by Gail Collins
“It sounds to me kind of complete,” she said.
IF, IN 1972, you had told ERA supporters that the amendment wouldn’t be ratified by 1977, they’d have been surprised and alarmed. Once it had finally gotten past the long-standing roadblock of Senator Sam Ervin, the ERA passed by overwhelming margins in Congress. Within two days it had been ratified by six states, all by unanimous votes. Twenty-four more had followed, virtually in lockstep. It felt as though the women’s movement had become an unstoppable wave. The whole country was humming Helen Reddy’s megahit, “I Am Woman (Hear Me Roar).” “I am strong. I am invincible. I am wooooman!” sang Reddy, who won a Grammy for her performance and thanked “God because She makes everything possible.”
But the backlash was already building. After a few more states acted on the ERA in the mid-1970s, support dwindled off completely, three states short of the thirty-eight needed to put equal rights for women in the Constitution. What had been, in 1972, a kind of feel-good celebration of women’s progress and the promise of even better things to come had turned into a vicious battle that would mark both the end of the women’s liberation movement as a social uprising and the ascension of the New Right, whose culturally conservative troops would take over the Republican Party and realign American politics.
“IT WAS AN EXCUSE TO GET AWAY FROM THEIR CHILDREN.”
While conservative politicians would make use of the backlash for their own purposes, the fear and resentment underlying anti-ERA sentiment was genuine, particularly on the part of traditional homemakers. Those women had been born in a country where housewives had always been celebrated. To work outside the home was, in general, a sign of failure: your husband was not successful enough to support the family on his own. Their skills for mothering, cooking, running an efficient house, and keeping a man happy had been praised endlessly in magazines and newspapers. Even on television, while the role of the housewife might not have been portrayed as central, the scripts always made it clear that she, of all women, had chosen the best path.
Then the job abruptly lost prestige. Women started working outside the home not because they had to but because society seemed to have suddenly decided that being a housewife was not enough. Married women with a college education or with an above-average family income were becoming the most likely to have outside jobs. To be a stay-at-home was no longer a sign that you had succeeded—by winning a husband who could support the family without your assistance. It almost suggested that you were unemployed, unable to do anything better. “I never saw myself as a stay-at-home mom,” said Kathy Hinderhofer, who was finishing college in the early 1970s. “Not to say that was a bad thing, but at that time it was almost—stay-at-home moms were looked down upon.” And all the talk about husbands’ responsibility to share the domestic chores seemed to suggest that there was nothing special in what women did at home. It was something anybody, even a man, could handle.
It would have been a miracle if many of the traditional housewives had not felt bitter.
“To me, being a wife and a mother is probably the best thing a woman can do, and with women’s lib came the idea to a lot of women that they have to ‘find themselves,’ and being a mother was demeaning,” said Louise Meyer Warpness, the Wyoming housewife, now widowed and remarried—still proud of the role she had been filling since the days she pressed the family clothes with that flatiron. “Women’s lib was not a good thing. Well, it did do good in some ways, because if a woman had to work I think it’s only fair that she receive equal pay, and I realize that some women do have to work, but there was a lot of women who didn’t, and for them it was an excuse to get away from their children.”
Housewives were not necessarily being paranoid if they felt that the women’s movement was looking down on their choices and repudiating the things they valued most. The young female revolutionaries who argued ideology and competed to make themselves heard in places such as New York and Chicago and Washington in the late ’60s and early ’70s had thrown around a lot of theories. Some had, indeed, compared housewives to prostitutes or slaves. Some had described childbearing as a curse that might someday be lifted with the help of artificial wombs. And quite a few had dismissed the idea that anybody could be happy taking care of a house and children full-time. “Mothers are the immediate enforcers of male will, the guards at the cell door, the flunkies who administer the electric shocks to punish rebellion,” wrote Andrea Dworkin as she explained why girls did not want to become “like their mothers, those tired, preoccupied domestic sergeants beset by incomprehensible troubles.” ERA opponents reprinted one of the NOW handbooks that informed American women who had proudly devoted time to their community schools, hospitals, and social services that volunteering was “yet another form of activity which serves to reinforce the second-class status of women.” It appeared that to volunteer for NOW was a sign of liberation, while volunteering for your children’s school was a sign that you were second-class.
