The mainstream papers declaimed wildly on the decision’s importance, but radical feminists were lukewarm: Anything that came from the American government, let alone a Supreme Court composed of nine men, was bound to be unsatisfactory. Suspicion and caution set the tone. It was understandable, given the constant setbacks the movement for abortion had suffered in legislatures, yet the response seriously underestimated the importance of Roe. Off Our Backs, the newspaper of Washington, D.C., women’s liberation, groused about the meagerness of the half loaf: Abortion was not free and it was still not available on demand. In New Haven Women’s Liberation that January, the announcement at a big meeting occasioned scarcely a murmur, so cynical were the radicals around Yale about change that emanated from the courts. The victory seemed inevitably compromised by the fact it was won by a coalition: “a quiet back-burner issue promoted by a handful of stray radicals and moderate reformers,” in the patronizing view of Susan Brownmiller.51 And the most knowledgeable supporters could scarcely celebrate before they started to worry about what came next, and with good reason, given what happened in New York state. Lucinda Cisler warned with prescience that the battle was not over: “The concept that fetuses have priority over women was not completely rejected by the court, while the concept of fully human autonomy for women was clearly not affirmed,” she observed cogently.52
But regardless of its weaknesses, Roe was a historic achievement. Along with Title VII and Title IX, these were the piers sunk to support a bridge to the future for both mothers and daughters, a far-reaching feminism that touched men and women, middle-aged and young, the well-off and the poor (for a time, until Medicaid funding was denied), and black, brown, and white.
If not everyone agreed on the reasons, they agreed enough. That is the definition of a successful coalition. Out of the polarized 1960s, a consortium of groups held together, despite tensions, and exerted pressure that changed the law in ways that would be experienced by every American woman, couple, and family. Mothers and daughters sank their energies into the crusade, and plenty of political brothers helped, too: the men in the repeal movement, the lawyers who helped construct the arguments, the physicians who provided abortions at great risk to themselves and who went to court as defendants, witnesses, and plaintiffs. While the judges were deliberating their decision, polls showed that the number of Americans who supported legalization rose to 65 percent, a solid majority that had been building for a decade and has remained a given of electoral politics ever since. After Roe, “the popular base for radically altering the abortion status quo seems to be lacking,” observed two political scientists in 1983 with studied neutrality, even though high-level candidates, including presidential contenders, would be forced after 1973 to take equivocal or antagonistic positions on Roe.53
The United States, whose policies for women fell short in most areas of family support compared to Western Europe and Scandinavia, now compared more than favorably, with one of the more liberal abortion laws in the world. A 1987 survey showed that only twenty-three countries, comprising about 40 percent of the world’s population, permitted abortion on request: These included most Communist states (China, the Soviet Union, Cuba, parts of Eastern Europe), half of Western Europe, and most of Scandinavia. Only two African countries and no Latin American nation permitted abortion on request. Half of the 30–50 million abortions that took place each year around the world were illegal.54 In other words, the U.S. women’s movement had scored a major victory in the most powerful country in the world: won, moreover, in the face of a fully mobilized Catholic Church.
Opponents were determined to obliterate the gain. Antichoice radicals, at this point led and financed by the Catholic hierarchy, geared up for a national campaign. In 1973, they were a highly effective and vociferous group of extremists, their dogmatic, shrill, and intolerant views overwhelming any liberal Catholic arguments for social justice that persisted from the 1960s. Their intolerance never abated, and over the next twenty years, they diversified their ranks to include evangelical Protestants, shifted ideological ground, and pushed their dogma to the center of U.S. domestic politics.
There was no undoing Roe—at least for the moment. The Church faced a rare defeat. In a pastoral message a month later, the bishops called for civil disobedience, an action unprecedented in recent memory, and reaffirmed their position that any woman who had an abortion would be excommunicated. Several groups of Catholics proposed that Justice William Brennan, a Catholic who had voted with the majority on Roe, be excommunicated.55 Reversing Roe, however, was a possibility that existed only faintly on the far horizon. In fact, as of this writing, it has still not happened, although right-to-life forces have seriously weakened abortion rights and women’s and girls’ access.
