is high time that the Federation has a president who is a wife and mother.”29 The vote in spring 1967 was close—much closer than the GOP middle-of-the roaders had expected—but Schlafly was deposed. The mass media, Republican stalwarts, and political observers of all stripes saw Schlafly’s loss as more evidence that the conservative movement had been dealt a death blow by the Goldwater defeat.
Schlafly interpreted events differently. She did accuse liberals of having stolen the election from her, and like everyone else she recognized that Goldwater’s supporters in the Republican Party were under siege. But to Schlafly, that was not the worst part of it. She had been purged, she wrote soon after the election, because she was a conservative woman who lived a traditional life based on family values. All women, she wrote in her usual blunt style and referring to herself in the third person, were treated with contempt by the party’s male leaders: “Many men in the Party frankly want to keep women doing the menial work, while the selection of candidates and the policy decisions are taken care of by the men in the smoke-filled rooms.… In Phyllis, they recognized one who could not be neutralized or silenced.” But Schlafly was not making an impassioned call for some sort of gender-free equality in politics. Her concern was less about equality in the abstract and more about ideology in particular. The party, she argued, was making a bad mistake in continuing to reward professional women without traditional family ties and responsibilities, such as her victorious opponent, with leadership of the National Federation of Republican Women. The party was telling “mothers of young children” that “they could be peons in the precincts but were barred from the highest office in the Federation.” Schlafly was doing more than standing up for all women in politics, she was speaking directly to her belief that “the values of ordinary American women” were being ignored or worse, by the male politicians who ruled both political parties.30 In making this claim, Schlafly began to stake out a new political territory and to organize like-minded traditional, religious, conservative women.
By the end of 1967, when Schlafly published her accusations about how and why the Republican Party purged her from its leadership, American society was in the midst of a rights revolution that was fast changing the legal, political, and cultural status of women. The kind of professional, working women that Schlafly had enjoined the Republican Party from rewarding had successfully allied with proponents of equal rights for African Americans and other racial minorities to ensure that the 1964 Civil Rights Act—the act that Barry Goldwater had opposed—also made employment discrimination against women illegal. Then, to push the reluctant federal government to enforce this provision, liberal feminists had formed the National Organization of Women in 1966. By the late 1960s, inspired by the civil rights movement in particular, but also by the massive movement for social change that was drawing millions of Americans to protest against the Vietnam War and for a more equitable and democratic nation, young and not-so-young women had formed a boisterous, multifaceted women’s liberation movement. Though Phyllis Schlafly paid little attention to this development at first, by the early 1970s, fighting it became central to her life and her conservative politics.
Feminism was hardly a new cause, though few Americans in the late 1960s or later knew it. In the United States women’s right activists had fought for political and legal equality since the early nineteenth century. Several generations of women had struggled for the right to vote, to hold public office, to serve on juries, and to control their own property. Success was recent; women’s federal voting rights were scarcely half a century old. Only in 1920, with suffragists having worked both sides of the political aisle, was a women’s right to vote guaranteed by passage of the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution (not coincidentally, feminists also succeeded in pushing through similar measures in the same time period in several other nations, including Australia, England, New Zealand, Germany, Holland and the brand new, one-party Soviet Union). These were not politically partisan battles, although Republicans were generally more sympathetic to women’s rights. Almost immediately after passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, some American feminists began working to pass a women’s equal rights amendment, aimed primarily at employment discrimination.
Women activists, however, divided over the proposed Constitutional amendment. Many progressive women, dedicated to preserving hard-won protective legislation aimed at safeguarding women (but not men) from dangerous and onerous workplace conditions, opposed the ERA. They feared that working-class women would lose more than they would gain from it. A great many professional women disagreed. They argued that protective legislation only contributed to men’s claims that women were not capable of working like men; it allowed such men to argue that the widespread and legal exclusion of women from the vast majority of well-paid, high-status jobs—or even decently paid, middling-status jobs—was justified and natural. Given this sort of class politics, it was not surprising that the Republican Party in 1940, generally opposed to paternalistically safeguarding any worker’s right to special protections, formally supported the ERA in its party platform and that Senator Taft was among the GOP supporters. In the 1950s, President Eisenhower reiterated GOP support for the ERA. While the Democratic Party had also come to support the ERA, despite opposition from its labor union bloc, the debate within the ranks of women activists over the issue of special rights versus equal rights for women had not been completely resolved in the early 1960s. However, by the mid-1960s modern feminists, with little stake in the old debate about the special needs of women industrial workers, had overwhelmingly decided that the loss of some protective legislation that favored women was worth the price if it meant that women would gain a legal guarantee of full equality in all aspects of American life.
