Episode 96 -- Phyllis Schlafly, Part 2

Hello, I'm Adrian Daw.

And I'm Moira Donnegan.

And whether we like it or not, we're dead with the right.

Okay, Adrian, welcome to my insane document that I sent you.

It's just like 10 pages and it's all walls of text.

So I hope you're ready.

Yeah, just to give people a little peek behind the curtain here,

Normally, we always, people who listen to the show a lot know this, we share kind of not a script, but like a background document.

And some of those can be two, three, four pages.

And sometimes with 1933, I go pretty wild with like 12 to 15.

Moira, I think, is more, you know, being herself a journalist is a little bit more parsimonious usually.

Like she wants to hit bullet points visually arranged.

But when she goes overboard, she goes crazy.

And this is one of those.

I'm very excited to see what this sounds like on the air because I was just like scrolling through block text being like, oh Lord, oh Lord.

Well, so we'll see.

Well, this is my opus, right?

Because this is our part two of our deep dive into Phyllis Schlafly.

And we did sort of the origins of Phyllis.

in part one.

I encourage everybody to listen to that.

But today we are tackling the thing that Phyllis is best known for and one of the biggest catastrophes in American feminist history.

The failure and conservative triumph that has led us to so much of where we are today.

And that is Phyllis Schlafly's defeat of the ERA.

That's right.

I also like want to pause for a moment and reflect on the fact that I'm about to

end

a research project because we've wanted to do Schlafly

basically for the entire time that we've been doing this podcast.

And I have been passively and then more actively researching the ERA fight really for like the past two years, right?

You have no idea how many tabs I just closed before we started this recording session.

So this is a big deal for me.

So just let me fly my freak flag here.

You guys are going to come on this journey with me for as long as you can handle it.

Adrian, tell us where we left Phyllis at the end of our last episode.

Not in a good place.

She had pushed heavily for Barry Goldwater in the 1964 presidential election, which was a bloodbath.

And so the Republican Party was humiliated.

And Phyllis Schlafly was just bit noir for the Republican mainstream.

She doesn't go away.

And she, of course, makes, like many of the cranks of our own day that are remarkably effective, you know, I'm guessing she made her real money with all the subscription stuff, newsletter stuff, and books about nukes that we need to drop on Vietnam.

For a long time, in sort of like the latter half of the 60s, Phyllis understands herself as sort of like a has-been.

She has her newsletter.

She's still plugging along.

She's got this leadership position in the National Federation of Republican Women.

She was the head of the Illinois Federation of Republican Women, but then when she got elected to national, one of her like bitch enemies got Illinois.

So she was like always like punching down at Illinois and was sort of like angry at having given it up.

She's writing her newsletter, the Phyllis Schlafly Report, but she doesn't really see herself.

as sort of in the game the way she was in 1960, 1964.

And a lot of other Republicans feel that way about her too.

They're not really like turning to her for leadership or for ideas the way they were.

The far right is licking its wounds, and the Republican Party really, really just wants to move on from Cold Water.

So, everybody, you know, sees her as kind of washed up.

And this story is the story of how she finds a new cause and rebounds to leadership of the right-wing movement.

The worst instance of someone finding a new hobby in history.

So, in this episode, Phyllis is going to recover from this professional nadir that she's at.

She's going to find a new cause and she's going to really rebuild the Republican Party as a movement made in her own image.

And in the process, she is going to propel herself to like genuine national fame of a sort that she has not experienced before through grit

and threats and you know the sheer power of her personal malice.

So she is going to, spoiler alert, to defeat the ERA.

So at the end of last episode, I kind of joked about like, did she pull over by the side of the road?

And there was like a big sign being like, pass the ERA.

It's like, ah, Eureka, I found it.

But obviously that was a joke.

But you said at the beginning of last episode that this wasn't an obvious fight to pick.

It really felt like one that was already lost.

How did she come to discover it?

And follow-up question, can we trust her account of how that happened?

Why, no, Adrian, you can never trust what Phyllis says about her own motivations, about her own private life, about her own thinking, because she lies constantly about her own career.

Was she like, oh, gee Williams, I found it on the back of an orange juice bottle.

Like, almost exactly.

Yeah.

Phyllis is always pretending she's just this humble housewife who, you know, just does politics as a hobby because she's so moral and so much believes in right and wrong, you know, that she's compelled to by Christ, I guess.

And that is a story that requires her to be very dishonest because she, in fact, is a really savvy and incredibly ambitious political operator, right?

So Phyllis's version of the story is that in 1971, in her capacity as the head of the National Federation of Republican Women, a housewife from Connecticut asks her to debate a feminist about the ERA at a conservative women's book club in Connecticut.

And Phyllis says, you know, I said no at first because I didn't really know all that much about the ERA.

You know, she says that like she had heard about it.

She's like, I was too busy thinking about making cookies with my kids.

Also, nukes from space.

Yeah, you know, just like aprons, apple pie, nuke from space.

You know, she's like, I didn't know much about it.

I thought it was, the quote she gives is somewhere between innocuous and helpful.

But her husband, and in these fake ass stories, it's always her husband who has the good idea that she ultimately winds up following.

Just as a quick reminder to our listeners, her husband appears to have been, by all objective accounts, a absolute doormat.

Yeah, not a not a strong character, Fred.

Not an ideas man.

But her, in her account, you know, it's her husband who encourages her to learn up and do the debate anyway.

So she asks the woman with the book club to send her some reading material.

And she discovers that this little amendment was in fact quite terrible

and went on to of course defeat the feminists at the book club debate and then everybody claps right

that's what fillish says in reality what happened is that schlafly knew exactly what the fucking era was because she had been trying to get the era out of the republican party platform for years and by 1971 when she places her discovery of the issue in time she was already in touch with women across the country from these republican women's networks who were gearing up to oppose ratification in their own states.

It was not a housewives book club either.

It was in fact a stage debate in an auditorium.

And it was just one of many, many of these big public events that Phyllis would participate in over the next decade, where she puts herself in front of eyeballs, in front of cameras, to oppose the ERA and to be the voice of ERA opposition.

Next thing you'll tell me that there was no pie.

And that is where I draw the the line.

Disinformation is one thing.

There actually are pies coming in this episode.

Oh, thank God.

Because I'm weirdly hungry.

I don't know why.

I'm just picturing apple pie now the entire time.

Thanks a lot, Phyllis Schlafsley.

So the ERA was introduced in 1923 by Alice Paul.

And it was in recognition that the 19th Amendment, which had been ratified in 1920, was already not being interpreted as this big transformation of social and familial life that the suffragettes had imagined it would be.

Reva Siegel, who's this really fascinating legal historian, she talks about the ambition of the 19th Amendment for the first wave feminists as being like to introduce democracy to the family, right?

Like really transform women's lives.

That's not what it did.

It was a very, very narrow suffrage law, right?

Meanwhile, over the ensuing decades, the Supreme Court rules a bunch of times throughout the first half of the 20th century that women can be treated as different and lesser than men, especially in things like employment and in family law.

So the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment is not interpreted as applying to women or as giving women the same protection of the laws as men, right?

It is just sort of a weird legal interpretation regime that just writes women out of the 14th Amendment.

So women, for instance, like it's really hard for them to initiate divorces.

When they do initiate divorces, they tend to lose custody of their children.

They have way fewer rights in inheritance.

A lot of like, you know, rules around who can be the executor of an estate often go to men by default with the rationale that they're better at math.

I wish I was making that up.