Unlike Roe, though, the ERA could still be stopped. Recall that at the end of 1973 the amendment was well on the way to being ratified (with thirty states having passed it out of a necessary thirty-eight). Notwithstanding their previous indifference to the amendment, conservatives now ginned up an analogy between the forced equality the ERA engineered and the forced equality of school busing. They were astoundingly successful in ramping up what had been an apple-pie issue into a referendum on defeating feminism. By 1977, the ERA was foundering. It died in 1982 when a second deadline for ratification expired.
The innovator who discovered the political gold in antifeminism was Phyllis Schlafly, who had never before concerned herself with women’s issues. Schlafly found in opposition to the ERA an issue that stirred up conservative women, becalmed in the backwaters of the Republican Party for years. By seizing the identity of Woman in the name of traditional housewives in Stop ERA, the organization she founded, Schlafly challenged feminism’s claims to speak for universal needs and rights. She indicted feminism as a monstrous aberration, an attack on women rather than a defense. “Women’s libbers are radicals who are waging a total assault on the family, on marriage, and on children as the basic unit of society,” she announced—a generality that she and her followers reworked a thousand times over.56 Feminists were dreadful people, unloved, shrill, and whiny, harridans who begrudged married women their happiness and wanted to ruin it by sowing discontent. The defense of the family, which Nixon fiddled with and Schlafly put up in lights, gave a new dimension to the Cold War crusade, projecting an America to be saved from godless feminism along with godless Communism.
Schlafly was from the far right wing of the Republican Party. She was a zealous Cold Warrior and, in the 1960s, a rabid critic of nuclear deterrence. Her foreign policy views were so apocalyptic that the logic would have led directly to nuclear war with the Soviet Union. In the 1960s, she maintained that Franklin Delano Roosevelt was despicable, America should have stayed out of World War II, wealthy Eastern moderate Republicans like the Rockefellers were secretly working with the Soviets, and segregation was a sane and workable system. As president of the Illinois Federation of Republican Women, she made a splash with a self-published book, A Choice Not an Echo, which became an underground bestseller on the right-wing lunatic fringe. The book purported to expose a secret cabal of “persons high in finance, government and the press” on the East Coast who were aiding the Soviets. Her conspiracy-mongering and hyperbole were so extreme that in 1964, even the Goldwater campaign tactfully rebuffed her offers to help.57
Initially indifferent to feminism, Schlafly found her way into women’s politics through the backdoor. Narrowly defeated in 1966 by a moderate for the presidency of the National Federation of Republican Women, Schlafly nearly fomented a schism within the ranks but pulled back and formed her own organization of virulent anticommunists by exploiting gender resentments of the ruling male cabal. Schlafly presented a spirited brief for the role and power of women that weirdly echoed NOW’s. The time was past, she declared, “when the women of the Republican party are merely doorbell pushers.” So they were ready to become “important in their own right, and not merely as the mirrored reflection of their masculine counterparts.”58
> Ironically, it was the incipient spirit of the women’s movement that gave Schlafly her entrée to a career with much greater influence. Followers saw her as a powerful figure proclaiming a new era of female clout in the party, a “demonstration of fearlessness and candor of women.” Taking great care to present herself as a reluctant leader, a housewife whom the pressing demands of the times had thrust on the public stage, she appealed to those who sank their lives and sense of self in the home. “Your ability and enthusiasm really did inspire us in our local efforts,” wrote a disciple who heard her speak in a Chicago suburb. “The example of your busy schedule leaves little alibi for us young mothers to shirk the responsibility of safeguarding our freedom.” “Don’t ever let anyone persuade you to ‘tone down,’ ” urged another. In the early 1970s, as Republican feminists in and around the women’s movement stepped up pressure for more power in the party, she kept her distance, but she nonetheless reaped the benefits of their labors to increase female leadership.59