While a general notion of gender equality unified most feminists, by the early 1970s much divided and factionalized the women’s liberation movement. Feminists had no party line on the roles that capitalism, religion, sexuality, and family life played in oppressing or liberating women. By 1970, a time when the nation was divided by the Vietnam War, racial justice issues, and the counterculture, groups of liberal feminists clashed with factions of radical feminists who were challenged by divergent feminists of color who debated a mixed bag of feminist separatists. What gender equality could and should mean in the United States, what it was to be a “liberated” women in America and the modern world, was not something that feminists, as a whole, could agree on. Still, most feminists concurred on a few general principles.
Betty Friedan laid out some of those principles in her 1963 best-selling book, The Feminine Mystique, which would sell more than three million copies. Friedan argued that women needed more than a pleasant home with husband and children to find satisfaction in their lives and to contribute to their society. In white-hot prose she damned American society for instilling in women the belief that only “neurotic, unfeminine, unhappy women … wanted to be poets or physicists or presidents” and that “truly feminine women do not want careers, higher education, political rights.” She continued, “The feminine mystique has succeeded in burying millions of American women alive. There is no way for these women to break out of their comfortable concentration camps except by finally putting forth an effort—that human effort which reaches beyond biology, beyond the narrow walls of home, to help shape the future.” Women, wrote Freidan, should be valued and should value themselves for more than their ability to have and nurture children and to attract and keep a man; “to break out of the housewife trap and truly find fulfillment as wives and mothers,” she insisted, American women had to fulfill “their own unique possibilities as separate human beings.”31 While some more radical feminists would find Friedan too accommodating to the traditional female roles of wife and mother, and though The Feminine Mystique was clearly oblivious to the different travails women of color and poor women faced in the United States, Friedan’s book and subsequent speeches, writings, and political organizing did much to launch, legitimate, and provide intellectual foundations for the women’s movement that grew in numbers and influence throughout the 1960s and 1970s.
As Friedan’s polemic indicates, women’s demands for change could not be satisfied by policy changes alone. Feminists wanted women and men alike to recognize the cultural, as well as the social and economic, oppression of women. Protesters attempted to “raise” people’s consciousness by demonstrating how often a woman’s value in America was reduced to her physical attractiveness and her marital status. At the 1968 Miss America pageant, women’s liberation protesters set up a “freedom trash can” into which they threw instruments of oppression: false eyelashes, girdles, wigs, and cosmetics. Others protested at bridal fairs, mocking the enormous expense of weddings and the marketers who promoted the wedding day as a woman’s greatest accomplishment. Their signs read, “Always a Bride, Never a Person.” These women, in accord with the simultaneous radicalization of the racial justice movement, New Left, and antiwar cause, were often deliberately vulgar and mean-spirited in an attempt to shock people into new ways of thinking. Some mocked brides, singing, “Here Comes the Slave, Off to her Grave.” And some showed contempt for the domestic activities of millions of women (though few understood their claims that way) by waving placards that read, “Fuck Housework.” These efforts did provoke thought, though not all of it was favorable to the cause.32
Feminists also produced an avalanche of books and articles, and in 1971 a leading group of women’s liberation advocates that included Gloria Steinem launched a mass market magazine, Ms. These publications asked women to ponder how and why women had been made to subordinate their hopes, their desires (including their sexual ones), their careers, their education, their health, and their happiness to men. And they asked why society did so little, if anything, to prevent men from harassing them, mocking them, beating them, and raping them. In the early 1970s, these feminists confronted a legal system that rarely prosecuted rapes or wife beating; a business world that almost never punished men who demanded that their female subordinates provide them with sexual favors; a religious establishment that asked for women’s faith but forbade them from being rabbis, priests, or ministers; and, in general, a society that denigrated ambitious, independent, and intelligent women. To explain this world, feminists invented a new word: sexism. Like contemporary racial justice activists, many advocates of the women’s liberation movement were angry, serious, and uncompromising in their demands for fundamental change.
In the early 1970s, the Equal Rights Amendment for women was seen as thin gruel by the more radical members of the women’s liberation movement, but nearly all feminists supported it. So, too, did an overwhelming majority of Congress. After a decade of monumental civil rights legislation aimed primarily at guaranteeing equality for African Americans, almost all congressmen saw a vote for the ERA as a no-brainer. The key passage of the ERA simply stated: “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.”33 In June 1970, after almost no deliberation, the House voted 350 to 15 in favor of the ERA. In the Senate, events unfolded more slowly, and some vocal opposition was raised; still, the ERA passed on a vote of 84 to 8. Literally within minutes, the Hawaii state legislature passed the amendment, as well, and an avalanche of other state legislatures rushed to join the ratification process.