Women are considered the responsibility of and under the control of their husbands when married, which means that men have a legal right to rape their wives and a de facto right to beat them.

They are excluded from many high-skill, high-wage jobs perfectly legally.

And along with all of that, a lot of institutions that receive public money, like universities, like hospitals, can just say, oh, we don't really want to admit women or we don't really want to treat this woman who, you know, is pregnant out of wedlock.

That's all legal, right?

So after Alice Paul introduces it in 1923, the ERA languished largely because it's opposed by unions, which is a whole can of worms that we can get into, but mostly unions are trying to protect their male membership from female competition is sort of like the short version of that story.

But just because it hasn't been taken up, it doesn't mean that the ERA doesn't have like a kind of broad but soft support, right?

It's something that virtuous civic activism types always think that the country should probably get around to doing eventually.

Feminism in many instances is something that lots of people like vaguely feel that they agree with, but very few feel any kind of like urgency about.

And this is, it's like that.

It just doesn't have an activist class pushing for it, but it does get added to the party platforms.

The Republican Party adds support for the Equal Rights Amendment to their party platform in 1940.

And the Democrats add it in 1944.

So I think something that people forget about the second wave is that when the second wave feminist movement arose, a lot of the first wave activists from the suffragette era were still around.

It's a little bit analogous to like the second waivers now, right?

They're these old ladies who receive this mix of like resentment and awe from the younger feminists who are following them, right?

And who sometimes will come down from the mountain to issue proclamations, right?

So, in 1967, Alice Paul is still alive.

Oh, wow.

She is extremely old and she has all of this moral credibility because she earned women the right to vote, right?

She was the forefront of the suffrage movement.

And she

talks to this group of liberal feminists who go to her apartment in Manhattan.

They talk about it like entering like a temple.

And they say that they don't understand most of what she's saying.

She's like naming all these women that she organized in the suffrage movement with.

And like these younger feminists have never heard of any of them.

And there's this kind of like generational grief going on.

But she tells these women, like, listen, you need to take up the ERA cause because if you get the ERA, then that is a legal foundation for you to get all of these other social changes that you're looking to create.

Betty Friedan hears this argument from Alice Paul and she buys it.

She's like, I'm in.

And at the time, she's the president of NOW, right?

So she gets now to endorse the ERA at their 1967 national convention.

I believe that Alice Paul is there in the room at the convention when it happens.

And this, for one thing, it gets a ton of media attention that NOW did this.

And it brings more members into NOW.

A couple of like ladies' auxiliaries of labor unions leave, but a ton more women come in.

Because again, the ERA has been a popular but languishing reform cause for decades at this point.

It's analogous, I think, to like electoral college abolishment, right?

It's something a lot of people feel strongly about, but haven't had a way to try and make it it happen before.

Now there's a way to try and make it happen.

And then in 1969, just two years later, this newly elected member of the House of Representatives, a young lady named Shirley Chisholm,

she gives a speech on the House floor called Equal Rights for Women, which is a really passionate endorsement of the ERA.

So you have these second wave figures of high profiles like lending their charisma to this cause.

This begins a pretty robust lobbying effort to pass the amendment through Congress.

And honestly, it's kind of an easy sell, right?

The amendment was non-controversial at the time.

Both parties had endorsed it in their platforms.

It seemed like the right thing to do.

And it passed both houses of Congress in 1972 pretty easily.

And it is sent to the states for ratification.

So the ERA is ratified by Congress.

Now it has to be ratified by, I think, three quarters of the states, so 38 states.

That's right.

And there's a deadline by which that has to happen.

The ratification by Congress is going to expire.

And that deadline is March 22nd, 1979.

Nobody expects it's going to take that long.

In fact, they will ultimately extend this deadline, and they still miss it.

So the ensuing ERA fight.

is something that you can see as the story of a changing far right.

We talked last time about the grassroots anti-communism era of the 1940s and 50s.

The domestic far right is moving away from this focus on foreign policy and military strength and towards more domestic issues, so-called social issues or cultural issues, namely like really race and gender, right?

Yeah.

And that's what the ERA fight is for the Republican Party.

It's a story of turning their right-wing sort of agenda from the foreign world to the domestic world and the social life of the U.S.

For the country as a whole, the story of the ERA fight is a story of backlash, right?

Because Phyllis finds a way to revive this degraded and embattled far-right by harnessing fear and resentment.

of social movements of the 1960s.

And she did it in a way that inaugurated the kind of like organized backlash politics that we see in our own time.

So I wanted you to read this paragraph from Schlafly's biography that is sort of like a summation of the ERA fight from a conservative perspective.

The strange career of the ERA, political fate.

Ironically, the ERA helped revive the GOP right and the GOP generally.

After Nixon resigned from office, the Republican Party stood arguably at its lowest point in its 120-year history, even lower than when Hoover left office in 1933.

In 1974, only 18% of voters identified themselves as Republican.

Yet within six years, many voters came to see the GOP not as a party of big business and the wealthy, but as a party of the little guy, the regular American Joe and his wife, while the Democratic Party belonged to elitists who imposed schemes of social engineering, social privilege, and special interest.

all at the expense of the hardworking middle class.

The catalyst for this transformation was to be found in the grassroots reaction against feminism, legalized abortion, ERA, and the ban on prayer in school.

Writing after the ERA had been lost, feminist Sylvia Ann Hewlett observed:

it was sobering to realize that the ERA was defeated not by Barry Goldwater, Jerry Falwell, or any combination of male chauvinist pigs, but by women who were alienated from a feminist movement, the values of which seemed elitist and disconnected from the lives of ordinary people.

End quote.

What does that remind me of?

Yeah, resentment politics placing the right wing in in a reactive role and as the harbingers and spokespeople for a oppressed but authentic asylum majority, chafing against high-flying, ambitious, but kind of remote democratic social engineering done by a scheming backroom elite.

The scheming backroom elite in this case being the elected representatives of just about all Americans.

But it's straight burcharism, right?

Yeah.

And it's also straight MAGA.

Yeah.

Like, I really think you see in Phyllis the through line between like the Charles Lindbergh old right and the Donald Trump like nativist authoritarian revival.

Like she kept this flame alive and she managed to get that politics sort of smuggled into the 21st century through anti-feminism.

Phyllis is a woman of our time before our time, right?

Adrian, could you read this one other other little piece of dialogue?

This is from a 2011 Schlafly interview, but she's talking about the time when she was raising her kids in the 1950s and 60s.

I was really into healthy food before it was cool to be into healthy food.

For many years, every Saturday, I would drive to a farm in Edwardsville and buy 12 gallons of unpasteurized milk, oh, brother, and 12 dozen fertile eggs.

And that would last us for the week.

You ask me what's the difference between unpasteurized milk and milk you buy at the grocery store?

I'll tell you, it's about the same difference as between fresh strawberries and canned strawberries.

First of all, I just want to

like dwell on how much fucking food this is.

12 gallons of raw milk and 12 dozen eggs.

Are you making cheese?

I mean, it is an eight-person family.

This is a shocking amount of milk.

Like, are you eating anything that is not milk and cheese?

These themes, these bugaboos, these weird conspiracy theories, they're so much older, even in their specificity, than I think we typically assume them to be.

Well, again, she's kind of a conduit here, right?

This is the direct path from water fluorization truthers to RFK Jr.

I thought about this not so much with Schlafly, who I don't know as much about, but Anita Bryant, who I do know a lot about.

The 70s, I think, kind of...

the mainstreaming of the concerned woman as a kind of political trope, right?

