The Feminist Movement, pt. 5
Helen Andelin was a Mormon housewife who observed Second Wave Feminism with initial suspicion and growing disappointment. As she saw it, women were betraying themselves, their gender, their nature, and their divine calling by pursuing work outside the home. As a Mormon, she believed that a woman’s divine mandate was to complement her husband.
Marriage, which is to say heterosexual union in the eyes of God, the community, and the law, was a foregone conclusion for women. As a divine mandate, this was (or should be) the chief and primary concern for women. Women who forsook this, first and foremost, had left the calling of the Heavenly Father. Feminism, in Andelin’s economy, was a national sin that would only continue to compound as women “liberated” themselves to idolatry of the self.
Helen married her husband Aubrey in 1942 and they became parents to eight children, four sons and four daughters. In 1963, in part as a response to Feminism, Andelin wrote Fascinating Womanhood. The book was a condensed form of her marriage enrichment classes which focused on the need for women to develop romantic relationships with their husbands. She had begun teaching in Central California and it sold over 300,000 copies under a publishing label she founded with her husband. Later, Random House would purchase the rights and it has been estimated that over five million copies and translated into eight languages. Her classes eventually grew, necessitating that she train 1,500 women to lead seminars of their own and share Andelin’s teachings to tens of thousands of more women.
As historian Julie Debra Neuffer explains in her 2015 book, Helen Andelin and the Fascinating Womanhood Movement, Andelin sought to teach women how to become good wives by reverting to traditional gender roles. The self-published Fascinating Womanhood (1963) was in equal parts a self-help book, a religious text, and cultural criticism that used the works of Victor Hugo and Charles Dickens to support a “family values” agenda. Though it is out of print, an updated version edited by one of Andelin’s daughters has found a renewed audience online.
Like Friedan, Andelin recognized a “problem that has no name,” but Andelin claimed the problem wasn’t caused by domestic drudgery, but by a lack of love. “[O]ne need is fundamental,” Andelin writes. “She must feel loved and cherished by her husband. Without his love, her life is an empty shell.”
As biographer Julie Debra Neuffer writes,
Several factors rested at the core of how Andelin understood her life, her religion, her family, and her marriage — and how she eventually developed what would become the Fasciniating Womanhood message. The first was a unique childhood shapred by both the financial devastation of the Great Depression and a spartan upbringing in the harsh, isolated conditions of the desert Southwest. Second, Andelin was raised in the heart of Mormon Latter-Day Saint (LDS) culture. Reared by devoutly religious parents, she accepted a worldview that was both optimistic in its assumption of the basic goodness of all human beings and laden with endless striving toward personal salvation. Finally, because her family had moved often when she was a child, she yearned for stability. Andelin developed a heightened sense of nostalgia that eventually became part of her appeal to women… Importantly, Andelin lived by the logic of immediacy. In this way, she identified with Evangelicals, Christian Fundamentalists, doomsayers, and other apocalyptic religious believers…
At precisely the same time that Betty Friedan successfully initiated the rise of the second wave of American Feminism with her landmark book The Feminine Mystique, Andelin’s femininity movement also became the subject of intense popular debate. A charismatic and sought-after celebrity, Andelin appeared on radio and television, and in sold-out speaking engagements across the country, touting a brand of nostalgic political conservativsm that large sections of the population found appealing… So significant was the femininity women’s movement that, in June of 1975, the New York Times Magazine featured a lengthy article on the nationwide FW phenomenon. Andelin’s philosophy, no longer the tiny fringe movement that some observers had hoped it would remain, caught the attention of serious journalists across the country. Even the renowned sex researchers William Masters and Virginia Johnson wrote a feature article for Redbook magazine in 1976 warning readers against Fascinating Womanhood and other advice books “that teach women to pretend.” At a time when the renewed call for women’s rights was at the forefront in the news, FW represented a significant aspect of a growing political and social backlash to the era’s turbulence, which many feared was eroding traditional institutions and values…
The views and goals of both Andelin and her FW movement were both more complex and more distinct than her critics conceded. Moreover, they endured. In fact, Andelin built a substantial and lasting following simply by addressing the immediate, felt needs of many women at a crucial moment in history when other reform movements did not. While Andelin regarded her work primarily as a religious calling, in time she and the women who followed her became a forminable political force with which Feminist leaders eventually had to reckon.