Enter Mrs. Schlafly. Between House and Senate passage of the ERA, Schlafly denounced the proposed Constitutional amendment. Her megaphone was the monthly newsletter she had begun as a way to communicate with the three thousand women who had stood with her in her run for the presidency of the National Federation of Republican Women in 1967. “What’s Wrong with ‘Equal Rights’ for Women?” she asked in her February 1972 newsletter. Up until that time, Schlafly had largely ignored the booming women’s movement. She had been politically active, even running again (and losing) for Congress in 1970, but her focus had not shifted from that of her Goldwater days. Communism, especially the threat of Soviet attack, had remained her fundamental cause, and she feared that President Nixon (whom she had supported) was turning out to be no better than his liberal Democratic predecessors when it came to standing up to the enemy. Still, amid the social chaos of the late sixties and early seventies, generated, to her mind, by the combined forces of a countercultural Left, Schlafly recognized that the religious, culturally sound America in which she believed was under an extraordinary attack. She chose to enter the fray, picking a target that suited her longtime commitment to American family life as she envisioned it. She never intended to make the ERA and the women’s movement her primary focus.
In making her attack on the ERA and feminism, Schlafly turned the logic of the women’s movement completely on its head. Betty Friedan, the National Organization of Women, and more radical feminists argued that women faced economic discrimination, legal inequities, restrictive gender roles, and a culture that subordinated women to men. They contended that American women faced lives of diminished opportunities and systemic disempowerment. A society based on ideals of liberty, freedom, and equality for all must end not only racism but sexism. Schlafly mocked the very idea, insisting instead that “of all the classes of people who ever lived, the American woman is the most privileged.”
Feminists, Schlafly claimed, missed the whole point of what it was to be a woman. “Women have babies and men don’t,” she pointed out, and as a result society is organized to protect women so that they may properly raise those children. Some societies may not be so organized, but that is surely not to their credit. “We have the immense good fortune to live in a civilization which respects the family as the basic unit of society,” she observed. “Our Judeo-Christian civilization has developed the law and custom that, since women must bear the physical consequences of the sex act, men must be required to bear the other consequences and pay in other ways.… [A] man must carry his share by physical protection and financial support of his children and of the woman who bears his children.” This complementary relationship between men and women guaranteed social stability and provided a moral framework for family life.
Schlafly continued in this vein for several paragraphs. She insisted that while men might find achievement through their work, often taking “30 to 40 years for accomplishment,” women were far luckier: “A woman can enjoy real achievement when she is young—by having a baby.” She dismissed feminists’ constant complaints about violence against women by looking instead at the socially embedded cultural traditions that led men not to beat women but to protect them: women “are the beneficiaries of a tradition of special respect … which dates from the Christian Age of Chivalry. The honor and respect paid to Mary, the Mother of Christ, resulted in all women, in effect, being put on a pedestal.” “The traditions of chivalry” she noted, meant that men not only defended women but were willing to work long hours to buy their brides diamond rings and then their wives “a fur piece or other finery.” In a Taftian move, Schlafly further argued that women in America are the “most privileged” because of the genius of free enterprise, which has produced numerous labor-saving devices that have turned the drudgery of housework into a breeze: “The great heroes of women’s liberation are not the straggly-haired women on television talk shows and picket lines but Thomas Edison who brought the miracle of electricity to our homes … or Elias Howe who gave us the sewing machine.” Schlafly and her feminist foes were not seeing the same world. Schlafly did not mince words: “The claim that American women are downtrodden and unfairly treated is the fraud of the century. The truth is that American women never had it so good. Why should we lower ourselves to ‘equal rights’ when we already have the status of special privilege?”
Schlafly was not blind to the discrimination women faced in the workplace and elsewhere in society. Just as Robert Taft and Barry Goldwater had noted that African Americans faced racial discrimination, Schlafly knew quite well that women and men were not given the same educational and employment opportunities. She even seemed to go further than Taft and Goldwater when she wrote that she supported “necessary legislation” to stop such discrimination (although she did not in her essay or later writings explain what kind of legislation she meant and she never supported antidiscrimination legislation of any description). But as Schlafly saw it, discrimination was really beside the point. Feminists who demanded the ERA, Schlafly told her readers, were not really interested in fighting discrimination, either: “[T]his is only the sweet syrup which covers the deadly poison masquerading as ‘women’s lib.’ The women libbers are radicals who are waging a total assault on the family, on marriage, and on children.… Women’s lib is a total assault on the role of the American woman as wife and mother, and on the family as the basic unit of society.” The ERA, Schlafly concluded, was the means by which feminists intended to destroy America.