You have a moment in the 50s and 60s where there are conservative women who just show up as straightforward political actors.

When Phyllis Schlafly wanted to get Goldwater elected, she did it as like a housewife, but like she did it by like writing a book and being like, I think we should nuke the North Vietnamese, right?

The way a political thinker might.

But you get the sort of the Anita Bryans of the world in the 70s are like they're positioning themselves as pre-political and they're trying to tap into something that's pre-political.

To anyone who knew about the Birchers, this whole like, I don't drink pasteurized milk would speak a very clear language about kind of conspiratorial politics.

Well, but you're not putting it like that.

You're like, oh, I'm just concerned about the kind of things we're not putting in our bodies or that we're putting in our bodies and our children are our most precious resource, et cetera, et cetera.

And this is exactly the kind of thing that you get with India Bryant, where they're just like, I leave all that stuff to the men, but I'm just concerned.

And concern is really the language in which she's like, no, I am making a fucking big political statement, but I also don't want to own that.

And I want to give the women who want to walk with me a permission structure to see themselves as non-political too.

It's a way to make these political positions that are like violent, exclusionary, maximalist, sadistic, cruel be packaged in a way that sort of gives them this sentimental veneer of

gender conservatism, right?

It's like it's not threatening, it's family, it's not threatening, it's motherhood, it's not violence, it is a mode of interacting with people that we have decided is virtuous through heterosexuality, through the family.

And that's,

I think this is, you know, this is Phyllis in a nutshell.

You can use misogyny and visions of women as sort of

distinct in ways that they are, in fact, not from men to launder in all this other crap.

Exactly.

Because people will swallow that pill really easily.

Yeah.

So Jane Mansbridge in her history of the ERA fight from 1988, how we lost the ERA, she says, look, constitutional amendments are hard to pass by design, but many amendments did pass in the 20th century.

And part of the reason why a bunch of amendments pass in the 20th century, especially in the first half, was that people basically didn't really know about them or they sort of softly supported them.

For example, the 22nd Amendment.

Adrian, this is from your citizenship test.

What is a 22nd amendment?

Yeah, as an explanation to that joke, I did recently take the citizenship test.

I'm gooba gabba one of you now.

He's an American, folks.

We got him.

Not historically how that's been used.

That usually comes after a drone strike, but okay.

It's the one where no person can be elected to the office of the president more than twice.

And you're right, this is one that like some people cared a whole lot about, and and most people certified something that had been standard practice and established practice prior to the passage of the 22nd Amendment.

Mansbridge argues that in a lot of these similar amendment fights, the crucial factor was not about actually the intensity of support, but the intensity of opposition, right?

Yeah.

Amendments are easy to defeat.

And that means that the amendments get passed are the ones with like weak, divided, sort of soft opposition.

The ones that people oppose, but not that many people, not that strongly, and not people who are acting together, right?

The amendments with strong and unified opposition cannot pass.

And so when the ERA was being sent to the states for ratification in 1972, after it passes through Congress, it looks like it's going to succeed exactly because it doesn't have much or very passionate opposition, right?

But when they have to get the ERA through Congress, they have to persuade people who can vote in two bodies, right?

Members of the House of Representatives and senators.

Now, what had been one fight in Congress is now 50 different fights all across the country for getting the amendment passed through the 50 different state houses, right?

Yeah.

So from 1972, when the amendment is passed through Congress to 1975, 34 states ratify the ERA in quick secession, right?

And remember, they only only need 38.

Right.

So this is really, really like basically a done deal.

Yeah.

And that's when Phyllis comes in.

And we should say, I mean, like, the way the issue now reverts to the states also starts playing into the hands of what we recognize today as Republican backlash politics, right?

Because on the one hand, national media don't tend to cover state stories quite as carefully.

So you can sort of lie in ways that like, at least in the 70s, I think on a national news show, you wouldn't be able to.

Republican, especially Republican women's organizing at the state and local level was far stronger than on a national level.

And you do get this kind of nullificationist streak in a lot of U.S.

states and a readiness to be against something just because it kind of comes from Washington.

Yeah.

And I think that's, you know, what Phyllis really plays on.

By 1975, her anti-ERA movement has gained steam and the ratifications have stopped.

Ultimately, six states actually rescind their ratifications, which we're going to talk about because that's like

dubious.

In the 1860s, a couple of states tried to rescind their ratifications of the 14th and 15th Amendment because they were like, whoops, we didn't think you meant that black men could vote.

Like, whoa, whoa, what?

And in those cases, it was ruled that you could not rescind an amendment.

So we're not really talking about 10 years, we're talking about three that you did this in.

How did this work?

How do we go from 1972 when the amendment passes to 1975 when it all reverses?

She did the bulk of it in three years.

So what Phyllis does is she takes the sort of like weak and scattered and disorganized opposition to the ERA and turns it into a single hierarchical organization under her own central command

from whose peak she can like direct strategy and from whose peak she can, you know, manipulate the media into reproducing her own anti-ERA propaganda, which is, you know, constantly raising the stakes and raising the temperature and working to inflame, you know, sexist anger, resentment, and woundedness.

Phyllis's real first salvo against the ERA comes in February 1972

with a issue of her newsletter, the Phyllis Schlafly Report.

And in the Phyllis Schlafly Report, she publishes an essay, What's Wrong with Equal Rights for Women?

And it's sort of like an anti-feminist screed, and it's a call to action to her supporters to join her in fighting against the ERA.

So it's got, you know, a couple of what will become sort of like boilerplate anti-feminist arguments.

The family is the basic unit of society in Judeo-Christian civilization.

Oh, yeah.

Everyone's such an expert in Judeo-Christian civilization.

Yeah.

You know, like, I will say for Phyllis, her genius is in organizing and political strategy.

Her genius is not in like political theory.

She's not like a particularly inventive thinker, but she does strike this kind of tone that's like strident and sneering, right?

She's very good at getting her readers on her side by having a common enemy, right?

So she talks about Ms.

Magazine a lot in this essay, and she derides the sharp-tongued, high-pitched, whining complaints of unmarried women

who talk about how satisfying it is to be a lesbian.

I do like imagining just like Phyllis Schlafly seeing my own life and just getting

Kool-Aid man red with rage.

The ability to

like downright dehumanize single women on the right is just like completely amazing to me.

But like the real point she makes that I think is one that has had kind of disturbing staying power is that housewives and women who are, you know, out of the workforce are not oppressed.

They are, in fact, privileged, right?

She says the ultimate right of women is to be cared for and supported as they raise their babies.

So

there's this dichotomy between the single woman and the conservative housewife.

This is a running theme for Schlafly.

She's like, feminists, they are failed women.

They couldn't hack it.

They couldn't be pretty enough.

They couldn't get a man.

They are embittered at their failures of femininity.

Conservative women and married housewives, by contrast, they have been rewarded for the achievement of their femininity.

You did it.

You were skinny enough.

You were submissive enough.

You were nice enough.

You made a good enough pie.

And here is your reward.

Here is your...

husband, your protector, your place on a pedestal, not excluded from, but in fact, above independence and work, right?

Andy's asleep on the couch from the second martini.

Yeah.

This is something you see all the time, like casting women's status as like housewives, helpmeets, you know, legal children as protection, as privilege, as aspirational.

This is what every trad wife does.

Yeah.

This is, I'm sorry to like bring it to the internet, but so many women I know over the past week, as I was writing this script, were reposting the same like still

from an old movie from the 60s with like Brigitte Bardot.

And she's like, I told you I can't work.

I'm no good for work.

It makes me ugly.

