“If the contemporary backlash had a birthplace, it was here within the ranks of the New Right, where it first took shape as a movement with a clear ideological agenda. The New Right leaders were among the first to articulate the central argument of the backlash—that women’s equality is responsible for women’s unhappiness.” — Susan Faludi, Backlash, “Chapter 9—The Politics of Resentment: The New Right’s War on Women.”
Kathryn Joyce (writer and journalist in New York): Count me as another journalist reminded of past reporting in rereading this chapter. I read Backlash in college, but returning to it now, after having written for years about conservative Christian social movements, Faludi’s early insights resonate in a whole new way. And I think from the type of reporting I’ve done, I have a slightly different take on the continuing relevance of what she saw in the 1980s New Right.
The first book I wrote, Quiverfull, concerned an evangelical subculture that is opposed to all forms of contraception and argued that having large families was the purest form of anti-abortion activism that Christians could undertake. They would demonstrate with their lives that children are “unqualified blessings” by having as many as God gave them. The wives would be submissive to their husbands, homeschool their children, and raise their daughters to see motherhood as their highest calling: conservative Renaissance Women who embodied a total and consistent opposition to feminism.
The families of eight, ten, or a dozen kids that resulted from this lifestyle were vocal, but admittedly few. With such a high-stakes ideological commitment, Quiverfull was never destined to attract that many hardcore adherents. As a movement, they functioned more as a purist avant garde. And as such, their movement had an influence that far surpassed its size: A sort of trickledown effect wherein moderate reflections of their values came to influence the broader conservative Christian community. In conservative politics, the size of a politician’s family became an easy indicator of their faith and conservatism—as with Rick Santorum, of course—but also other Republican candidates who nudged the conversation rightward. Mike Huckabee, for example, who supported the conservative gender doctrine of “wifely submission”; Sarah Palin and her brood of five children, including a son with special needs; and Mitt Romney, no evangelical of course, but a devout believer who urged the 2013 graduating class of Southern Virginia University to have “a quiver full” of children.
But perhaps more importantly, the Quiverfull movement’s purism echoed in the changing face of Christian leadership, which began to have larger families—maybe four kids instead of two—to edge away from contraception, and to embrace the idea that many forms of birth control are in fact “abortifacients.” While that may sound unsurprising today, in the wake of the Hobby Lobby lawsuit, it’s worth remembering that before the 1980s, many evangelicals (notably Beverly LaHaye, as Faludi writes) endorsed contraception or at least allowed that it was a private marital decision.
But that started to change with the New Right revolution, and its insistence on feminism as the root of all social ills. That’s a legacy that has endured in today’s conservative Christian culture. What struck me most forcefully when I started reporting on the Quiverfull and homeschooling movements was how seriously they took the threat of feminism. They wrote a library of books instructing conservative evangelical women that women’s equality was a slippery slope, and that accepting careers or family planning led directly to divorce, abortion, child abuse, and gay marriage.
This first struck me as an almost hysterical overreach, but I came to see it as something else: Christian conservatives acknowledging feminism’s revolutionary potential, taking it far more seriously than did mainstream society. And that’s something else Faludi diagnosed early on. While the 1980s media raced to declare feminism’s obsolescence — a “fringe” issue and “sideshow” to the New Right’s more serious policy objectives — “the players in the right wing fundamentalist drama knew better,” as Faludi writes. “For them, public punishment of autonomous feminist women was no less than the main event.”
The children of those players went on to create the fundamentalism we know today. In some cases, contemporary right wing leaders are quite literally their descendants. Conservative Caucus founder Howard Phillips, who Faludi writes about as a New Right architect obsessed with revenge, fathered Doug Phillips—one of the most recognizable faces in the homeschooling world—who helped popularize a vitriolic form of antifeminism in that community. But the ideological lineage is there more broadly, in modern, culture warriors who have carried forward the New Right’s mission almost unchanged since the 1980s. The Phyllis Schlafly and Beverly LaHaye model of conservative women leaders who fulfilled their ambitions through antifeminist campaigns continues on in today’s evangelical women’s leaders, who encourage followers to “rise up by stepping down,” and (no joke) join “a revolution that will take place on our knees.” These people may be dropouts from mainstream politics and culture, but they aren’t irrelevant. On the contrary, they’ve had a more direct influence on millions of Christian women (and men) than most political leaders.