Supporters of the ERA, Schlafly asserted, wanted to outlaw traditional American women who took pride in being feminine and who devoted themselves to their families. She offered three examples. First, she argued, the ERA would make women equally subject to be drafted into the military (she was writing at a time when the draft was still in effect and the war in Vietnam was still raging). Second, the ERA would end women’s right to financial support from their husbands, making it possible for a husband to demand that his wife go to work. Third, it would end women’s near-automatic right to custody of their children in the event of a divorce. The ERA, in other words, would cost women far more than they would gain. “The women-libbers,” Schlafly wrote, “don’t understand that most women want to be wife, mother and homemaker—and are happy in that role.… We do not want to trade our birthright of the special privileges of American women—for the mess of pottage called the Equal Rights Amendment.” She finished with a call to arms: “Tell your Senators NOW that you want them to vote NO on the Equal Rights Amendment. Tell your television and radio stations that you want equal time to present the case FOR marriage and motherhood.”34
Schlafly sent out the newsletter with no particular expectations. A month later, one of her supporters phoned her with extraordinary news: her article had been circulated among Oklahoma state legislators as they prepared to vote on the ERA. Bolstered by Schlafly’s argument, the legislators had voted against ratification.35 Schlafly wasted no time. She began to organize, first contacting her supporters from the NFRW. Quickly, however, many more women who had never before been involved in politics flocked to the cause. Overwhelmingly, they were religious women, mostly evangelical Christians, but Catholics and Mormons as well. Schlafly had tapped a new constituency for the conservative cause.
In October 1972, she launched a new organization: STOP ERA (Stop Taking Our Privileges). By early 1973, the organization was national. Phyllis Schlafly and the conservative women who believed in her had found their new political battleground. They would be joined in their fight by men and women, most of them deeply religious, who feared that the ERA would destroy traditional gender roles. They linked the fight against the ERA to related issues, most important the battle over abortion rights and the status of homosexuals. A new kind of conservative coalition was lining up against the supporters of gay and women’s liberation. Americans were dividing themselves into two camps over issues of sexuality and gender, and conservative politicians liked their chances in this new political war.
Schlafly had important allies in her fight, men and women who would help redefine conservatism in the 1970s. Among the most prominent and useful was North Carolina Senator Sam Ervin who led the fight against the ERA in Congress. Ervin was a Democrat, part of that last generation of southerners who had come to political maturity at a time when the Republican Party in his home state stood for Abraham Lincoln and not Barry Goldwater. For some twenty years, Ervin had been best known for his fulminations against any and every form of civil rights legislation. In his first term as senator he had proudly coauthored the “Southern Manifesto” that had castigated the Supreme Court for ending mandatory segregation of the races in public schools. The nonviolent campaigns against racial discrimination in the early 1960s only inflamed his disgust for what he called the “snivel rights” movement. He blasted the 1964 Civil Rights Act, insisting that “[n]o men of any race can law or legislate their way either to economic or social equality in a free society,” and he called the 1965 Voting Rights Act “an insulting and insupportable indictment of a whole [white] people.” “Equality,” he insisted, could not be bought at the cost of “the freedom of the individual.” Senator Ervin, like Barry Goldwater, genuinely believed that individual liberties, and not a zealous pursuit of equality, were the wellspring of American justice. He would, in fact, win praise in the 1970s from the American Civil Liberties Union and Common Cause—organizations usually associated with the Left and not the Right—for his unbending commitment to protecting individuals’ rights from coercive government power. His principled stance became evident to the nation when he helped lead the effort to hold President Richard Nixon accountable for his “Watergate” misdeeds. But Ervin was dedicated to more than a simple weighing of individual liberties and equal rights. He was a proud traditionalist who believed in the racial hierarchies in which he had been raised and that had been passed along generationally among whites in his community.