And they think they're being anti-capitalist, right?

In a cheeky way.

But I'm like, that shit is straight Phyllis Schlaffley.

If you're a girl and you're hot enough and you're pretty enough, some man will come in and rescue you.

And that is how you know that you won at being a woman is that you don't have to support yourself.

I'm an outsider, but it does seem to me that if you can't combine being super smoking hot and working, it's just a skill issue, man.

Sorry.

I will say,

in defense of hot girls, being skinny is exhausting.

True.

Being pretty is expensive and it takes a lot of time.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And these are, of course, the only reasons I have opted out of them.

I could totally do it if I wanted to.

Phyllis Schlafly knows that she's not exactly going into the past so much as trying to evoke a future that is dramatically different from the present, right?

Right.

Her mother only had two children.

Phyllis had six.

Yeah.

And that is, you know, those are decisions that those women made

for material and also ideological reasons.

So she forms a group she calls Stop ERA.

It's an acronym.

Do you want to read out or guess what the acronym is?

Because it's so fucking stupid, Adrian.

Stop ERA.

I don't know.

Stop taking our privileges, ERA.

Oh, my God.

Isn't that so bad?

So the S and STOP stands for stop?

Yes.

That's not how acronyms work, Phyllis.

That is not how acronyms work.

She forms this in September 1972.

The first meeting is at an airport hotel in Chicago.

And it's really just local people from the Illinois Federation of Republican Women.

Only good things happen at airport hotels in Chicago.

The O'Hare Marriott, yeah.

Dead Possums overdoses and Phyllis Schlafly beginning the destruction of the ERA, yes.

I think this has actually come up on the podcast a few times.

I have like a real soft spot for Chicago.

I think Chicago's place

in the American imagination is is like really noble.

They're this like downtrodden, rough-hewn second city that I admire their fighting spirit.

I've been there like twice and I had a bad time each time, but I like Chicago as a concept a lot.

No, I love it.

I love it.

I'll go even further.

I even like their pizza.

Wow, that's sacrilege.

That's not good.

Chicago deserves better than Phyllis Schlafly is what I'm trying to say.

Yeah, but well, I think this was a comment on O'Hare.

O'Hare is a worse airport than Chicago as a city by far.

And it's about airport hotels, which is like the level of divorce, sadness, and convention is just like out of control.

Even when people are not trying to take people's rights away.

But, you know, she works the phones, basically, and she gets her contacts from the National Federation of Republican Women, so women from a bunch of different states, to all meet her in St.

Louis a couple months later.

And that's more than 100 people are at that conference.

And the intention is to create a national movement of right-wing women against the ERA.

So they choose a stop sign as their logo.

So every picture of Phyllis from this era has her wearing like a weirdly oversized red stop sign on her chest that says stop ERA.

And they grew up pretty quickly because it consolidated basically the entire scattered anti-ERA movement like very, very quickly, right?

So they cannibalize groups like my favorite one, which is called Women Who Want to Be Women, WWW.

Wow.

Which is such a crazy name.

So, you know, the Stop ERA pretty quickly develops like a downline of these state orgs, right?

So, there's Stop ERA Missouri, there's Stop ERA, Virginia, there's Stop ERA Oklahoma, and these are like state groups that will lobby against ratifications in their own capitals.

And Schlafly personally chooses the state directors for all of the state chapters, and they all respond directly to her.

So, Stop ERA

is Phyllis's first campaign under an organization she later comes to call the Eagle Forum.

Have you ever heard of the Eagle Forum?

Yes, only ever as someone saying Phyllis Schlafly's Eagle Forum.

Yes.

Yeah, it's basically like more or less synonymous with her, but it is a big network.

So, this is a group that Phyllis forms officially in 1975.

She calls it the Alternative to Women's Lib.

And after the ERA campaign is won, she's going to use Eagle Forum and all of those mailing lists and all of those contacts and all of those fundraising networks to continue her anti-feminist and anti-gay work.

So for a while, they're calling themselves the alternative, but then they decide to stop calling themselves the alternative to women's lib because they're like, we're not the alternative.

We're the mainstream.

The numbers say otherwise.

At its peak in the 1970s, Eagle Forum had about 60,000 members nationally, whereas around the same time now had about 220,000.

Right.

So STOP ERA does some things that are designed to change the votes of state legislatures and some things that are designed to get attention, right?

So whenever the ERA ratification is being debated in a state capitol, the state STOPERA chapter will send women to the Capitol.

They tell their members to dress up, to wear makeup, to look nice, and to bring baked goods.

So they bring pies,

cookies, bread.

There's a lot of reports of like jam, like various jams.

I guess making your own jam was a bigger thing in the 60s and 70s.

They were all cooking with jellos.

So like it's just like a natural extension into marmalade making, marmaladerie, if you will.

A single shrimp suspended in a big wiggling like jello tower.

That's right.

This is 1960s Republican food.

So they like, they deliver literally cookies and pies.

I did promise you pie.

With notes that say things like, I'm for mom and apple pie, bread makers for breadwinners with loaves of bread.

That was a popular one.

And they've got this like dainty presentation with which they get their picture taken, right?

So it's ladies in like little matching skirt suits with pillbox hats and white gloves holding a pie and like displaying this big, ugly like like stop sign on their chest.

It's my impression that for decades, the best way for a woman to get photographed in the United States was to hold a pie.

If you have anything to say at all,

your opinion does not count unless you're like, you're like free Northern Ireland.

It's like, well, she brought a cherry pie.

So

she's going in Time magazine.

And, you know, this is like a very, very dainty, proper, feminine presentation.

And it contrasts with the actual scenes that ensue at a lot of these state capitals, like in them and outside.

Because the stop ERA protesters, they get into these screaming matches with the pro-ERA feminists.

It reminds me a little of like what you'll sometimes see outside an abortion clinic, right?

Like there's a bunch of, you know, feminist clinic escorts who are like there trying to walk women into the clinic.

And then there's a bunch of like wild, drooling, anti-feminist like chuds who are just screaming at you.

This also tends to contrast with the tone that the movement takes in its actual communications, which like Phyllis's tone a lot of the time is really sneering, really sarcastic, right?

But Phyllis is personally at the forefront of almost all of these state capitol demonstrations.

She's traveling constantly.

And by 1975, she has testified at more than 40 state legislature hearings against the ERA, right?

So she's really putting into work.

And there's like two kind of genius ideas that Phyllis has that I think make Stop ERA a big success.

Right.

And the first is that she's recruiting women from churches.

Right.

So in the first couple months of Stop ERA, Phyllis is mostly recruiting women from the ranks of the right-wing activist organizations where she already has a lot of friends, right?

The National Federation of Republican Women, the Illinois Federation of Republican Women, the DAR, and some old friends from the Goldwater campaign.

She says she milks those contacts.

But one problem is that, like Phyllis, they're old.

They're kind of old.

Yeah.

Phyllis is almost 50 at this point, which is not actually old, I think, in my estimation anymore.

But, you know, she's not a photogenic hot woman, right?

She's not pregnant.

She's not.

She's no Goldwater girl anymore.

She doesn't fit into the tiny little skirt and the cowboy hat anymore, you know?

And there's kind of a problem because the feminists are sort of hot.

They're younger.

They are long-haired.

They often don't wear bras.

I think feminists of the second wave in our popular imagination now tend to be associated with a sort of like willful rejection of sexuality, right?

That's not actually how a lot of them were looking.

They looked like they were wearing mini skirts and they had long hair and they had no bras on and they were young enough for that to be like quite lovely, you know.