Andelin’s claim to divine inspiration seems a bit far-fetched. As Neuffer explains, Andelin’s message did not originate with her. Neuffer sat down with Andelin shortly before her death and conducted a series of interviews about her life, marriage, religion, and work. There, she came to realize that Andelin’s lectures and book were stolen from a series of 1920 booklets, The Secrets of Fascinating Womanhood by Verna Johnson. As Andelin shared with her, she took the books from Johnson in 1961. Even then, the books did not originate with Johnson but were instead a “set of advice booklets that her mother had given to [Johnson] in her teens…” These were the basis of Johnson’s own marriage classes and seminars. Neuffer explains,
This discovery made me sad. Andelin believed that because God had led her to the booklets, they belonged to her and so she had the right to do with them as she wished. Because Verna did not, in Helen’s opinion, recognize the religious values of the booklets, she felt justified in taking possession of them, adding some of her own ideas, and then copyrighting the finished product in her name. Helen also believed that the teaching materials and ideas generated by FW teachers belonged to her. They were all part of God’s work, she reasoned, and so she ‘protected’ them by also copyrighting them in her name.
Divinely inspired or plagiarized, Andelin’s Fascinating Womanhood was neither the only book capitalizing on anti-Feminist sentiment nor the only seminar calling women back to a previous generation. Marabel Morgan was another speaker on the circuit who, like Andelin, began with courses designed to help women before becoming an author.
Morgan’s marriage guide The Total Woman (1973) explained that the source of women’s marital woes was not male chauvinism, inequality of the sexes, or women’s untapped potential. The problem was women’s sullen resistance to their designated role. Unlike Andelin, who encouraged witholding sexual favors To achieve marital bliss, a wife needed to devote herself wholly to her husband and give him the honor he was due. Kristin Kobes Du Mez writes in Jesus and John Wayne (2020) that
Popular Evangelical publisher Fleming Revell printed an initial run of 5,000 copies, but by the end of the first year over 500,000 copies had been sold, and it would become the best-selling nonfiction book of 1974. Eventually, America’s housewives would consume more than ten million copies…
Morgan offered practical tips to help women “become the sunshine” in their homes, advice that included time management, more efficient meal planning (prepare your dinner salads right after breakfast), and weight loss. Most importantly, women just needed to stop nagging their husbands… Morgan’s solution was simple: treat your husband like a king, revere him, and cater to his every need. This was especially important for working women, because a man’s “masculinity may be threatened by your paycheck.” A wife needed to let her husband know that he was her hero, and it was her job to put her husband’s “tattered ego” back together at the end of each day by admiring his masculine qualities — his muscles, or whiskers. Morgan’s advice had a religious foundation: “The biblical remedy for marital conflict” was the submission of wives to husbands…
The Total Woman offered Christians a model of femininity, but it also presented, along the way, a model of masculinity. To be a man was to have a fragile ego and a vigorous libido. Men were entitled to lead, to rule, and to have their needs met — all their needs, on their terms. Morgan’s version of femininity hinges on this view of masculinity. It’s not difficult to see what part of this equation appealed to men, but Morgan’s primary audience was women… [Her] message appealed to women invested in defending “traditional womanhood” against the Feminist challenge…
Making yourself sexually available to your husband seven nights in a row, praising his whiskers, calling him at work to hell him you craved his body — none of this came easy for many women. But thousands if not millions deemed it an easier path than the one offered by women’s “liberation.” For many housewives, the new opportunities feminism promised were not opportunities at all. To those who had few employable skills and no means or desire to escape the confines of their homes, Feminism seemed to denigrate their very identity and threaten their already precarious existence. It was better to play the cards they were dealt. Women who chose “traditional womanhood” didn’t always do so because they wanted an easier path, however; many believed it to be the better path.