There are things about this chapter that feel heavy-handed and stale today; for example, Faludi’s dry juxtaposition of LaHaye’s submissive rhetoric with her evident political might, along with the blithe hypocrisy of her aides, who return home from staffing the counterrevolution to egalitarian partnerships that could have been based on the 1970s feminist classic the Marriage Agreement. However, what feels like a more significant omission to me is that Faludi never seemed to follow up on what would happen to LaHaye’s and Schlafly’s devotees. She never saw her way past those leading women to the foot soldiers of this movement: The ones who might have enjoyed an empowering weekend volunteering for Concerned Women for America, but who never had a shot at the fulfillment LaHaye’s staffers did, let alone the celebrity and power career of LaHaye herself. There aren’t that many openings for antifeminist grand dames, and at the end of the day, for every Phyllis Schlafly, there are masses of women who bought into her sales pitch and found themselves, years later, trapped in lives they didn’t want. A few, lucky conservative women leaders got to “have it all” as reward for telling other women to get in line, but the second generation has had to live with the rules that their foremothers helped put in place.
Years later, I’ve spoken to a number of them, and the absence of their voices in Backlash feels like a missed opportunity. There is more to this story than pointing out the hypocrisy of movement leaders who sated their ambitions by telling other women to starve theirs. There are real victims here, in the women and girls who were suckered into—or perhaps worse, were born into—the families where the New Right’s pro-family revolution really did take hold. And they paid the highest price.
David Weigel (political reporter for Slate): Right after finishing this chapter, I headed out on assignment covering a conference of social conservatives. The Iowa FAMiLY Leader (lowercase “I” to represent the humbling of the individual) gathered a thousand odd believers in Ames, Iowa; the location attracted five Republicans who may run for president next year, plus an almost entirely male lineup of social conservative leaders.
One of the only prominent women who found the lectern was Iowa’s 2014 Republican candidate for Senate, Joni Ernst. Listening to her, you would have never guessed what kind of conference you were at. According to Ernst, the FAMiLY Leader was in the business of “making sure that Iowa has strong families,” and nothing else. Her campaign was about “Iowans helping Iowans,” because “taking care of one another” was obviously the only way to keep society humming.
The only details she shared about herself actually were that she’d once volunteered for a crisis hotline—for battered women, not women needing to be scared away from abortion—and that she served in Iraq. Ernst had been perfecting this blandness. A Des Moines Register reporter told me how she’d handled a speech the day before, at the Iowa State Fair. Progressive activists had shown up to heckle her and capture video of any gaffes. This was the setting where Mitt Romney swatted a 99% jeerer by telling him “corporations are people, my friend!”
They left empty-handed and viral-video deprived because Ernst spent the whole time talking about veterans. This was not something Paul Weyrich could have anticipated when he gave Faludi this wonderful, embarrassing interview about how all the women he hired were useless and kept getting knocked up. And it wasn’t what Phyllis Schlafly had in mind during the campaign against the ERA, when she warned women that equal rights would make them subject to Selective Service.
I came away from both the campaign and the book thinking that conservatives have conceded some of the terms, but little of the content, of the culture war. The Weyrich interview with Faludi is dated to 1988, a full decade before Weyrich conceded that conservatives had “lost the culture war” because Bill Clinton survived his sex scandals. The blogosphere/Facebook universe features plenty of antifeminist trolling. But saying “Todd Akin” around Republicans has the effect that saying “Frau Blucher” had in Young Frankenstein. They have learned, or are learning, what not to say.