Given that disposition toward racial hierarchy, Ervin, not surprisingly, was flabbergasted by feminists’ demands that women should be given the same rights, responsibilities, and opportunities as men. Men and women, he orated, are fundamentally different, and those differences should be and must be reflected in the laws of the land, just as they are expressed in custom and tradition. Men, he believed, had their superior qualities, such as greater strength, which made them natural protectors of women. But women too had special faculties. Like Schlafly, and like so many women reformers of the nineteenth century, Ervin insisted that women, because of their sex, their role as mothers, and their natural inclination to be helpmates to their husbands, had the ability to bring moral order to the fierce and competitive world that men made. Women, unlike men, he stated, could readily distinguish between “wisdom and folly, good and evil.” Ervin acted on this belief; he was one of the few members of Congress to hire women to work on his professional staff. The senator was not an easy man to pigeonhole. Still, as Donald Mathews and Jane Sherron De Hart, historians of the North Carolina ERA ratification battle, write, “Ervin believed he was defending timeless values against ephemeral fad, superficial posturing, and political pressure, all of which he identified with feminists. Their refusal to concede the rationality of legal distinctions based on physiological and functional differences imperiled society.”36 Ervin, who had failed in the mid-1960s to convince his Senate colleagues that civil rights legislation was wrong, failed in the early 1970s to turn the Senate against the ERA, but his courtly arguments did win the attention of Mrs. Schlafly.
Schlafly had been following the Senate debate over the ERA and had written to Senator Ervin to commend him for his leadership, as well as to send him a copy of her “What’s Wrong with ‘Equal Rights’ for Women?” newsletter. Within a few months, Schlafly had convinced Ervin to use his congressional free mailing privileges to send out massive numbers of anti-ERA packets. By early 1973, she had coordinated with Ervin to send anti-ERA materials to STOP ERA activists in twenty-four states and to legislators considering ratification in twenty-five states.37 In 1972, North Carolina elected its first post–Reconstruction era Republican Senator, Jesse Helms, who also threw himself into the anti-ERA cause. Helms, who would become a nationally important conservative champion by the end of the decade, built a close alliance with Schlafly.
Schlafly worked with members of Congress, but the real battle over the ERA, she knew, was at the state level, where the ratification fight was being waged one state at a time. In that conflict, Schlafly proved herself to be a grassroots organizing genius. She held workshops, set up chapters, traveled from battleground state to battleground state, and taught her people how to win. Throughout the 1970s, as the ERA war raged, Phyllis Schlafly became the most recognized figure on either side of the battlefield. For many Americans, the ratification fight over the ERA defined a new conservative-liberal divide. On the one side were the feminists, demanding equality for women and an end to sexism. On the other side were “traditional” women who insisted that America must support “family values,” respect and protect the role of wife and mother, and recognize that men and women had different roles to play in a virtuous and stable society.
Those “traditional” women believed in Phyllis Schlafly’s leadership, and those who joined the cause adored her. Carol Felsenthal, a liberal feminist who wrote a biography of Schlafly in the immediate aftermath of the ERA battle, was floored by anti-ERA activists’ personal commitment to Schlafly: “Her supporters became positively misty-eyed when talking about their Phyllis.” Schlafly showed her people how to make grassroots politics work; she inspired them to commit to community leadership. She provided the arguments and the evidence they needed to fight the ERA, but even more, she taught STOP ERA organizers how to raise money, how to get publicity, how to make politicians pay attention, and how to connect with other women who had never done anything political before in their lives. Schlafly even told her women what dress colors and makeup looked best on television. She videotaped them to help them become better debaters and modeled for them the calm, well-informed, disciplined, and cheerful feminine demeanor to which most politicians, who were overwhelmingly male, responded positively. What she taught them, Schlafly instructed, they were responsible for passing to the women in their chapters. For the housewives and mothers who joined the movement, STOP ERA was inspirational and life-changing. As feminists might have said, it was empowering. It was exactly the kind of participatory democracy left-wingers had thought they had cornered the market on in the 1960s and early 1970s.38
Schlafly was fighting the ERA, but she was also creating a powerful, well-trained activist base for the larger conservative movement. She used her newsletters, as well as her workshops and meetings with the STOP ERA activists, to teach her volunteers, most of them new to politics, how their struggle against the ERA fit into the larger conservative movement. Schlafly was creating a critical component of a revitalized, highly motivated, and savvy conservative Republican political base. Here were conservative legions who would raise money for, vote for, and convince their neighbors to vote for conservative candidates and issues.
Once Schlafly organized masses of women against the ERA, the seemingly uncontroversial amendment that most had seen as a sure thing began to lose support in state legislatures. A majority of state legislators, having been beseeched by STOP ERA activists to protect them from unwanted changes in their lives, began to vote against it. For many a state legislator during the early rush to ratify, a vote for the ERA had been a fairly easy way to show the ladies back in the district that he had their concerns in mind. Schlafly and her legions argued that legislators, in fact, were choosing a side in the battle between those who believed in time-tested, traditional gender roles that had governed America for generations and those who would upend family life, promote sexual promiscuity, mandate state-funded abortions, endanger women’s economic security, endorse homosexuality, and even force women to go to war, where they would face death and sexual violation. Given that framing of the issues, the ERA began to flounder, especially among the many male state legislators who were dubious about really having women take their place as men’s equals in politics, business, and at the dinner table.