Elisabeth Elliot, widow of Jim Elliot, was a missionary to the Huaorani tribe in Ecuador with her husband. As a trusted Evangelical veteran, Elliot became a popular speaker to churches and women’s groups after the death of her husband in 1956. Two decades after Jim’s death, Elliot published “Let Me Be a Woman” in 1976, ostensibly as a letter to her engaged daughter, Valerie. In the book, Elliot explained that “The woman is totally other, totally different, totally God’s gift to man.” It was a phrasing intended to subvert the language used in academic circles at the time. Feminists were arguing against the foreign “otherness” of the female body, seeking to normalize and glorify the female body apart from the default of patriarchy. Elliot’s explanation went even further. God had given “rank” to males in the social hierarchy, and a “virile drive for domination” that extended to marriage as the male’s first “conquest.” While God had given rank and related privileges to men, women were given self-sacrifice by God, for marriage and motherhood required “self-giving, sacrifice, and suffering” that needed to be endured silently in submission to the divine order of authority. As Du Mez frames it,
The very notion of hierarchy came from the Bible, Elliot contended. In short, equality was “not a Christian ideal.” A heirarchal order of submission and rule descended “from the nature of God Himself.” God the Father exercised “just and legitimate authority”; the Son [Jesus Christ] exhibited “willing and joyful submission.” Within the trinitarian God, then, existed “the elements of rule, submission, and union.” Due to a hatred of authority, however, “the blueprint has been lost.”
Elliot assured her daughter that by accepting her — and all women’s — otherness, she would find peace. Men are “likely to be bigger and louder and tougher and hungrier and dirtier”, even more desirous of sexual activity, but insisted that real women wanted real men and real men wanted real women. “The more womanly you are, the more manly your husband will want to be.” The emphasis on “real” men and women was an implied way to confront Evangelicalism’s growing attacks on homosexuality and “abnormal” sexuality.
Like Johnson, Andelin, Morgan, and Bryant, Elliot would reason away the harshness of men as something a woman needed to accept and overcome within herself. Each of these Traditionalists sang the same note: America’s decline was because women had failed to submit to men. Women eagerly embraced these teachings because it provided a simple explanation to a complex problem, but also because it also offered an opportunity for change. America could be healed if women submitted.
One can almost appreciate the simplicity of Traditionalism. No matter how awful and tangled the world becomes, everything can be fixed with a simple formula of self-improvement. It is ironic that for a group of people who valorize Plato and Aristotle for their contributions to philosophy and rhetoric, Traditionalists display a spectacular absence of critical thinking or recognition that the world is inherently complex. By valuing simplicity — politically, racially, socially — what they really mean is a homogenous culture already familiar or “natural” to them by which they judge everyone else — the “other” at the opposite end of whatever issue presents itself.
For simplicity, we might see the debate that created Third Wave Feminism as one between progressive liberal Feminists and traditional women — those who identify as Feminist and those who reject it. Both ends of this spectrum, the liberal and the traditional, were seeking a solution to “the issue” or “problem” of women. For the Feminist, this meant addressing the myriad issues, plural, that women encountered in the world — pay equality, sexual harassment, limited prospects, misogyny, education, access to medical and social services, and hundreds of other concerns. For the Traditionalist, there was a complex problem, singular.
Pessimistically, women were a problem that needed to be solved. Optimistically, it was also possible to say that women were the solution. For the woman willing to accept her fault/responsibility, the burden was light. As Jesus promised when he was quoted in the Gospel of Matthew, chapter 11,
Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.
Women, especially Christian women (like Andelin, Morgan, Elliot, and anti-gay activist Anita Bryant who was also a popular anti-Feminist speaker in the Seventies), would find that fixing America was possible and also simple: Women would find America improving when they submitted to the natural (or, in religious communities, “divine”) order: marriage and children. Look at the Feminists fighting for their rights. Where had all that fighting and shouting and protesting against the natural order gotten them? Submitting to husbands and accepting domestic responsibility would restore order and peace to this God-kissed nation.
As Jonathan Haidt writes in The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (2012)
In 1987, moral psychology was a part of developmental psychology. Researchers focused on questions such as how children develop in their thinking about rules, especially rules of fairness. The big question behind this research was: How to children come to know right from wrong? Where does morality come from?