They were, they were a look, right?

So Felix sets out pretty deliberately to recruit younger women.

She's like, I need young moms.

I need young married women.

And I'm going to get them mostly from churches.

Let's MILF up this ERA protest.

Kind of, yeah.

This seems to us like a pretty obvious thing to do from the vantage point of 2025, right?

But this unified Christian conservative movement that we know as the Christian right,

it doesn't like really exist yet.

No, of course.

Yeah.

Yeah.

We covered that in our Anita Bryant episode, right?

Like Protestants and Catholics didn't trust each other.

Protestantism and Catholicism were also stand-ins for ethnicity and whether or not someone was like reliably white or not.

Mainline Protestants didn't trust the evangelicals.

Evangelicals didn't trust the Catholics.

No one trusted the Mormons, right?

There was just a lot of energy and distrust going many different directions.

And which is all to say that the Christian right, such as it is, doesn't exist yet, right?

Phyllis builds it.

And she builds it by getting women and like, honestly, not more than just a few men from all of these different, like mutually suspicious backgrounds and denominations to work together because she finds something to unite them around that they care about more than their divisions, which is anti-feminism.

Right.

So Tanya Melick is a former Republican strategist, and she turned liberal and had this conversion experience specifically in response to the Republican Party's anti-feminism.

And she put it this way: Do you want to read this?

It was Schlafly with her authoritarian leadership and expert grassroots organizing who made the religious right a political player.

It was Schlafly, first of the Goldwater and then the New Right team, who unearthed the political gold of misogyny.

It was Schlafly who translated fear of women's liberation into a political force in the Republican Party and thereby extended the foundation of the Republican Southern strategy.

Now, not only did the strategy flourish on the backlash of the civil rights movement, but it was broadened to include a backlash against the women's movement, too.

The political gold of misogyny is, I think, a phrase that's going to ring in my ears.

Yeah, pretty well.

She's right about the sequencing here, right?

The racial resentment of the Southern strategy was powerful, but it was limited, right?

There were parts of the United States where that was going to be really successful, and there were other parts where, if anything, it might be unhelpful, or at least it wouldn't do very much for you.

Just on the merits, she's, I think, correct to say that without backlash to other social movements of the 60s or their perceived kind of upending of what people felt to be natural hierarchies, this probably would have stayed a regional phenomenon, right?

Right.

She expands like pretty widely the constituency of the backlash.

So you said this was the first genius thing she did, the churches.

What's the second?

The second is that she used women as ideological misogynists, right?

And we talked about this before, right?

The rise of the concerned woman as sort of the face of some pretty like oppressive policies that you see starting to bubble up on the American right in the 1970s.

And women are useful to a right-wing project because they can soften bigotry.

They can make it seem less threatening and less serious.

These white middle-class women are useful precisely because they have an easier time appearing innocent, right?

They're also useful because they have a lot of time on their hands.

Right.

Many of Schlafly's foot soldiers are housewives.

They've got empty hours to fill.

And even better, they were religious, which means that they are reliably reachable at the same place every week.

Phyllis really tended to talk down to and about these women, right?

So she once described them as housewives who didn't know where their state capital was.

And that's kind of overselling it for some of these women.

Like some of them were also like political operatives from the Republican Party, but a lot of them were women who were just sort of like, you know, naive.

They had sort of a lack of political practice.

And for Phyllis, these were useful qualities, right?

They were women who were unused to thinking for themselves and who followed all of her orders.

She's like, in the defense of my followers, they're idiots.

Kind of, yeah.

She pitches that as a virtue, right?

Yeah, yeah.

They're not fancy women with, you know, independent capacities for critical thought.

So she also gets a bit of luck when Phyllis becomes allied with North Carolina Senator Sam Irvin.

Do you know anything about Sam Irvin?

I don't.

That's ringing a little bit of a bell.

I mean, he's a North Carolina senator in the 70s, so I'm going to guess he's a Democrat, probably a Dixiecrat, right?

He is a Dixiecrat.

He will also, around the time that he and Phyllis start working together, become the chair of the Senate Watergate Committee.

Oh.

So he does like come up for other reasons, right?

Yeah, maybe that's where I've heard of him.

So, like, for our purposes, the thing we need to know about Sam Irvin is that he was a passionate and really committed ideological misogynist and a big ERA opponent.

He had been one of the only senators to vote against it in 1972.

And when he did, I'm sorry, this is like a little bit of a side thing, but when the ERA was being passed by the U.S.

Senate in 1972, Sam Irvin goes onto the floor to speak against the ERA and he reads this like really creepy poem on the Senate floor about this young bride quaking with terror on her wedding night when she realizes she's like alone with a man.

And I'm like, this is,

it's just so many layers of wrong.

But Irvin, allows Phyllis to use his Senate's office resources to distribute distribute her newsletter and all of her stop ERA and Eagle Forum mailers, which means that her direct mail campaigns no longer have basically any overhead since the whole bill is being footed by the taxpayers.

And another thing that Phyllis does is that she enrolls in law school at Washington University in St.

Louis in 1975.

And she says that she only does this in an effort to get her son to go to law school.

Do you want to like read a little bit from this like Phyllis Schlafly interview where she talks about her decision to go to law school?

I'm going to try and do a blanche du bois.

No, I'm kidding.

Well, that's a story.

My husband's a lawyer and we have four sons.

I thought we should have a lawyer's son.

The first one rejected it and when the second son came along, I tried to persuade him to go to law school and he didn't want to do it.

So I made a bet with him.

We'll both take the LSAT and one of us will go.

So we both took the LSAT and he still refused to go.

Carrying on with this argument, I applied to Washington University Law School.

Of course, my children, who were in on this and knew what was going on, I never told my husband.

But my children said, oh, they won't accept you, mother.

You're too old.

So I'll take things that never happened for 500, Phyllis.

This was 1975.

I applied and they accepted me.

And one night at the dinner table, I announced that I had been accepted for Washington University Law School to start classes in September.

Fred had a tantrum.

What a charmer.

I'd never seen him like this.

He said, that's the most ridiculous thing I ever heard.

You're trying to beat the ERA.

You're making these trips around the country.

You don't have time.

It's ridiculous.

And it broke up the dinner.

I remember everybody left the table and I walked up to my oldest son and I said, I'm just floored.

I never saw him like this before.

And John said, mother, you have everything else in the world now.

And now you're trying to take away his law practice.

I'm thinking of like conversations I've had with women my own age about our mothers where they're like, they're not allowed, really.

They haven't been allowed to cultivate self-respect.

So whenever they're proud of something or they think that they deserve something, they can't just say that.

They have to create like this whole elaborate scheme in which they passive aggressively manipulate other people into saying it, you know, like

this is a whole long story, like largely fiction about

how proud she is of everything she achieved, right?

She's like, my friend said, you're defeating the IRA.

You're taking these trips around the the country.

You're raising six children.

And now you're also going to law school.

She's proud as shit of that.

Yeah.

Right.

This is a woman who's very, very invested in her own achievement, right?

But she can't or won't.

say that.

Yeah.

What she's doing is creating an elaborate story in which other people say that about her so that she can say it.

It's such a fucking mom thing.

It's a very particular like emotional tick of like 20th century American white women who were just like psychically warped by misogyny in this very strange way.

Aaron Ross Powell, it also strikes me that someone like Schlafly is kind of a complementarianist, right?

So, this idea that, like, oh, the husband and the wife bring separate and distinct things into the marriage, and really only one can do one thing and the other has to do the other, right?