“INTEREST IN IDEAS WAS LIMITED TO HOW IT WOULD AFFECT LANDING A GOOD, SAFE JOB.”
Meanwhile, the economy started tanking. The gorgeous American money machine that had propelled the bulk of its citizens into a living standard higher than the planet had ever before witnessed began to falter. The warning signs were evident from the beginning of the decade, but the real crunch began in 1973, when the oil-producing nations started flexing their muscles, leading to a doubling of the price of gas. Bad weather and crop blight sent the cost of food soaring. By 1974 a consumer’s dollar purchased only about two-thirds as much as it did in 1967. The unemployment rate, which was under 5 percent in December 1973, rose to 8.3 percent by June 1975. By the end of the decade, people felt they were living in an economic nightmare. Gas shortages in 1979 left drivers waiting in gas-station lines for hours, worried that they would hit empty before they made it to the pump. Inflation hit 13.3 percent.
Many of the young people graduating from school in the mid-1970s had grown up with the expectation that they, like their older siblings, could either get a good job and start a family as soon as they wanted or float through their twenties, working little, living cheaply, and devoting their energies to finding themselves. They were brought up sharp. The combination of rising inflation and slumping economic growth created a frightening new world where they not only would fail to get the enviable choices of their older brothers and sisters but would be hard-pressed to ever match the standard of living of their mothers and fathers. Anselma Dell’Olio, who spent much of her time speaking about women’s liberation on college campuses, found that by 1975, the spirit of the gatherings had changed. Instead of eager crowds of women who were ready to sit up all night, swapping stories, the students seemed “quiet and passively attentive.” The teachers told her she was right: “Interest in ideas was limited to how it would affect landing a good, safe job.”
To keep family finances afloat, more wives went to work. By the end of the decade, for the first time, more than half of adult women had jobs outside the home. Although they got lower pay than men—less than 60 percent as much, on average—women found it easier to get work, since the growth sectors, such as health care and the service industries, were the ones that traditionally used a lot of female employees. The jobs men had taken—particularly those high-paying unionized factory jobs—were beginning to migrate overseas. The median income of families where the husband was under 30 fell 27 percent between 1973 and 1986. Young men, the latest hired, were terrified of layoffs, and inevitably, women moving up collided with men struggling to avoid falling down.
Patricia Lorance worked at a plant that made AT&T telephone circuit boards in the beleaguered blue-collar town of Montgomery, Illinois. Although the majority of the workers were women, the most lucrative work, which involved testing the finished product, almost always went to men. In 1976 Lorance, who had been helping to support her mother and four siblings, decided she wanted to qualify as a tester. She switched to the five a.m. shift, enrolled at a community college, and successfully c
ompleted sixteen courses in subjects such as electronics and computer programming. Armed with her credentials, she applied for the next vacancy. “I went on vacation, and when I got back, the position they told me I would have was gone,” she recalls. “They said it was a cutback. And lo and behold, what do I see—somebody who had gone to school with me.” The job had been filled by a man from her community college class.
But she finally got the tester’s job, and three decades later, Lorance still remembers with pleasure how surprised her supervisors were at the quality of her work. “I’m going to brag on myself. I was very good during my whole working time. I was fixing things they gave me, and I think I kind of amazed them,” she said. By 1979, 14 other women had joined her and the 185 male testers, while another 12 women were signed up for the community college courses. While some of the men were helpful, others resisted. They posted a picture of a fat woman with money spilling out of the top of her rolled-down stockings. “Today I are a tester,” someone had written on the bottom. Lorance felt she got the worst products to test. “Sometimes things were picked over and what was left for me was really bad. But I’ll put it this way—they got fixed.” She was quickly upgraded to a higher-paying position.