There are two obvious answers to this question: nature or nurture. If you pick nature, then you’re a nativist. You believe that moral knowledge is native in our minds. It comes preloaded, perhaps in our God-inscribed hearts (as the Bible says), or in our evolved moral emotions (as Darwin argued). But if you believe that moral knowledge comes from nurture, then you are an empiricist. You believe that children are more or less blank slates at birth (as John Locke said). If morality varies around the world and across centuries, then how could it be innate? Whatever morals we have as adults must have been learned during childhood from our own experience, which includes adults telling us what’s right and wrong…
But this is a false choice, and in 1987 moral psychology was mostly focused on a third answer: rationalism, which says that kids figure out morality for themselves.
Haidt continues to summarize the work of developmental psychologist Jean Piaget, who noticed that caterpillars developed in stages and then did so again as they became butterflies. He later applied this work to humans, noticing a transferable set of information. Similar to caterpillars, children moved through stages of understanding. But to expect a child to think or behave like an adult would be tantamount to expecting a caterpillar to fly. It would be impossible. Some concepts, even simple concepts, are unrecognizable and unexplainable to children until it seems to “just appear”, fully formed in their minds. Piaget studied this and developed these studies further. Once children reached a point in their development, Piaget noticed, they were able to understand how a thin but tall glass and a short but wider glass could hold the same amount of water, for instance. Haidt continues,
In other words, the understanding of the conservation of volume wasn;t innate, and it wasn’t learned from adults. Kids figure it out for themselves, but only when their minds are ready and they are given the right kinds of experiences.
Piaget applied this cognitive-developmental approach to the study of children’s moral thinking as well. He got down on his hands and knees to play marbles with children and sometimes he deliberately broke rules and played dumb. The children then responded to his mistakes, and in so doing, they revealed their growing ability to respect rules, change rules, take turns, and resolve disputes. This growing knowledge came in orderly stages, as children’s cognitive abilities matured.
Piaget argued that children’s understanding of morality is like their understanding of those water glasses: we can’t say that it is innate, and we can’t say that kids learn it directly from adults. It is, rather, self-constructed as kids play with other kids.”
This is the essence of psychological rationalism. We grow into rationality as we grow up and explore the physical, social, psychological, and relational spheres of life. What I’ve noticed in my classrooms, especially after the pandemic, is that many students possess impenetrable certainty with no experience in the domain in which they are speaking. When I assign an argumentative essay, not only do they not understand scholarship and where to find it, but also they exhibit an inability to understand it when I provide it to them. The apparatus for critical thinking simply is not there, sometimes.
Similarly, my mother works with a high-risk population at a treatment facility and there are some clients who simply do not see the connection between their own behavior and the consequences of that behavior. Earlier this week, she told me about someone who works at the facility who holds Traditionalist views. Her coworkers often talk about her behind her back and, as the head of the facility, my mother hears many of their complaints. “She’s still a child,” my mother tells them, “Even if she is an adult. You need to accept her for who she is, not who you want her to be. She hasn’t had the advantages you have, the experiences you have. She’s lived a sheltered life. That’s okay. Being different doesn’t mean she deserves less respect.”
Accepting difference is something she instilled in me, growing up. That does not mean I don’t see the difference. In the case of my students, there are several reasons for the absence of critical thinking. Coming out of the pandemic, young people find themselves stuck in practical or survival thinking rather than reflective or critical thinking. The decline in critical thinking is not unique to Millenials or Generation Z, as the woman who works for my mother shows. And this decline, unfortunately, shows no signs of changing. Rather, among Traditionalists specifically, rejecting critical thought is a conscious choice and one that has been culturally reinforced for decades. Evangelicalism is a testament to this. The writings and influence of Andelin, Morgan, and Elliot are a testament to this. Conservative politics is a testament to this. The popularity of Fox News is a testament to this. The proliferation of conspiracy theories and the role of QANON in the ascendency of Donald Trump to the White House is a testament to this. This is not about Covid — which Traditionalists originally asserted wasn’t even real but a product of government propaganda.