Like, they're matching halves, basically.

What it's always struck me is that the way conservative women, especially, talk about this is laced with so much contempt.

She's basically saying, my husband is an insecure dummy.

She's like, I am to be a faithful helper and a quiet support to my idiot, no-good husband.

Right.

And you're like, I'm sorry.

Like, it feels like you hate this man.

Like, it doesn't seem harmonious at all.

Yeah, there's a little bit of a martyr complex in a lot of like women's gender conservatism, right?

Like, women are edified by suffering

in a way, like even more than souls under Christianity are, right?

Like women in particular make a virtue of self-denial.

And so they'll like show you how much they're denying themselves.

They're like, oh, I wish I could have a cookie, but, you know, it just goes straight to my hips.

And it's just like, just eat the fucking cookie, you know, like, um, eat the fucking pie, Phyllis.

Yeah, this is taking forever.

Does she go to law school?

She does go to law school.

This story is complete bullshit, right?

She's not just like such a good mom that she accidentally goes to law school to try and get her son to go to law school.

Also, I saw a picture of her children in a pamphlet from 1964.

How old are these children?

She's not saying, oh, they called me from Washington or they called me from their job in Dubuque.

She's like, oh, we were all sitting around the dinner table.

I'm like, these children are 30

or 25, I guess.

But like, this is a fake story, right?

Phyllis Lasky does not want to go to law school because she's such a good mom.

She wants to go to law school because A, doing so will make her more credentialed in her political career and better qualified for a role in a future Republican administration, which is something she is already eyeing.

Right.

And also, it gives her more credibility as an anti-ERA campaigner because at this point, Phyllis has spent a couple of years doing these televised and sort of like on stage debates with feminists about the ERA.

And feminists are, on the whole, much better educated than anti-feminists.

And they will pose Phyllis a question in this debate.

How can you speak so authoritatively about the ERA and say that I'm wrong in my interpretations of this amendment when I'm a lawyer and you're not?

Right.

This is something you see a lot in Phyllis's politics.

Like she is now, at this point in her life, a rich woman, right?

She didn't grow up rich.

Right.

She didn't grow up in these fancy enclaves.

Like somebody like Betty Friedan did grow up rich.

You know, and this is a real chip on her her shoulder, right?

Like Nelson Rockefeller definitely grew up rich, right?

Like these groups that she sees herself as rebelling against, be it the feminists or the Rockefeller Republicans, are people who I think she suspects are a little better than her.

And she has this like mix of

anger.

at the thought that they might have that idea and like insecurity that it might be a little bit true.

And like Phyllis is like many of us, somebody who's just continually driven by spite right this i cannot fault her for because that's pretty much what gets me out of bed i know i had to look real hard for something i could relate to in phyllis and what i actually came up with was like well i too am full of rage and hatred you know like like i just had to lower my estimation of my own character so like this legal training that phyllis gets it also gives her more ammunition for the anti-era campaign, right?

And bizarrely, it also allows her to get on TV a lot.

So I've like mentioned a few times that Phyllis is doing these televised debates about the ERA.

She's doing them in like auditoriums, but she's also doing them a lot for like broadcasts.

And she did this dozens and dozens of times during the ERA battle.

And it was not, at least at first, because like people were clamoring to have her on TV.

It's because she sued and threatened to sue anybody that wouldn't put her on TV or on the radio.

Because at at the time, the FCC was still endorsing something called the fairness doctrine.

Really, it meant that if there were

opposing sides of the issue, a broadcaster had to provide each side of the issue equal time,

even when one side is very mainstream and the other is very fringe, right?

So, like, this fairness doctrine applies even to topics of broad political consensus, like, say, the ERA in 1972.

So, every time that a broadcaster wants to have a feminist on TV to advocate for the ERA, Phyllis Schlafly calls them up and says, I'm going to sue you if you don't put me on TV next to her, right?

Wow.

And she demands, in fact, the same amount of time to speak.

So around 1972, feminists start noticing that one of the only ways the ERA is being covered at all now is in the form of debates that are always against Phyllis.

Because there's lots of different women who are willing and able to go on TV to advocate for the ERA.

And basically the only person who's ever there to oppose it is Phyllis, right?

So suddenly she's on TV all the fucking time.

She's on Phil Donahue over and over and over again.

She's on all of these news magazine shows.

She's a debate me bro, right?

And like them, the actual performance that she puts on is not really like good faith exchanges, right?

She's berating, she raises her voice, she misrepresents the amendment, she misrepresents the impacts of the amendment, she misrepresents her opponents, and she issues ad hominems and lies, right?

But this might be a good time to go through some of Phyllis's like big claims and arguments against the ERA.

Yeah.

So the first is a wife's right to support.

Have you heard of this?

Yeah, I know that that's one of the arguments, but it doesn't make any sense to me.

A wife's right to support was Phyllis's term for a series of state laws that designated wives as dependents of their husbands.

And Phyllis claimed that if the ERA went into effect, women who had been financially dependent on their husbands, like divorcees and widows, basically, would not be entitled.

to financial compensation or financial support if they were abandoned or left alone.

This is something that some feminists had actually sort of been trying to work around, right?

But functionally what she's talking about is alimony law,

which is, as you alluded to at the beginning, like trivially easy to make gender neutral, right?

But Phyllis sort of likes to gloss over that because what she's actually talking about is government and legal recognition of a default in which women are confined to the home.

Right.

She argues argues that it's going to give homosexuals rights.

Not the homosexuals.

She points to legal gay sex, gay marriage, gay adoption, and the right of gays to teach in public schools.

So she like raises the specter of gays and gay rights.

And she's got this like anecdote.

She's like, well, firefighters risk their lives for us and they work in close quarters.

And now the ERA will mean that they'll have to tolerate a homosexual male firefighter in their midst.

And do we really want to do that to our brave firefighters?

Yeah, they have to tolerate a firefighter, a construction worker, a Native American dude, and their trusty group of macho men.

Yeah.

She talks about sex mixing,

which, you know, heaven portend.

Yeah.

Stop threatening me with a good time.

Yeah.

She's like, this would ban single-sex education is one claim she makes.

So you couldn't have like a girls' Catholic school anymore.

Yes.

But she really leans heavily onto the idea of unisex bathrooms.

Oh my lord, they have not moved on for 50 years.

It's like there's going to be a man in the woman's room if you let women have rights.

Yeah.

They may be the party of social security and the New Deal.

We are the party of having only

people that you believe are of your gender while you're taking a big dump.

I'm pretty ecumenical ecumenical shitter, to be honest.

The Phyllis Lafley Report, her newsletter, during this era has a ton of like crazy homophobic and transphobic cartoons of like men in dresses coming out of the women's room in a big long line.

And it could be something that the Trump campaign tweets today.

Elon Musk has them like as a screensaver.

She's trying to like throw a lot of different issues at the wall to see what sticks.

She talks about abortion a lot.

By now, Roe v.

Wade has happened in 1973, January 1973.

And she's like, well, this is a cockamime-y idea, she says,

that you can find a right to an abortion in like the 14th and 9th Amendment, which is what Roe found.

But if we pass the ERA, it won't be a cockamime idea.

That will mean abortion on demand.

So she leans into that.

There's sort of like this nascent anti-abortion sentiment that's starting to be galvanized around Roe.

And she does sort of like press on that button a lot.

The one I remember most is the thing about the draft, right?

She's like, oh, women would get drafted into the army, right?

Yes.

This is kind of her main thing.

It's what seems to hit most for most of her audiences.