In 1972, Schlafly departed from her harangues on foreign policy to lambast the ERA, attacking the amendment as a Soviet-style assault on women’s traditional role in the family. She did so in terms identical to those the right had used the previous year to torpedo the Child Development Act. Initially, condemning the ERA was difficult, as she herself acknowledged, since the idea of equal rights was widely accepted as a guarantee of fairness. “Most people mistakenly believe that ‘equal rights’ means simply ‘equal pay for equal work,’ ” and she was all for that, she assured readers of her Phyllis Schlafly Report, signaling her support for more job opportunities, equal pay for equal work, more women in medical school, even more appointed to “high positions.”60
But the goal of equality had already been reached, she asserted. Then came the pernicious ERA, which caught Congress off guard. A few noisy, maladjusted women were trying to wreck a chivalric system that had evolved over centuries to rescue America’s women from drudgery and place them under the kindly protection of men. She declared war on those who threatened this system, which was the most benevolent, sumptuous, life-enhancing regime available to women in the entire world. The ERA was a plot to brainwash American women into believing that they were second-class citizens rather than pampered consorts.
About the need for justice, she noted: The idea that the ERA would bring justice to women could not be further from the truth! Politicians simply hadn’t heard “from the millions of happily married women who believe in the laws which protect the family and require the husband to support his wife and children.” Men were ready to shower women with love and support to ease their lives.
A man’s first significant purchase is a diamond for his bride, and the largest financial investment of his life is a home for her to live in. American husbands work hours of overtime to buy a fur piece or other finery to keep their wives in fashion, and to pay premiums on their life insurance policies to provide for her comfort when she is a widow.61
Elevated to their position as treasured homemakers and mothers, dripping with furs and diamonds, their lot eased by ample goods and labor-saving devices provided by the American free enterprise system, the right to a husband’s financial support guaranteed by law: No sane woman would want to throw away the housewife’s bounty for the dystopian nightmare of sexual conflict the ERA would bring on.
Like any dogmatist, Schlafly presented ideology as fact. The reality was that housewives were losing face. Male-headed households were buckling in the 1970s; among African-Americans, the numbers of female-headed families had been climbing since 1940, and the trend was now evident among whites, too. The role of the wife/mother/homemaker touted in the 1950s was frayed from the wear and tear of divorce and rising rates of female employment; and feminists were not the only women who treated housework as drudgery. Matrophobia was in the air: The stay-at-home wife was a debased Other whom bright young American women were running hard to escape. Schlafly rallied true believers by insisting the housewife’s future was golden, that their fortunes would turn, provided the enemy was crushed. If under the law, “the man is always required to support his wife and each child he caused to be brought into the world,” then “why should women abandon these good laws?” Why, indeed? She articulated phobic fantasies about the catastrophic effects of female independence and channeled them into a crusade to shore up family government, presented as benign dictatorship.62
Schlafly, a Catholic, went beyond the traditional purview of Republican women’s organizations by recruiting highly traditional working-class and lower-middle-class women from Protestant evangelical churches as the storm troopers of Stop ERA, which she created in 1972. The overwrought style diverged from the genteel ladies’ decorum of mainstream Republican women. In states where the amendment was up for ratification, they inundated legislatures with feverish warnings about the pernicious effects of the ERA. “Long before the birth of the Moral Majority,” Tanya Melich notes, “Schlafly’s women of the Religious Right were fixtures in the capitals of southern states, walking the halls with their Bibles and strongarming legislators to understand that ‘women weren’t meant by the Lord to be equal.’ ” 63