As Traditionalists frame it, modernity and progress have brought about confusion and uncertainty. There are too many options, too many ethical models, too many “personal truths” to validate and understand. In this seeming chaos, the Traditionalist rejects critical thinking for the familiar, the supposedly “natural” state of existence, the ancient, timeless, capitalized Truth to be found in Tradition. Critical thinking is a threat to this existence, to the simplicity, creating a form of mental and emotional arrested development where everyone outside the tradition is an “other”, a threat to be overcome and vanquished.
It is possible, to be explicit here, that Traditionalism seeks to reach so far back that it may consciously privilege the primitive violence of a pre-civilized state. When Traditionalists insist on recovering the “natural” state, the “original” way of being, what are they referring to? When are they referring to? Not to make light of Traditionalism, but I’m quite content using indoor plumbing (designed by Isaiah Rogers in 1826) and air conditioning (invented in 1902 by Willis Haviland Carrier). While I might be enjoy camping and natural living, I have absolutely no intention of using leaves and straw instead of toilet paper (introduced to Americans in 1857 by Joseph Gayetty).
By continually rejecting social, mental, and relationial development, this wilfulness creates neural pathways that, as Traditionalists age, make development impossible. Fixed thinking and subjectivity will have been reinforced for so long that the Traditionalist will no longer able to adapt or recognize an objective reality. In this state, every experience is a threat. Everyone who slightly disagrees in an enemy. Consumed with this predisposition to violence, they revert to a “simple” state of mind and become prisoners to it. Anyone who probes their thinking is too stupid to see the capitalized Truth that the conservative claims as their own.
But then I am not a social scientist. I can only pull from my own experiences in Evangelicalism, from growing up in a conservative household, and socializing in a conservative region of the South. All of the above generalizations are experiences I have had. Over four decades, I have noticed and often remarked on the messages that are reinforced:
- Women are the originators of sin because Eve, a woman, was the first human to sin in the Garden of Eden. You can’t trust women because
- Muslims are bad because they attacked America.
- Europeans are foreigners. It doesn’t matter if many of the first settlers in America were from Europe. They don’t speak English — not even in England! Can you believe! — and so they’re not welcome here.
- Russians are bad-no wait, turns out they are alright because they are traditionalists also.
- Communism is awful, but they were on to something with that Fascism thing. Shame they got away from that. Then again, Communism is an evil that needs to be defeated for that reason.
- Jews are behind the media and orchestarting world events.
- Democrats are evil, well maybe not evil so much as puppets of the Jews.
These narratives are always hostile and lurk behind a thin veneer of family values, pro-life politics, and Christian Nationalism. Because a woman was the first to sin and start this whole mess, they bear the greater burden of fixing things — in the home, in society, in the church — and yet this is also why they must be restrained — in the home, socially, in the church. Feminism is the anthesis of this, wanting to liberate women. Liberate them to what, exactly? To sin more? To violate God’s will ? To make the state of the world even worse?
These attitudes are embodied in narratives that make women ashamed of their bodies, to feel shamed for their desires, to feel shamed for succeeding in the classroom and shamed for failing to succeed, to feel shamed for the television they watch and shamed when they are not “girly enough” to watch the shows marketed to them, to feel shamed by unrealistic beauty standards and excessively harsh (maybe they’re a secret lesbian?) when they point those unrealistic beauty standards out. Is it any wonder that Feminism seeks to reject all of these oppressive narratives of shame? And, for their part, the Traditionalists don’t offer a compelling message. Yes, there is this repeated theme of “returning” to the natural and divine state, a pre-Fall state of innocence and obedience. But this theme is curiously twisted. If one presupposes the existence of God and claims that Traditionalism is more godly, then what are we to make of the insistence from the leading voices of Traditional Feminism — Johnson, Andelin, Morgan, Bryant, Elliot — of making it so. For a narrative that insists on surrender and passivity, there is a considerable amount of work. At least when it comes to working on a woman’s perfection of the self. Toward men, women are encouraged to manipulate and control with “feminine wiles.” Somehow, this takes the “natural” disposition toward manipulation characteristic of women in the Traditionalist narrative and makes it… godly? Aren’t manipulation and deception bad things? Apparently no, as long as a woman does so for “godly” reasons pre-approved by the Traditionalist politic. A woman is supposed to give herself to a husband, but refuse and resist men until then, to encourage a man, but never fully trust him — for men are so easily manipulated if one is pretty and can be led astray by the beauty of a competing female if you are not beautiful enough.
