by Jill Lepore
Liberal feminists, by contrast, drew inspiration and borrowed tactics from the suffrage, abolition, and pre–Black Power civil rights movements. In pursuit of equal rights, they wanted to pass laws, amend the Constitution, win court cases, and get women elected to office. In 1971, writer Gloria Steinem, Republican organizer Tanya Melich, and New York congresswomen Bella Abzug and Shirley Chisholm founded the bipartisan National Women’s Political Caucus. The next year, a record-breaking number of women ran for office, including Chisholm, who sought the Democratic presidential nomination, and they kept on running. Between 1970 and 1975, the number of women in elected office doubled. The 92nd Congress, which met from 1971 to 1972, passed more women’s rights bills than any other Congress, including Title IX and a federal child care bill (which Nixon vetoed). The ERA, first introduced into Congress in 1923, passed in the House in 1971, 354 to 24, and in the Senate in 1972, 84 to 8. Sent to the states for ratification, it won by enormous margins, 205 to 7 in liberal Massachusetts; 31 to 0 in conservative West Virginia; 61 to 0 in independent Colorado.18
Liberal feminists made striking gains, too, in the courts, many of them won by Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a brilliant young law school professor born in Brooklyn to Jewish immigrants in 1933. Ginsburg began arguing equal rights cases before the Supreme Court in 1971, relying on and citing Pauli Murray’s strategy for using the Fourteenth Amendment to defeat discrimination by sex. Weren’t women, after all, “persons”? The next year, Ginsburg launched the ACLU’s Women’s Rights Project. “I ask no favor for my sex,” she told the nine male justices in 1973, quoting the eloquent abolitionist Sarah Grimké. “All I ask of our brethren is that they take their feet off our necks.”19
A conservative women’s movement, best understood as a form of anti-feminism, came last, a reaction to both radical and liberal feminism and to the lifting of bans on contraception and the liberalization of abortion laws. In 1970, a woman from Fort Wayne, Indiana, as if conjuring up the ghost of the nineteenth-century anti-vice crusader Anthony Comstock, wrote to Guttmacher, “Everyone is asking, ‘What is wrong with our young people in this generation?’ Well, I can tell you what is wrong! They are being fed garbage and filth from dirty books, magazines, and movies! But the most tragic thing of all is the fact that many churchmen have joined these non-Christian intellectuals in a new attitude toward sex. It is one of the grave tragedies of our day, and God will surely hold them responsible.”20
The Constitution, whose framers did not believe women to be political subjects, offered very little guidance. “There is nothing in the United States Constitution concerning birth, contraception, or abortion,” Jay Floyd, Texas assistant attorney general, told the court in Roe v. Wade, when the case was first argued, in 1971. Floyd spoke on behalf of Wade County, Texas, defending its anti-abortion statute. Floyd was right. But there is also nothing in the Constitution about a great many things on which the court had ruled, from segregated schools to wiretapping. The question became what legal doctrine would be used to talk about the bodies of people that the framers of the Constitution had understood as subject to the rule of men. Men enter the courts as citizens of the Republic; women enter the courts as citizens by sufferance.
Sarah Weddington, the attorney for “Jane Roe,” a Texas woman who had sought an abortion, was willing to use any kind of argument the court would accept—liberty, equality, privacy, the First Amendment, the Ninth, the Fourteenth, or the Nineteenth—whatever would work. Asked by Justice Stewart where in the Constitution she placed her argument, she pointed out that the privacy right established in Griswold seemed a terribly weak foundation on which to build her case: “Certainly, under the Griswold decision, it appears that the members of the Court in that case were obviously divided as to the specific constitutional framework of the right which they held to exist in the Griswold decision,” Weddington said. She had a few other ideas. “I do feel that the Ninth Amendment is an appropriate place for the freedom to rest,” she told the court. “I think the Fourteenth Amendment is equally an appropriate place.” Justice Potter Stewart tried to nail her down: did she mean to rely on the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment?