I didn’t realize until reading Backlash how Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum discovered “family” brand. It was founded in 1972 as “an alternative to women’s lib,” a reactionary and downright snarky self-description. “After 1980” (i.e., after the Reagan landslide) it completely changed its motto to “leading the pro-family movement since 1972.” That was only a couple years after Focus on the Family launched, and around the birth of the Family Research Council.
How does a Joni Ernst fit into this? Two ways. First, she represents how conservatives have given up on keeping mothers in “traditional” roles because they know women can do more while remaining reliably conservative. Faludi writes that Beverly LaHaye sounds like she’s “on the verge of a feminist conversion,” and that’s exactly how the most successful Republican politicians and conservative think-tankers sound.
Faludi’s sources argued that pop culture was turning their way: “Look at the movies. They’re all about having babies now.” This is still true on the right. There’s endless angst about the morality of pop culture, but conservatives notice that romances end with marriage, or babies, or both. And they notice what happens on Facebook when anyone, liberal or conservative, gets their first ultrasounds. Babies are cute; abortion is horrifying. Conservatives are more and more confident that norms around women’s careers, women in combat, etc, can change without those women remaining childless.
Here’s the other story to take from Joni Ernst. She’s not talking much about policy; she’s not proposing anything specific that would make family formation easier or cheaper. Few conservative politicians are, and I was surprised to read Faludi and see they might have backslid on this. She describes the Family Protection Act—the omnibus social conservative bill shaped by the Heritage Foundation and killed in committee—as “dismantling nearly every legal achievement of the women’s movement.”
Not wrong at all. But the bill also doled out tax credits to encourage births and adoption. Day care providers would have been made tax exempt. Anyone adopting a handicapped child or a child “not of the same race” (hey, it was 1981) was eligible for a $3000 tax credit, the equivalent of nearly $8000 today.
Which Republicans are talking like that today? Well, there’s Rick Santorum and… Rick Santorum. Libertarians have generally overwhelmed the people who think the state can be used to encourage behavior, even conservative, family-forming behavior. Joni Ernst’s flogging the standard GOP recipe of “fairer, flatter taxes,” and deregulation, and “freemarket alternatives” to Obamacare.
I was fascinated to see where culture warriors thought they were headed in 1991. They got pop culture and mores right. They got attitudes about women’s careers partially right. And they got nowhere on economic policy. They came to prefer policies that might allow people to “drop out”—home schooling, abolishing the IRS—and return to defeat liberals.
Erin Gloria Ryan (News Editor at Jezebel): Like David, reading this chapter of Backlash dovetailed nicely with an experience I’ve had at a rally presided over by the modern equivalent of Faludi’s female antifeminist political leaders.
It was a rally by and for self-identified pro-life women held at the 2012 Republican National Convention in Tampa, Florida. The phrase “war on women” was relatively freshly minted and gaining traction for the Democrats; Todd Akin’s comments on “legitimate rape” was only a few weeks old, and Mitt Romney had made the politically costly mistake of voicing support for the fringe belief in the “personhood” of zygotes (a viewpoint so extreme that in 2011, voters in Mississippi—the most conservative state in the Union—rejected it by a nearly 60/40 vote). But the politicians who attended the Celebration of Pro-Life Women Leaders either weren’t yet willing to admit to themselves that dressing archaic ideas in a pair of stilettos and pearls doesn’t render them any more palatable to mainstream voters.
The event was by no means devoid of liberal-leaning watchdogs; the architect of this very project, Irin Carmon, was there, among others. But rather than shying away from the rhetoric that had gotten their party into trouble in popular opinion polls, the female politicians in attendance seemed emboldened by the ideological equivalent of a hometown crowd. Michele Bachmann was there, wholesome and comforting and fierce, like a poisoned apple. Tennessee representative Diane Black was there, warmly greeting me with a hug even after she learned I worked for a blog the pro-life sites call “abortion enthusiast.” Senator Kelly Ayotte was there, as was Wisconsin Lieutenant Governor Rebecca Kleefisch and Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi. The event was sponsored by the Susan B. Anthony List, a political funding organization that seeks to pour money into the candidacies of anti-abortion political candidates.