And with the emphasis on regression as a form of perfection, there are messages that — traditional, conservative, progressive, or liberal — are immediately problematic. For example, Andelin emphasizes that women should be “child-like” to their husbands. A later edition of Fascinating Womanhood edited by Andelin’s daughter, The Vintage Woman, was published to correct insistence on “child-likeness” to “girlhood/girlishness.” But doesn’t that correction imply something was wrong with Andelin’s (admittedly stolen) “divine” revelation? In any event, encouraging the infantilized woman to be “girlish” instead of “child-like” is only marginally better. A woman is expected to embrace her girlhood toward her husband and, as she physically matures, toward the world outside of their shared home. Women should not feel responsibility, for example, for finances or upkeep of the home. Those are masculine and mature responsibilities. To assume them would be to take on masculinity and maturity that, Andelin taught, a woman should refrain from. The limited but simplified domain of a woman was to be domestic. The emotional and sexual care of her husband (never his intellectual equal, because this might foster rivalry or an awareness that a woman might be smarter than a man) were a woman’s chief expression of the divine order, according to Morgan. Accepting a man in his brutishness and enduring his behavior with stoicism, then providing emotional care for their children, who were her true equal inside of a home and thus her primary interlocuters, was the message from each of these influential women.
When Third Wave Feminism began in 1991, we might see the movement’s bend toward “tradition” as divergent from Feminism as it was expressed in the 20th Century. It might also be seen as a reaction to it. But we would be wrong to believe that Third Wave Feminism was a regression. Just because the signs were lowered and protests grew silent does not mean issues were resolved or that anger abated.
The appointment of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court was something of a watershed moment, clarifying the place of woman in America. For many, Thomas’ ascendency to the Court was an offense and insult, proof that women would not be believed even when they were willing to sacrifice their personal and professional reputation. As Elise Loehnen writes in On Our Best Behavior (2023), women had “been trained for goodness. Men, meanwhile, have been trained for power.” Feminists would need to command political will accordingly.
Thomas’ appointment was further proof of what Feminists already knew. Despite all of their supposed advancements, Feminism had failed to make progress. Why continue to resist the inevitable? It might be best to give up and submit to the system of patriarchy and misogyny that had so evidently prevailed in America.
For their part, the expectations of rigid gender roles also created a series of expectations for men. Also emphasizing hard work, the narratives directed toward traditional men regarded were concerned with the development of the physical self to prove sexual virtility and financial provision for the family. No attention was given to the development of the mental or emotional self, and it’s noteworthy that much of Evangelical thought from the middle of the 20th Century to the present has been a continual retreading of the tire: salvation, marriage, financial responsibility, without much by way of social responsibility, critical thinking, understanding of historical context, compassion and emotional development towards “other” (women, minorities, geopolitics, etc.).
It’s truly a tragedy, an absolute tragedy that Traditionalism has never really developed beyond the first principles but as Piaget and Haidt both note in their respective works on cognitive development and moral ethics, Traditionalists have been asphyxiated for decades. In a relentless pursuit of recovering the past while the world has moved forward and navigated several wars, Traditionalists have missed several opportunities to confront and thoughtfully curate a compelling narrative on a series of economic collapses, the rise and decline and resurgence of terrorism, the collapse and recovery of superpowers like Russia and China, culture and the arts, education, to say nothing of social consciousness. By narrowing their message to family values and tradition, many Traditionalists have been mischaracterized and maligned. They express anger — particularly on Fox News and at every invitation extended by other news outlets — that they have been left behind, even when this is what they have insisted they want and how they have continually presented.
Second Wave Feminism accepted Traditionalists, but somewhere along the way Traditionalists began to cultivate their own agenda, misunderstanding critical thought and conversation as an attack. Second Wave Feminism had encouraged progressives and conservatives to share their experiences and find solidarity, welcoming the merits of their respective positions in occasional tension. But there were women who were actively, aggressively against the liberation of women.