“We had originally brought this suit alleging both the due process clause, equal protection clause, the Ninth Amendment, and a variety of others,” Weddington answered.
“And anything else that might be applicable?” Stewart asked.
“Yes, right,” said Weddington.21
As the court neared a ruling on Roe, Nixon’s advisers saw a political opportunity. In 1971, Nixon speechwriter Patrick Buchanan told the president that abortion was “a rising issue and a gut issue with Catholics,” and suggested that the president’s prospects for reelection would be improved “if the President should publicly take his stand against abortion, as offensive to his own moral principles.” A week later, Nixon, jettisoning his previous support of abortion, issued a statement in which he referred to his “personal belief in the sanctity of human life—including the life of the yet unborn.” Exploiting Catholics’ opposition to abortion was a deliberate attempt to inject doctrinal absolutism into party politics. Nixon supporters complained, and asked whether Nixon might perhaps return to his original position. Buchanan waved that objection aside: “He will cost himself Catholic support and gain what, Betty Friedan?”22
The Supreme Court handed down its decision in Roe v. Wade on January 22, 1973, the day LBJ died, finding that the “right of privacy . . . is broad enough to encompass a woman’s decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy.”23 It would turn out to be a monumental decision, salvation to some, sin to others. In the White House, the casual viciousness of the president was caught on tape the next day, when Nixon shared his thoughts on the ruling with an aide. “There are times when abortions are necessary,” he said, casting aside, in private, his public invocation of the “sanctity of life.” Abortion was necessary in case of rape, for instance, he said, or, here offering his frank, private views on race, in case of a pregnancy resulting from sex between “a black and a white.”24
Betty Ford, unlike Nixon, didn’t express her true views about abortion only behind closed doors. From the moment her husband took office, hours after Nixon resigned, she had been candid about women’s rights, abortion, and women’s health. She held regular press conferences, something no First Lady had done since Eleanor Roosevelt. Only weeks after she moved into the White House, she found out she had breast cancer and needed an emergency mastectomy. Determined not to be part of a cover-up and to help save the lives of women by encouraging them to get tested—breast cancer was, at the time, the number one killer of women between the ages of twenty-five and forty-five—she disclosed her condition, and allowed herself to be photographed during her recovery. “I thought there are women all over the country like me,” she said. “And if I don’t make this public, then their lives will be gone or in jeopardy.”25 She earned an intensely loyal following among voters, but especially among women.
Betty Ford, who attended the National Women’s Conference in Houston in 1977, was among several powerful Republicans who objected to using women to draw a line between the political parties. Ford’s vocal support of the ERA was equally well known. She spent a great deal of her time making calls to states debating ratification; protesters outside the White House carried signs that read “BETTY FORD, GET OFF THE PHONE.” This caused some strain between the East and West Wings of the White House, but the president refused to submit to pressure to quiet his wife and instead joked, “I say one wrong thing about women’s rights and the next state dinner is at McDonald’s.”26
In the summer of 1975, when Betty Ford sat on that floral sofa with Morley Safer, she did not hold back. “I feel that the Equal Rights Amendment ought to probably pass in our Bicentennial year,” she said, hoping for ratification in 1976. He asked her about abortion; she cited Roe v. Wade: “I feel very strongly that it was the best thing in the world when the Supreme Court voted to legalize abortion, and in my words, bring it ou
t of the backwoods and put it in the hospitals where it belongs. I thought it was a great, great decision.”27
Neither Betty Ford nor Morley Safer appreciated how tightly these two issues were being wound together by Phyllis Schlafly, the anticommunist crusader, McCarthy supporter, and Goldwater promoter. Having been ousted from Republican Party leadership, Schlafly turned her attention and prodigious organizing skills to defeating equal rights for women by attaching the ERA to Roe v. Wade. Read a headline in a typical issue of the Phyllis Schlafly Report in 1974: “ERA Means Abortion and Population Shrinkage.”28
Betty Ford, ill-judging her adversary, dismissed the Radcliffe-educated Phyllis Schlafly as a crank. Asked whether she’d agree to debate her, the First Lady said, “I wouldn’t waste my time.”29
Schlafly, blond and petite, wore flawlessly pressed pink skirt suits and pumps. She liked to talk about herself as a housewife and mother of six. But she was also ruthless, and she was learned, and people who underestimated her nearly always regretted it. Tying the ERA to abortion was a stroke of political genius. To better debate her opponents, and realizing that much of this political battle would be waged in the courts, Schlafly earned a law degree in the 1970s. She was not a flake; she was as keen as the most cunning battlefield general.