Phyllis Schlafly, having done her best to craft the ratification vote in that way, then instructed her women in how to keep the heat on. First, they had to do the basics: organize legislative letter-writing campaigns, hold petition drives, and personally lobby their representatives both in their home districts and at the state capitol. Demonstrating once again her extraordinary ability to pack a powerful political punch in shorthand, Schlafly came up with compelling political tactics. Among the most pointed of those strategies was the fresh-bread offensive. When STOP ERA activists lobbied state legislators, they gave each of them (or at least all the men) freshly baked loaves of bread with an attached sticker: “from the breadmakers to the breadwinners.”39 STOP ERA wanted male legislators to understand that their women saw the roles of men and women as complementary. They did not want the world that came with legal equality, most especially financial independence. Traditional women wanted what they believed a mother and wife deserved—economic support from her husband.
Phyllis Schlafly used secular arguments, with an occasional heart-felt injection of religious language, to fight the ERA. Many of the people who joined her were more straightforwardly inspired by their religious beliefs. Among the most motivated was the leadership of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Under church leadership, Mormon women became powerful opponents of the ERA and feminism more generally. Given their church’s beliefs about the roles of men and women, Mormons were natural allies of the cause. The Mormon Church newspaper, Deseret News, announced its opposition in February 1975, the day before the Utah state legislature was to vote on the ERA. The paper reminded readers of “the fact that men and women are different, made so by a Divine Creator.”40 Mormons believed that difference to be not just a biological fact but a sacred one. Mormon women were regularly and emphatically instructed by Church leaders to reject the women’s liberation movement and to “Maintain Your Place as a Woman,” which meant accepting their submission to men in all spheres of life, including the religious, secular, and domestic.41 Such submission was a prerequisite for a “man and wife” to achieve exaltation in the “celestial kingdom” of heaven. The stakes, for believers, could not be higher.
Still, for Mormons, as for other religious groups, change in religious doctrine was always possible. Right up until the 1970s, Church leaders stated that according to their sacred doctrine no “Negro,” owing to inherent unworthiness, could ever become a priest (a status almost all male Mormons—but no females—gain at the age of twelve). Nor could any “Negro” enter the “celestial kingdom” except as a servant to a white family. And in the late 1960s, a prominent leader and later president of the Mormon Church, Ezra Taft Benson, could not have made clearer his opposition to African Americans’ struggle for equal rights in the United States: “Not one in a thousand Americans—black or white—really understands the full implications of today’s civil rights agitation. The planning, direction, and leadership come from the Communists, and most of those are white men who fully intend to destroy America by spilling Negro blood, rather than their own.”42 But in 1978, at a time when the Church was under intense social, economic, and governmental pressure on race issues, its leaders announced that they had received a divine message giving African-American and African black men status equal to that of white men in the Church.
So, even as the Mormon Church was coming under great pressure in the 1970s over its race practices, the leadership decided to make the issue of women’s subordination to men not just an enduring religious belief but a political priority. Historian Neil J. Young contends that the insertion of the Mormon Church into this secular, political battlefield was a deliberate decision by its leadership to become a far more powerful force in American politics, more generally. At a time when rapid social and cultural changes were testing Mormons’ traditional practices, the Church, under the guidance of its new leader Spencer W. Kimball, a committed conservative who took office at the end of 1973, meant to become a firm shepherd for its own flock and for the national community as well. The Church leadership girded itself for this struggle by emphasizing that the head of the Church was not just its president but a “Prophet” who worked as “God’s mouthpiece on earth.” To reject the Church leadership’s teachings on the ERA or on feminism, in other words, was to go against God.43
The result of the Mormon leadership’s decision to fight the ERA was impressive. Before 1975, a majority of Mormon legislators in the Congress as well as in a variety of states had voted to ratify the ERA. And in 1974, a survey by the Church’s own newspaper had shown that 63.1 percent of Mormons in Utah supported the ERA. After Prophet Spencer Kimball explained the Church’s opposition to the amendment, support for it evaporated among the faithful, and Utah’s state legislature voted resoundingly against it.