After a (wine-less) cheese and hors d’oeuvres social, the women took the podium one by one in what read like a spiritual pissing contest. One speaker interrupted a story about her impressive personal achievements to superfluously remark that her husband was still the head of the household. Another stopped mid-sentence to announce that she loved her husband. All of them defensively announced themselves as “a Mom and [insert political office],” as though responding to a non-existent political opponent who had taken to an identical podium hours before to decry motherhood. Because of this specialized and self-selecting audience, and, I suspect, because of the corresponding campaign money at stake, there was no Ernstian calculated “blandness.” The “freak flags” were flying high, and proudly.
Faludi notes that conservatism of the Backlash era needed liberalism to survive, a principle that is as true now as it was during the 2012 RNC. In fact, decades later, imagining feminist strawmen has been a conservative institution for so long that if Feminist Strawman were a comic book superhero that could feasibly be played by a Hemsworth brother, the character would have been rebooted via blockbuster at least three times. Pretending feminists are whatever conservatives need them to be to attract the scared and ill-informed is practically a prerequisite for running for office as a Republican.
You don’t necessarily encounter unabashed moral straw-manning at mainstream political events—events where the cagey speakers know they can’t say what they really mean at the risk of Akin-ing themselves. But you see this at insular rallies for true believers like the one at the RNC in 2012. You see it on the web, when women with access to a platform but little willingness to buttress their indoctrination with facts, present an almost comically ill-informed view of modern feminism in the #WomenAgainstFeminism movement. And it’s still whispered privately. It just isn’t as blatant as is it was in the late 1980s.
Conservatives might have retired terms like “pro-chastity” and, as David noted, abandoned naked endorsement of backtracking entirely on the gains of second-wave feminism, but that doesn’t mean it’s not still happening.
While canny modern antifeminists like Sarah Palin and Cathy McMorrisRodgers now couch their language in phrases like “pro-woman,” the contradiction between what they live and what they advocate remains. Palin famously argued against comprehensive sex education—something that research has shown reduces a teenager’s risk of becoming pregnant—during her unmarried teenage daughter’s pregnancy. This January, a smiling gently lit Cathy McMorris-Rodgers argued against government oversight of health coverage in the GOP’s official State of the Union rebuttal, ostensibly while her stay-at-home retired Naval officer husband cared for their special needs child (an arrangement made possible by health care coverage bestowed on her family by the U.S. government).
Furthermore, men at the forefront of the conservative movement have partnered with women who serve as living counterexamples of the argument that government policies advocated by feminists will lead to the destruction of families. Ted Cruz’s wife is a managing director at Goldman Sachs, and they rely on her health care benefits, not his, for their own health and the health of their two children. Eric Cantor’s wife, Diana, is a pro-choice, pro same-sex marriage Democrat with a high powered career in banking. Ad nauseum. Ad infinitum.
In Backlash, Faludi cites plummeting church attendance as a catalyst for conservative mobilization, a stubborn fact that definitely remains today. The steady decline in religious engagement hasn’t budged since the late ’80s; in fact, there isn’t much mainstream God-talk dog-whistling from socially right-wing conservatives anymore, at least on mainstream media outlets. Opposition to programs that benefit women are instead couched in economic language. “We can’t afford it!” as a rebuttal to social policy that benefits women has replaced Backlash-era Heritage foundation talking points about feminism, making women sad because God made men to boss us around.
Lots of ways to read along and join in: Post your own Backlash response on Medium/MSNBC.com, tweet at @readmatter with #BacklashBookClub, or comment on MSNBC.com. We’ll be featuring some of your posts and tweets as we go.
Read more of the Backlash Book Club, featuring Adelle Waldman, Jenna Sauers, Kate Harding, and others.
Illustrations by Hannah K. Lee