Conservatives had been trying since the 1930s to dismantle the New Deal coalition and to take over the Republican Party. In the 1970s and 1980s, by bringing Catholics, evangelical Christians, and white southern Democrats into their own coalition, they finally succeeded. No small number of conservative political strategists would take credit for this achievement. But it was Schlafly who built the road to the Reagan Revolution, paving it with stones labeled “END ABORTION NOW” and “STOP ERA.”
TWO CENTURIES HAD PASSED since Thomas Jefferson declared all men to be equal. “Well, Jerry, I guessed we’ve healed America,” Gerald Ford told himself as he fell asleep on the Fourth of July 1976, after watching a stirring display of fireworks over the Washington Monument on the nation’s bicentennial.30 But the scars of Vietnam and Watergate had not healed, the electorate was growing increasingly polarized, Americans’ trust in government had not recovered, and the economy had stalled.
Had American growth peaked? All nations have a rise. In the 1970s, many Americans began to wonder whether their nation’s fall had begun. Were its best days in the past? Had its ideals failed?
The economic and moral downturn that would be called a “malaise” during the administration of Democratic president Jimmy Carter, elected in 1976, first became visible to most Americans in 1973, during the OPEC oil embargo. In a matter of months, the cost of gasoline increased by a factor of five, driving up the price of other goods, too. In nine months in 1974, the Dow lost 37 percent of its value. Japanese automobile manufacturers, producing more fuel-efficient cars, out-competed Detroit. Heavy industries, especially steel, closed their doors, or moved to other countries, creating what came to be called the Rust Belt in the Midwest. Economists had to come up with a new name—stagflation—for the strange and puzzling new mix of slow economic growth, high unemployment, and rising inflation that afflicted the American economy in the 1970s.31
Liberals blamed the malaise on Nixon and on the abandonment of Johnson’s Great Society programs, arguing that if the economy was worsening, it must be because the liberal economic agenda remained unfinished. Conservatives understood the state of the economy as evidence not of the unfinished work of liberalism but of liberalism’s failure, and of the wrongheadedness of Keynesian economics: economic planning, taxation, and government regulation, they argued, had shackled the free market.
One explanation that fits some of the evidence, if not all of it, is that the century of economic growth that had begun in 1870 had been driven by inventions, from electricity to the automobile, and was not sustainable. After 1970, the pace of invention slowed and its consequences narrowed. Delivering electricity, gas, telephone, water, and sewer—power, warmth, communication, cleanliness—to every home in the United States, a project completed by about 1940, had ended isolation and produced astonishing improvements in living conditions and economic output. Medical advances made before 1970, which include anesthesia, a public water supply, antiseptic surgery, antibiotics, and X-rays, had saved and lengthened lives. But few inventions after 1970 produced such vast changes; instead, they offered slow, steady improvement. Cellphones were useful, but the telephone had existed since 1876. A Boeing 707 approached the speed of sound in 1958; it’s not practical to go faster. Moreover, the growing economic inequality that became a feature of American life after 1970 meant that the economic benefits of newer inventions were disproportionately enjoyed by a very small segment of the population.32 The rise of the Internet, in the 1990s, would recast some of these arrangements, but it would not yield a return to earlier levels of economic growth; instead, it would contribute to widening income inequality and political instability.