Mormon women, in particular, became a major force in actively fighting the ERA. In Utah, in 1977, some fourteen thousand of them turned out to rally against the amendment and the entire feminist agenda. They worked actively with Phyllis Schlafly’s STOP ERA throughout the United States and were a decisive factor in convincing legislators in Idaho, Nevada, and Virginia to vote against or to rescind previous support of the ERA. Mormon women also organized against the ERA using their own national Church-linked network, the women-only Relief Society. For Mormon women, who were expected to submit to men’s leadership in religious as well as secular matters, fighting the ERA became a way to prove their loyalty and importance to the larger mission of the Church. A great many embraced that cause resolutely.44
The Mormons were far from alone among deeply religious Americans to join the fight against the ERA and feminists’ attacks on restrictive gender roles. The Virginia-based Baptist minister Jerry Falwell, whose syndicated radio and television show, the Old Time Gospel Hour, had made him a national figure, helped convince the Virginia state legislature to reject the amendment. He spoke for many evangelical Christians when he stated, “A definite violation of holy Scripture, ERA defies the mandate that ‘the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church’ (Ep. 5:23). In 1 Peter 3:7 we read that husbands are to give their wives honor as unto the weaker vessel, that they are both heirs together of the grace of life.” He was quick to add that “because a woman is weaker does not mean that she is less important.”45 Similar understandings fueled other Protestant ministers, dedicated to a literal reading of the Bible, to oppose the ERA and the larger feminist cause.
In the early 1970s, political pundits thought Phyllis Schlafly’s battle to stop the ERA to be both hopeless and more proof of the political marginality of “Goldwater” conservatives. By the late 1970s, Schlafly had proved them wrong on both counts. She and her supporters had stopped the forward progress of the ERA and had successfully lobbied several state legislatures to rescind previous passage of the amendment. When liberals in Congress, facing the failure of the ERA to be ratified by the states, managed to extend the ratification deadline to 1982, Schlafly led the effort to battle the extension in Idaho through the federal courts. She was assisted by the Mormon Church and, most critically, by the Mountain States Legal Foundation, an organization that had been originally funded by the conservative businessmen Adolph Coors to fight government economic regulation, tax policy, and management of public lands. Schlafly’s war had brought together economic conservatives and working-class evangelical Christians, Mormons, and Catholics. Not since the heyday of the anticommunist movement had such divergent groups cooperated so well nor mobilized en masse so energetically on political issues. Against all odds, this conservative coalition led by Phyllis Schlafly killed the ERA.
Schlafly also worked tirelessly to join her legions’ battle against the ERA to other fierce cultural battles that began to rage in the 1970s. Almost from the beginning of her anti-ERA campaign she linked the feminist cause to the burgeoning gay liberation struggle. In her September 1974 Phyllis Schlafly Report, she told her readers that the ERA would mandate the legalization of lesbian and gay marriage. She warned that the women’s liberation movement had actively embraced lesbianism. (Betty Friedan, speaking for many liberal feminists, had feared that the “lavender herring” would damage the women’s movement in the eyes of many Americans, but, after a long, internal, divisive fight over the issue, she and most liberal feminists had eventually decided to put principle over short-term pragmatic politics and allied with openly lesbian feminists and advocates for gay civil rights.)46 The ERA, Schlafly continued, was just the first step in liberals’ crusade to extend legally mandated equality not just to women but to homosexuals. And while legal scholars mostly rejected Schlafly’s claim that the ERA would automatically legalize gay marriage, her larger argument that the women’s movement and liberals, more generally, were supportive of equal rights for lesbians and gay men was true.
Religious and cultural conservatives had long been concerned about issues of sex and sexuality, including but not restricted to homosexuality or gay rights. They had protested liberals’ advocacy of sex education in the schools, acceptance of sexually explicit books and movies, and tolerance for sex outside of the boundaries of traditional marriage. They believed socially mandated sexual control and individual sexual discipline were fundamental to the health of the traditional family and a necessary prerequisite to a moral, God-fearing nation. In the late 1960s, groups like MOMS (Mothers Organized for Moral Stability) had sprung up in conservative communities to fight against the dissemination of birth-control information in their children’s schools. Self-published anti–sex education books such as Is the Schoolhouse the Proper Place to Teach Raw Sex?, distributed by the Christian Crusade, became best sellers in conservative religious circles.47 Social conservatives believed that parents had the right to control their children’s sexuality and to limit their exposure to sexually explicit information. Many religious conservatives believed the Bible damned homosexuality and adultery. For many conservatives, liberals’ open acceptance of homosexuality and the rise of a mass movement in behalf of gay liberation were almost unimaginable blows to the nation’s moral and spiritual health.