This argument that the ERA would mean that women would be eligible for the draft and that they would be required to be placed in combat roles if drafted.

And I think this is a moment where like a little bit of historical context is helpful.

So the Vietnam draft was from 1964 to 1973, so nine years, a good long time.

Carter reinstitutes the draft registry system in 1980, towards the end of the ERA fight, right?

And then Reagan comes in just a couple of months later and is like really hawkish on foreign policy, right?

So, everybody has these memories of how bad the draft was.

And then in the early 80s, they're like, oh shit, we're going to be at war again.

There's going to be another draft.

And, you know, this is something that increases in salience over time.

You know, when she puts out her 1972 first like ERA pamphlet, The Right to Be a Woman, which was written while the Vietnam War and the draft were still ongoing, the combat role issue is only four paragraphs, but it becomes a central theme of her ERA campaign by 1980.

Observers at the time said that this was the decisive issue that ultimately doomed the ERA.

Wow.

Yeah.

And, you know, one thing to note is that like the feminists didn't really have a good answer for this because they said at the time, like, many of these pro-ERA organizations, like now, were like, yeah, the ERMA means that women will be drafted and they will be sent into combat.

That is the requirement of the law.

That is indeed something that happens in our army now to like no buddies' complaint about the actual effectiveness, but it's become like an ideological hobby horse for like Pete Hagtheth to get women out of combat roles.

Oh, yeah, good point.

So, this is another thing that is like carried over from the ERA fight.

But at the time, people really didn't like this idea.

When they're like, well, I don't want to get drafted.

I don't want to serve in combat.

People had very strong normative ideas that women should be excluded from war and now didn't really grapple with this.

They were like, well, we oppose war and we oppose the draft.

Right.

And they didn't really talk enough, I think, about what it would mean in practice for women to serve in combat roles in the military in a world where there is the draft, which is ultimately what they were advocating for, right?

They were just sort of like, well, we'll lobby against the draft.

It's like, well, okay, but like, you know, you're also advocating for a piece of legislation that will lead to this outcome.

So like, you have to be a little more accountable for it.

They just didn't really have enough political will within their organizations to get further than we oppose the draft.

Right.

And then I think the other thing that we have to think of when we assess Phyllis's work with the ERA is that she really drew on this like infinite resource that could power the economy if only we could harness it, which is like women's hatred of other women, right?

Right.

The conservative white women who were mobilized by Phyllis Schlafly, they were, you know, like mostly middle-class, married Republicans.

They're from the South, the Midwest, and the Mountain West.

And they had the same kind of resentment of coastal cosmopolitan elites that men of those demographics did and still do, right?

Right.

So these are some of the same voters who had been compelled to vote for Goldwater in the 1964 primary as a fuck you to the New York Rockefeller Republicans.

You can always mobilize people into the most intense hatred for those who remind them of themselves, right?

Like

when I think of the people who drive me crazy and get really under my skin, they're the people who are like flawed in the same way that I'm flawed or who seem like a version of myself that's like doing a little bit better, you know?

And these were women in Schlafly's movement who were able to much more fiercely hate feminists and to mobilize against them because they had this affinity, right?

Because they had this like affective investment in these feminist women.

because they shared the category of women, but were inhabiting it differently, right?

And they thought, okay, your feminism is an indictment of me and my circumstances.

And this is like, I think, central to Phyllis's genius and to her ultimate success that she understood this.

Yeah, I mean, this is something that I think a lot about with Me Too backlash or with the way that Republican women were able to overlook all the very credible allegations against Donald Trump.

Essentially, once you live long enough in a compromising position within unfair and unjust system, the lift for recognizing that injustice gets higher, right?

Because you have to sort of say, everything that was true of my life up to this point is to some extent invalid.

And it is easier to kind of kill the messenger and to sort of say like, no, like the fact that you're making me feel that shows that you're sneering and looking down at me.

rather than saying like which also many women did in the 70s like yes i am ready to to reassess my life and i'm going to kick my husband out and i'm going to treat my children differently and I'm going to treat myself differently.

But it's very clear that there are going to be other people who are going to look at that and shrink from that realization.

Right.

And the same, I think, is true in our own day, where you have the choice between either making many of the men in your life super uncomfortable and making yourself super uncomfortable for quite some time, or you come up with this fecuctive way to like rationalize it all and make it the fault of people who've been pointing out the problem to you.

Does that make sense?

Yeah, I mean, it's just so much easier to delude yourself and change nothing

than it is to like accept a difficult truth and have to change your life, right?

Yeah.

Like that is the choice that feminism offers to women.

And it's really a difficult one.

And I think most women, even today,

like do not choose to live a harder feminist life.

They choose to live an easier anti-feminist life.

It is the path of least resistance and least pain for a lot of them.

There are just these real limits of solidarity because, right, if you're asking someone who's lived 40 years in a patriarchal system to raise their consciousness, basically, you have to grapple with the fact that you've essentially conspired against yourself.

I think this is like really the kernel of Schlafly.

It's not that she's a woman who worked against women's liberation, but that she's a woman who organized other women against women's liberation because she understood that women could be very easily persuaded to hurt themselves and to sacrifice their own material interests and dignity.

And this is also, I think, why she drives feminists absolutely insane.

In one of her televised debates, Betty Friedan said to Phyllis Schlafly, I want to have you burned at the stake.

Wow.

Which is such a Betty Friedan thing to say.

The woman was a fucking nut job.

Like, I love her, but she was just like, had no filter whatsoever.

Nice.

She gets under our skin because Schlafly exploits and exposes the core vulnerability of the feminist struggle, the thing that makes sexism unique among other axes of oppression.

And the thing that, to my mind, at least, makes feminism kind of like ultimately impossible, which is that women will conspire against themselves and participate in their own subordination.

Right.

Yeah.

And this brings me to the sort of like explanations of Schlafly and like explanations of the phenomenon that Schlafly represents, right?

Freud would say, okay, well, you know, women are inevitably naturally, inherently masochists.

I sort of prefer the radical feminist understanding of women's anti-feminism, which is that like women avoid feminism and seek out subordination to men because they are, among other things, making a somewhat rational choice based on a realistic assessment of their own gendered vulnerabilities.

I think this is like basically what you've been saying, Adrienne.

The fight is impossible.

Doing so requires me to grapple with my own complicity in harming myself and others in ways that I'm not sure that I can handle, right?

And even if I succeed in changing myself and in changing my life,

I might be materially deprived.

I might be vulnerable to violence, right?

What the anti-feminists offer women is this fantasy that there's an escape from the problem in the first place, right?

Which also makes it so significant that she's essentially peddling, as you say, a fantasy or a story, right?

In the end, you get a kind of version of domesticity that Schlafly herself didn't live, that her mother didn't live.

I wouldn't want to aspire to it, but also even if you were to aspire to it, it wouldn't come naturally to you, right?

Even if that is your life's ambition, it's not easy.

Or you get this kind of picture of like the gentlemanly husband who like

just bears no relationship to the farting, cheating weirdo who like comes home and pours himself a fucking martini the first thing that he gets home, right?

You're like, why not just live in fictions?

Reality is too awful.

Come live with me in fucking fantasy land.

Right.

Pitching this exact dream.

Shafley says, women was and need protection.

Any male who is a man or gentleman will accept the responsibility of protecting women.

I'm sorry.

men don't protect you from shit.

They don't provide, they don't protect.

Like, that's not a matter of time.

Please don't ask me, ladies.

But like, I really think you'd be better at this, honestly.