Meanwhile, the economy faltered, in ways that intensified battles over the role and rights of women and, soon enough, over guns. Beginning in 1973, and well into the 1990s, real earnings for all but the very wealthiest Americans remained flat, or declined. The real wages of the average male worker dropped by 10 percent. To make up for shrinking family income, more married women began working outside of the home. They began arguing for government-supported child care. Soon, three out of four women between twenty-five and fifty-four were working for pay.33
More women worked, but, for most Americans, family incomes did not rise as a result. Liberals blamed conservatives, conservatives blamed liberals, and Schlafly convinced a lot of people to blame feminists. “Women’s lib is a total assault on the role of the American woman as wife and mother, and on the family as the basic unit of society,” she wrote in 1972. Schlafly had not at first objected to the ERA. But, she later explained, she’d come to believe that it amounted to a conspiracy against women and the privileges and protections they enjoyed under the law. She tied her opposition to the ERA to anticommunism. Soviet women had “equal rights,” she said, which meant a mother being forced “to put her baby in a state-operated nursery or kindergarten so she can join the labor force.” George Wallace, who had earlier supported ERA, switched positions when he ran as a third-party candidate that year, with this platform: “Women of the American Party say ‘NO’ to this insidious socialistic plan to destroy the home, make women slaves of the government, and their children wards of the state.”34
If the wrenching polarization that would later bring the Republic to the brink of a second civil war has a leading engineer, that engineer was Schlafly. Schlafly’s first battle was within the Republican Party—and her first triumph was taking it over. The GOP, founded in 1854 as the party of reform, had been the party of abolition and the party of women’s rights. By 1896, it had become the party of big business. It had remained the party most supportive of women’s rights. The Equal Rights Amendment had been on the GOP platform since 1940. In 1968, in the first wave of the backlash against the women’s movement, the ERA had been left off the party’s platform. In 1972, Nixon began turning the GOP into the party opposed to abortion but, long before that effort saw its first successes, Schlafly turned the GOP into the party opposed to equal rights for women.
At the 1972 GOP convention, Republican women fought to restore the party’s pro-ERA plank.35 To outflank them, Schlafly, who had been carefully mustering her troops and stockpiling ideological weapons, formed a women’s organization called STOP ERA (STOP stands for Stop Taking Our Privileges) and marched her troops all the way to the front lines. By the 1976 Republican National Convention, a group of thirty GOP feminists had formed the Republican Women’s Task Force to fight for platform planks in support of the ERA, reproductive rights, affirmative action, federally funded child care, and the extension of the Equal Pay Act. They also supported the pro-ERA Gerald Ford as the party’s nominee over Ronald Reagan. They won only a pyrrhic victory. Ford earned the nomination, but, by a single vote, the platform sub
committee defeated the ERA. Only due to strenuous lobbying from Ford did the ERA plank narrowly pass the general platform committee, 51 to 47.36
In the general election, feminists claimed that Ford lost to Carter because, cowed by conservative Republican women, he refused to let his wife campaign for him. (She made only nine campaign stops.) Whatever the cause, Ford’s defeat only strengthened Schlafly’s hand. Early in 1977, four days after North Carolina’s House of Representatives voted in favor of the ERA, Schlafly, speaking in Raleigh, whipped up a crowd of fifteen thousand people to raise their hands and pledge to defeat any member of the legislature who voted for the ERA. North Carolina failed to ratify by two votes.37
Schlafly’s next battle was with the liberal feminists in both parties who were organizing a National Women’s Conference, to be held in November 1977 in Houston. “We simply want for the first time in the history of this country an opportunity for women to meet,” said Hawaii congresswoman Patsy Mink, who asked Congress for funds to support the meeting, which was to be preceded by state conventions to nominate delegates. Schlafly protested that neither she nor any women known to be opposed to the ERA had been named to the commission organizing the conference. Darkly, she had hinted at a feminist takeover of the state. After Ford signed Congress’s pledge of $5 million to support the conference, the Phyllis Schlafly Report ran the headline HOW THE LIBS AND THE FEDS PLAN TO SPEND YOUR MONEY.38