While some of the harassment was pure sexism, the younger men had practical reasons to resent the newcomers. The women had become testers after spending years working at the low-paying bench jobs. Their seniority would put them ahead of many male workers when it came to opportunities for promotion, or protection of their current jobs during layoffs. The male testers proposed a new seniority system that discounted the women’s prior experience. At the meeting where it was debated, people argued bitterly about who needed good jobs more—the men, who often had wives and children, or the women, who were often single mothers. Given their superior numbers, the men won the vote, but the company officials assured the women the new system would be used only to chart advancement, not when it came to layoffs. Nevertheless, when layoffs came, Lorance was downgraded to a post at lower pay and written up for a reprimand when she asked for a reason. She and two other women sued the company, which argued that they had missed the legal deadline for filing a complaint. That was true—if you counted from when the new seniority system was adopted rather than from when the women first learned about details in the rules that had been kept secret and that would cost them their jobs. The judge threw out the case on that technicality. By the end of the decade, Lorance was laid off entirely.
“IT IS MORE IMPORTANT FOR A WIFE TO HELP HER HUSBAND’S CAREER.”
The American public had been through a lot, facing up to the national shame of racial segregation, the failure of the war in Vietnam, and economic disarray, as well as the news that age-old rules about the appropriate roles of men and women were wrong. The country was in a kind of digestion period that did not produce perfect consistency. Men told surveyors for one poll that they favored “an equal marriage of shared responsibility,” and they told surveyors for another that they disliked changes in women’s roles because it meant that the men had to spend more time on household chores. A National Opinion Research Center survey in 1977 found wide support—in theory—for the ERA. But it also found wide agreement with the statement that “it is more important for a wife to help her husband’s career than to have one herself.” When the question came down to what sounded like fairness—the ability of women to get a credit card or to win a job or a berth in graduate school—polls showed that most people approved. But on other issues involving men’s and women’s roles, the public was much more conservative.
When the Equal Rights Amendment came under attack in the mid-’70s, its supporters needed to explain, in the most concrete terms possible, how it was going to make things fairer. The problem was that there weren’t all that many good examples. When Alice Paul had first proposed the ERA, and even when the second wave of feminists had reclaimed it as their cause in the 1960s, it was unimaginable that all the state, local, and federal laws that discriminated against women in everything from credit to jury duty to the ability to work overtime could be gotten rid of one by one. But by the mid-’70s, between the courts and the legislatures, most of the laws that the ERA was intended to vanquish had already been eliminated or neutralized. One of the reasons the amendment was such a feel-good cause in 1972 was that it seemed unlikely to have much impact beyond the symbolic.
Feminists felt the need was still real. They pointed to the fact that women were so far behind men in earning power as proof that things were far from equal. And those court rulings were not as sweeping or consistent as they needed to be. Besides, what the courts and legislatures had given, they could take away without the protection of the Constitution.
All that was true but a little vague. Once politicians began getting caught in the middle of the Equal Rights war, many decided that the practical consequences of defeating the amendment were not dire. And the states where the fight was being waged were the hardest sells: the Deep South, Southwestern and border states, and Illinois, which required a three-fifths majority to ratify a constitutional amendment. The decade of annual ERA battles in Illinois, with the endless near misses, botched strategies, and thudding collisions between the aging New Left and the insurgent New Right, would become fodder for a generation of doctoral dissertations.
All these problems still probably wouldn’t have killed the amendment’s chances if it had not been for a single woman. It’s not often in this story of large economic forces and roiling social change that any one person makes the difference. But in this case, it’s unlikely that all the simmering discontent among traditional women, working-class men, and conservative churches would ever have been channeled and mobilized in time to stop ratification if it hadn’t been for Phyllis Schlafly.
“I WAS GIVING SPEECHES FOR BARRY GOLDWATER AND IN NOVEMBER I HAD A BABY.”