What if we were like out late at night and like we got mugged or something, and I looked at you?

Like,

my heart would stop.

We are both dying in that scenario.

I'm sorry.

This is bad.

Go ahead and fight him.

Yeah.

I left something back there.

uh let's go ahead and retrieve it but you know like when you are financially dependent on a man as schlafly encouraged women to be that means you're dependent on their character you're dependent on their whims you're dependent on their moods right and all those human failures that men have because they are in fact human beings and not these you know like gladiators that phyllish wants to depict them as uh they become your in a way that's really outsized, right?

It means if you are financially dependent on a man, you can't leave him if he hits you because you can't afford to leave him, right?

If you're financially dependent on a man, you have no say in where you guys move to or live.

If you're financially dependent on a man, it's really hard to talk back.

It's really hard to like win an argument or get your way, right?

When you're a housewife, you have a boss, and the boss is your husband because you are in a dependent role in very material terms terms that extend out to emotional and psychic terms.

But, you know, Phyllis just kind of wants to wave all of this away.

So maybe as a coda, I have a question.

The type of person you're describing makes perfect sense to me and it's very moving the way you're describing them.

And I can see why in the 70s there were a lot of them.

At the same time, the 70s are also, of course, famous for women who took very different stances, who did in fact walk out on husbands, who did in fact change their lives, who did in fact join the movement, et cetera, et cetera.

So I do want to hear from you just as a coda, how was it actually done?

How did Phyllis marshal this considerably large group of women, but not the overwhelming majority of women, into this victory?

What did the victory actually look like?

What were these steps?

What connects these rhetorical and strategic gambits to what would become this ignominious defeat of this amendment?

She marshals votes, and she makes it really unpleasant to oppose her.

So one thing I think we've alluded to is that like Phyllis is mean,

but she makes it unpleasant and like almost logistically impossible for pro-ERA feminists to do almost anything at all, right?

I think we've talked off mic a little bit about like the women's year in 1977, which was this like big national conference in Houston, Texas that was sponsored by the federal government.

And each state sent delegations to come up with recommendations for the status of women, right?

And it was supposed to be basically a victory lap for the ERA, but the ERA by 1977 has stalled considerably.

And what Phyllis does is she sends her little foot soldiers to all of these state convention-nominating events, and she gets them to like sort of commandeer the state commissions for a lot of these Republican-controlled conservative states.

So, in Houston, you've got 16,000 people in an arena who are supposed to be coming up with ideas for how the status of women can be improved.

And the feminist coalition there is very big.

You've got Republicans, you've got Democrats, you've got first ladies.

And then you've got these anti-ERA women who are on the floor, who are shouting stuff down.

At the state nominating conventions, they're seizing the mic.

They're giving it to their husbands who will take the mic and threaten violence.

They're not letting anybody else stand for election to these state delegations.

You know, it actually gets like like really crazy.

And again, it reminds me a lot of trying to get an abortion, like the scene outside of an abortion clinic, how part of it is just that it makes the political arena

so unpleasant and so stressful and so maximally taxing for even like minimal achievement and organizing that she basically harasses the pro-ERA feminists into like exhaustion.

Right.

And she makes the issue so toxic that a lot of legislatures just want to be done with it.

I know from your excellent introduction to right-wing women by Andrea Dworkin that, in fact, that book, she doesn't sort of pick on right-wing women just as a curio.

She picks on right-wing women because they picked on her at one of these ERA fights, right?

She really was mobbed by them and is sort of trying to understand what the fuck makes these people tick.

Yeah, it's exactly the Houston conference in 1977.

Andrea Dworkin goes there to cover it.

She's a journalist working, I think, for Ms.

Magazine.

And she's trying to have conversations with these anti-ERA right-wing women who've been sent there by Schlafly.

And eventually, you know, she keeps getting chased away from the like committees from Mississippi and Utah.

And eventually a bunch of them surround her in this mezzanine.

And she thinks that they're about to throw her off of a balcony.

They're telling her to go the fuck away and leave them alone.

Jeez.

And, you know, she finally like flees and goes and tells her editor, Gloria Steinem, who's like, well, you have to write about this.

And that's where the book, right-wing women, has its like genesis.

Wow.

And then in 1977, Flafley also publishes The Power of the Positive Woman, which I must admit I didn't read, but I'm guessing is also

an ERA book.

Don't read it.

Yeah,

it's an anti-ERA book.

Like she pitches the introduction as a self-help book where she's talking about the positive woman in contra to like the dissatisfied, embittered, self-pitying feminist.

But then the rest of the book, which is like 200 pages long, it's not like massive.

It's pamphlet-sized, you know?

Yeah, yeah.

Schlafly, for all her many vices, at least was a pretty brief writer.

Yeah, she says a few things, and it's the same ones over and over again.

Like half of the book is actually just evidence that the National Organization for Women is too friendly to lesbians.

And then she like reprints all their resolutions, like apologizing to lesbians and supporting lesbian rights.

And that's like a solid, like 25 pages.

The last three weeks, I was teaching a class at Stanford about LGBT history in the Bay Area.

And as part of that, I went to an archive and I read a bunch of interviews with gay and lesbian people around the bay in the 1970s, late 1970s.

And there was one interview with a lesbian couple.

And in the transcript, you can sort of tell that all these kids are running around.

And it takes about two or three pages into the interview for you to realize that these are only one of the women's children.

And the way the other woman sort of says, like, well, yeah, I can't see my children because I'm gay.

They were with us for years, but then he took them away because he suddenly decided to care and the judge sided with him and he has them now.

It fucking breaks your heart.

And like, Phyllis Schlafly, May She Rot in Hell, helped prolong and perpetuate that state of affairs.

Like, it is fucking disgusting.

Like, this isn't about like, will a landlord slam a door in your face or whatever, which is bad enough.

But like, no, it's about like, you can't see your kids kind of shit.

It's really fucking rough.

If you think about the Patricia Highsmith novel, The Price of Salt, right?

The first lesbian pulp novel with a happy end.

The happy end is that they possibly get to stay together and she loses custody of the kids, right?

Like it's just like,

that's where we are, right?

This is the state of affairs that Phyllis Schlafly wants to freeze in fucking amber.

She talks at length in The Power of the Positive Woman about the horror of allowing lesbians to have custody of their children.

Fuck her.

Fuck her.

Like the intensity and the vitriol of her homophobia is quite disturbing.

And she stayed that way until the end.

One of her last accomplishments of her life was really like being a cheerleader and architect of some of the opposition to gay marriage in the 2004 George W.

Bush reelection campaign.

And then one of the last things she did before she dropped the fuck dead was write a book endorsing Donald Trump for president.

So Phyllis,

rest in piss,

we don't miss you.

But I do think she is

a fascinating figure and a little bit of a cipher for our own time.

Absolutely.

Thank you for letting me yap at you about this.

I think listeners are going to get hopefully a much shorter version of this, but I have like commandeered Adrian's entire afternoon just to make him like listen to me talk at him.

So like three cheers for Adrian for being such a good sport about Phyllis Schlapply.

Well, you sat through Wagner for a lot longer.

Thank you for walking.

me through this amazing story.

Thank you for sharing your magnum opus with us here.

As always, we're so thrilled that you all are willing to embark with us on these rabbit holes.

We look forward to speaking with you again in another episode of Inbit with the Right.

See you next time.

In Bed with the Right is made possible by hundreds of listeners who support us via patreon.com.

Our episodes are produced and edited by Mark Yoshizumi and Katie Lau.

Our title music is by Katie Lau.