Courtesy: U.S. News and World Report Magazine.
Phyllis Schlafly, the wife of wealthy St. Louis lawyer Fred Schlafly and mother to their six children, gained attention for championing “traditional” womanhood and a political career that opposed Communism. After two failed attempts to secure a seat in Congress, Schlafly’s defeated pessimism found new fire attacking the Equal Rights Amendment. Originally proposed in the 1920s after the passage of the 19th Amendment, the text of the Amendment is (you’ll notice I’ve been using this word a bit) simple.
Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.
Schlafly originally felt the Equal Rights Amendment was beneath her. It was obvious to her that no such amendment was necessary, given the privileges women like her experienced. But with the resurgence of Feminism in the 1960s and the series of laws passed to legislate equality, the Equal Rights Amendment had gained traction. It was believed that the momentum of Feminism would finally help the ERA pass and further protect women. But Schlafly saw an opportunity.
In her February 1972 newsletter, Schlafly outlined her issues with the ERA. Chief among those reasons was that the idea of women’s oppression was ludicrous. No one in America experienced privileges and protections like women. It was, on its face, absurd that women were not afforded equality and privilege under the law already; the Feminists were stuck in a cycle of victimhood. Beyond this, legislation in America or anywhere else would erase what everyone already knew and had known for thousands of years. Men and women were different; women had babies and men didn’t. This was not a problem to overcome or ignore. That settled the matter. Anyone who didn’t like this fact — and it was a fact — should complain to God, not the government. It was a fact that America was a “Judeo-Christian” nation and had already written laws to solidify local customs requiring men to carry out their duties to protect and provide for women and children. Men were responsible, another fact. “Women’s rights”, if such a thing were to be further legislated, should be directed toward a woman’s right to have a baby and to be protected by men, but even then, there was no need for this. Women had a responsibility (you are hearing this now familiar note struck again) to marry, have babies, and secure the family structure at home. Schlafly insisted that “equal rights fanatics” threatened to undo this by forcing it into law, a requirement to be met rather than a custom to be expanded on within the safety of the home. “Aggressive females” were “yapping” about how mistreated they were, equating marriage to slavery and suggesting that their natural sphere (again, you hear what has already become familiar here) of housework was “menial and degrading and — perish the thought — that women were discriminated against,” which was “the fraud of the century.” What Feminists failed to understand was that women liked to be housewives and homemakers. Women who said otherwise were failed degenerates and — possibly — secretly, a lesbian.
Schlafly’s message resonated with religious women, who had been primed to these views through churches and tradition, as well as woring-class women who were realizing, upon leaving the home, that the labor market only offered unfulfilling work and low pay to women. So while she was unreservedly against Feminism in every form, even Traditional Feminism, Schlafly was a constant voice whose attacks became part of the discussions Feminists were having about abortion, religion, nationalism, the law, tradition, and gendered violence.
Like other conservative politicians and emerging celebrities within the Evangelical Movement, Schlafly’s message was simple, focusing on family matters and national security. The ERA, according to Schlafly, would only mandate forced abortions, forced childcare, and forced labor like Communist Russia, to say nothing — “why any women would support such a ridiculous and un-American proposal as this” — of forced military service. Schlafly helped convince conservative women who agreed that there was a need for legal protections to abandon this project. It was Feminists who were violating them, not men, and Feminists who were forcing them into roles they didn’t want.
In this way, Third Wave Feminists had already been indoctrinated and platformed by Schlafly. By the time Thomas was sworn in as a member of the Supreme Court, they were already programmed to see Thomas as the victim of philosophical strawmen: the Left, the Liberals, the Radical Feminists, the Communists, the non-Christians (usually Jews, but sometimes Humanists, the Illuminati, or one of the secret societies housed on the campuses of the Ivy Leagues), the Coastal Elites, and the Democrats who were always (always!) diabolically searching for ways to undermine America with their sinister agendas to legislate evil and perform witchcraft in the hallowed halls of sacred institutions. To say that the conservatives were hijacked would be an understatement. But then again, this was inevitable when they abandoned critical thinking.
Continued in pt. 6