Schlafly was an extraordinary person. A brilliant debater, she could dish it out mercilessly and then stand serenely while her sputtering opponents tried to give it back. A tireless speaker and organizer for conservative Republican causes, she counted up ninety-eight public appearances in 1960, which was not one of her most demanding years. She was also a wife—a traditional one, by her own lights—and the mother of six children, who were very young at the time she was at the peak of her political activity. “I’d drive out to give a speech and sometimes I’d bring a nursing baby with me,” said Schlafly, who breastfed each child for six months. “There was always someone outside willing to take care of a baby rather than listen to a long lecture.” (She also taught her children to read and write, so they were ready to begin school at the second grade when they turned 6.) In the middle of the anti-ERA crusade, she stunned her family with the announcement that she had decided to go to law school—which she did, at 51, graduating three years later in the top quarter of her class. “I think what Phyllis is doing is absolutely dreadful. But I just can’t think of anyone who’s so together and tough,” said Karen DeCrow, one of the NOW leaders whose life Schlafly made absolutely miserable. “I mean, everything you should raise your daughter to be… she’s an extremely liberated woman.” Robin Morgan claims that whenever she had private conversations with Schlafly—mainly in studio greenrooms, waiting for TV debates to begin—Phyllis readily admitted that without the doors opened by the women’s movement, she would never have been able to achieve so much. “But she would never repeat that in public,” Morgan said.
Raised in a struggling, Depression-era middle-class family in St. Louis, Phyllis Stewart won a scholarship to a Catholic college but decided that the curriculum wasn’t challenging enough, opting instead to work her way through Washington University in St. Louis—with a forty-eight-hour-a-week defense job on the overnight shift, firing guns and testing ballistics at an ordinance plant. After graduating Phi Beta Kappa in three years, she raced through a graduate program in government at Radcliffe. She returned to the Midwest, became very active in Republican politics, and married Fred Schlafly, a lawyer fifteen yea
rs her senior. They started a family in Alton, Illinois, with children arriving so quickly that Phyllis had three babies in diapers at one time.
In 1952, not long after their first son was born, Phyllis agreed to run for Congress as the Republican in a heavily Democratic district. She posed for her campaign pictures in an apron, cooking the family breakfast, but she was anything but a demure and deferential politician. Schlafly proved to be a ferocious candidate, bombarding the district with press releases attacking the incumbent, Melvin Price, for his position on foreign affairs, taxation, and—her favorite topic—the Communist conspiracy. (Nevertheless, Price won reelection rather easily.) Like many members of the Republican right, the Schlaflys gave their hearts to Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona. To support his presidential bid in 1964, Phyllis wrote a small book, A Choice Not an Echo, describing how, as she saw it, the establishment power brokers were trying to keep Goldwater and the forces of anti-Communism down. It sold millions of copies and was read by virtually every delegate to the Republican convention, where Goldwater won the nomination. Many years later, Schlafly said 1964 was “the most productive year of my life. I was running the Illinois Federation of Republican Women; I wrote A Choice Not an Echo; I self-published it; I went to the Republican convention; wrote a second book, The Gravediggers—now we’re in September—I was giving speeches for Barry Goldwater and in November I had a baby.”
Goldwater, Robert Taft, and the other conservative heroes of the ’50s and ’60s were focused on beefing up the military and reducing the role of the federal government in everything except national defense. They had no desire to get involved in social issues such as abortion or gay rights. “The conservative movement is founded on the simple tenet that people have the right to live life as they please as long as they don’t hurt anyone in the process,” said Goldwater, who had a gay grandson. Women’s rights had traditionally been a Republican issue, and one with which many conservatives sympathized. It had been the Democrats, with their base in heavily Catholic urban districts and the South, who were more likely to resist anything that encouraged women’s independence from the home. But both parties were changing, and the passage of the ERA by those huge congressional majorities in 1972 might be a good marker for the point when the Democrats and Republicans crossed paths on women’s issues, one moving toward the cultural left while the other moved right.