The Stop ERA campaign capitalized on the highly American analogy between uppity women and uppity blacks. “Forced busing, forced mixing, forced hiring. Now forced women. No thank you,” declaimed a North Carolina woman. The ERA was said to legislate unisex toilets, prohibit all-female organizations such as sororities, mandate that women be drafted into the military along with men, and outlaw any female advantages in divorce—alimony, child custody. For reasons that are unclear, Schlafly at first did not harp on the Roe decision, although she brought in legal abortion from time to time as Exhibit C for feminism’s attack on childbearing. “Women’s libbers are trying to make wives and mothers unhappy with their career.… Women’s libbers are promoting free sex instead of the ‘slavery’ of marriage. They are promoting Federal ‘day-care centers’ for babies instead of homes. They are promoting abortions instead of families.”64
Stop ERA and its male allies rerouted the Republican Party away from its historic support for the ERA (since 1940). President Gerald Ford withstood them, his resolve stiffened by his staunchly feminist wife, Betty, who took a heavy beating from the right for her principles. But Ford was the last Republican president to do so. Ronald Reagan ran for president in 1980 on explicit opposition to the ERA and Roe.65
Despite feminist successes in Congress, the women’s movement was unable to mount a successful counterattack. One problem was that the ERA itself had so few concrete meanings that tangible truths were scarce to use in countering Stop ERA’s fantastical charges. The dual feminist legal strategy in the 1970s—pushing Fourteenth Amendment appeals as the ERA campaign continued—obviated the original intent of the amendment, since courts were already striking down sexually discriminatory laws. The effect of the legal revolution was that most laws that ERA supporters in 1972 cited as unjust were found unconstitutional within ten years anyway.66
The dearth of substantial issues emptied out public debate, which came to rest on two decontextualized issues. First, there was the question of whether or not men protected women. Stop ERA charged that the amendment would throw the traditional harmony of male independence/female dependence out of whack and encourage men to abandon their obligations. In line with denunciations of coverture stretching back centuries, ERA supporters maintained that male protection was a myth and women needed legal equity to take care of themselves.
Second, there was the potential that the ERA would make women liable for the draft, a vastly exaggerated scenario at a time when the United States had pulled out of Vietnam and was demobilizing its armed forces. Yet feminists got caught up in a hypothetical tangle. Unwilling to abandon principle, they insisted that an equal opportunity draft was better than a discriminatory one. But because the women’s movement was so strongly antimilitarist, ERA supporters lacked any real commitment to grapple with the nature of military obligation and men’s domination of t
he armed services. Thus their reasoning lacked the appeal of practical outcomes. There were already women in the military, for example: Would the ERA do anything to improve their situation? American citizenship brought obligations as well as rights. What were women’s obligations to the nation, besides paying taxes and obeying laws? Was military service one of them? Feminists were loath to engage these questions.
The ERA’s demise in 1982 completed a shutdown on feminist hopes in Washington that was already in progress once Reagan took office. Radical feminists, uninterested in electoral politics to begin with, retreated from the dismaying trends of the Reagan years. Liberals who in the earlier 1970s had seen the road through institutions open to them lost heart as conservatives blocked them at every turn. As the New Right seized national and state office, small-scale local actions—dubbed “grassroots”—proved more appealing. Feminists in politics either retired from the rout, settled in for the long haul, or took up positions in liberal enclaves where they could wield influence: foundations, the media, universities, professional organizations, and Democratic Party venues. Among the highly committed looking for accessible and immediate issues to bring about change, a set of new concerns with body politics—issues that lay beyond birth control and abortion—proved fertile ground.
As coalition politics, the campaign to legalize abortion paid the women’s movement enormous dividends. “A woman’s right to choose,” with its attendant belief in the integrity of the female body, moved into the mainstream of the culture after 1973, even as it fueled what was already a powerfully organized opposition. The justice of Roe was an adamantine belief for feminists of all dispositions: “The one thing I care about in politics,” a generally nonactivist woman told me sometime in the 1980s. “Just about the only thing I care about,” she added. Millions put off by the New Right’s ascendancy but cynical and disillusioned about taking action could have echoed her sentiment.
The Feminist Promise Page 43