This issue came to a head in 1977 when officials in Dade County, Florida, passed a gay rights ordinance. Several dozen other communities, almost all of which had active gay civil rights movements, had already done likewise. But in this case, local resident and national celebrity Anita Bryant—a former Miss America, pop singer, and Florida orange juice spokesperson—decided to fight back. She started an anti–gay rights organization, Save Our Children, to repeal that ordinance. Schlafly, Reverend Jerry Falwell, and other conservative figures flocked to southern Florida to support Bryant and her group. Schlafly vowed to fight what she referred to as the “perverts.” Falwell issued a somewhat bizarre jeremiad: “So-called gay folks [would] … just as soon kill you as look at you.” And in an only slightly more temperate tone, the erudite conservative columnist George Will declared the gay civil rights ordinance “the moral disarmament of society.”48 Bryant and her well-known supporters made the Dade County fight a national symbol for the culture wars that were breaking out all over the United States.
Bryant used language similar to that of the anticommunist crusade of prior years to attack the gay rights movement. Speaking to the anti-gay fears of many contemporary Americans, she warned: “As a mother, I know that homosexuals cannot biologically reproduce children; therefore, they must recruit our children.” She hit a strong nerve. Dade County voters responded to the charge by overwhelmingly voting in favor of a referendum that overturned the gay rights ordinance. The Save Our Children movement expanded and with its allies rolled back gay civil rights ordinances in several other states.
As was true of the ERA battle and the school textbook battles of the 1950s and early 1960s, the issue of gay rights resonated with many mothers and fathers who feared that liberals’ relatively new spirit of tolerance and expansive notions of equality were putting their families at grave risk. Government-mandated equal rights—first for African Americans in the 1950s and early 1960s and then for women and homosexuals in the late 1960s and 1970s—had become a major American battleground. Mostly, those who favored such rights understood that they were liberals and those who opposed such forms of legally mandated rights saw themselves as conservatives. When it came to the issue of gender equality, Schlafly, as much as anyone, had helped to draw that line and create that political war.
By 1980, Schlafly was just one general among many. Other committed conservative, religiously driven cultural warriors dedicated to returning Americans to their God-given moral verities, as they interpreted them, helped lead the charge. In 1977, Dr. James Dobson began Focus on the Family. Its mission was “[t]o cooperate with the Holy Spirit in sharing the Gospel of Jesus Christ with as many people as possible by nurturing and defending the God-ordained institution of the family and promoting biblical truths worldwide.”49 Two years later, Beverley La Haye, coauthor with her husband of a best-selling guide to a rewarding Christian marriage and an ardent anti-ERA activist, formed Concerned Women for America. Its charge was similar to that of Focus on the Family: “The vision of CWA is for women and like-minded men, from all walks of life, to come together and restore the family to its traditional purpose.… We believe it is our duty to serve God to the best of our ability and to pray for a moral and spiritual revival that will return this nation to the traditional values upon which it was founded.”50 Much more forthrightly than Schlafly, members of these groups and of many other similar organizations, demanded that public policy follow Christian verities as they understood them. Moral order—the bedrock of American society, they believed—must be based on the inerrant word of the Bible, which, they asserted, condemned homosexuality and feminist precepts.
These culture wars taught millions of Americans that they were conservatives. The equal rights battles and the oft-linked struggles over homosexuality were directly connected, as well, to other massive changes in American mores and legal rights. Most important, the 1973 Supreme Court’s ruling in Roe v. Wade that gave constitutional protection to women’s right to choose to have an abortion widened the gap between liberals and conservatives. While many Americans opposed abortion because they believed, in keeping with church teachings, that life began at conception, the debate over abortion also fit into the liberal-conservative versions of discipline and order. For liberals, who believed that the state should protect individuals from the dangerous unpredictability and uncertainty of life in a modern, capitalist society, women’s legally guaranteed right to have an abortion made sense. For conservatives, who believed that people needed to be held responsible for their bad choices and that only a strong, religiously based moral code could produce a stable and good society, abortion was a moral abomination that placed the right to individual sexual pleasure above society’s need to protect the family, and most especially the family’s most vulnerable members. The Catholic Church, operating through the National Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Family Life Division, responded almost immediately to the legalization of abortion by forming the National Right to Life Organization. For many Catholic conservatives, abortion replaced anticommunism as a singularly important and galvanizing political issue. Soon many Protestant-led conservative organizations joined the fight, as well. The conservative-liberal battle over abortion would only sharpen at the cusp of the 1970s and 1980s, giving ever-greater salience to the cultural issues conservatives had been championing for decades. Phyllis Schlafly, who had come to national prominence fighting the communist threat and whose Republican Party had spurned her in the post-Goldwater anticonservative witch hunt, had helped lead conservatives to a new battleground where they fought on favorable terrain. To earn victory, however, they would need to find another hero for the cause.