00:01:53.240I also like want to pause for a moment and reflect on the fact that I'm about to end a research project because we've wanted to do Schlafly basically for the entire time that we've been doing this podcast.
00:02:06.920And I have been passively and then more actively researching the ERA fight really for like the past two years, right?
00:02:15.620You have no idea how many tabs I just closed before we started this recording.
00:02:36.760She had pushed heavily for Barry Goldwater in the 1964 presidential election, which was a bloodbath.0.85
00:02:45.640And so the Republican Party was humiliated, and Phyllis Schlafly was just bit noir for the Republican mainstream.
00:02:54.040She doesn't go away, and she, of course, makes, like many of the cranks of our own day, that are remarkably effective.
00:03:01.760You know, I'm guessing she made her real money with all the subscription stuff, newsletter stuff, and books about nukes that we need to drop on Vietnam.
00:03:10.280for a long time in sort of like the latter half of the 60s phyllis understands herself as sort
00:03:17.900of like a has-been she has her newsletter she's still plugging along she's got this
00:03:22.820leadership position in the national federation of republican women she was the head of the
00:03:28.300illinois federation of republican women but then when she got elected to national one of her like1.00
00:03:32.280bitch enemies got illinois so she was like always like punching down at illinois and was sort of1.00
00:07:16.580But in her account, you know, it's her husband who encourages her to learn up and do the debate anyway.
00:07:21.780So she asks the woman with the book club to send her some reading material, and she discovers that this little amendment was, in fact, quite terrible and went on to, of course, defeat the feminists at the book club debate, and then everybody claps.
00:07:39.000In reality, what happened is that Schlafly knew exactly what the fucking ERA was because she had been trying to get the ERA out of the Republican Party platform for years.0.98
00:07:48.780years. And by 1971, when she places her discovery of the issue in time, she was already in touch0.96
00:07:56.180with women across the country from these Republican women's networks who were gearing up to oppose
00:08:01.560ratification in their own states. It was not a housewives book club either. It was in fact a
00:08:06.920stage debate in an auditorium. And it was just one of many, many of these big public events that
00:08:14.300Phyllis would participate in over the next decade, where she puts herself in front of eyeballs,
00:08:19.920in front of cameras, to oppose the ERA and to be the voice of ERA opposition.0.99
00:08:26.120Next thing you'll tell me that there was no pie. And that is where I draw the line.
00:08:31.960There actually are pies coming in this episode.
00:08:34.000Oh, thank God. Because I'm weirdly hungry. I don't know why. I'm just picturing apple pie
00:08:38.220now the entire time. Thanks a lot, Phyllis Schlafly. So the ERA was introduced in 1923 by
00:08:46.760Alice Paul. And it was in recognition that the 19th Amendment, which had been ratified in 1920,
00:08:53.620was already not being interpreted as this big transformation of social and familial life
00:09:00.280that the suffragettes had imagined it would be. Reva Siegel, who's this really fascinating legal0.96
00:09:06.360historian, she talks about the ambition of the 19th Amendment for the first wave feminists as1.00
00:09:11.860being like to introduce democracy to the family, right? Like really transform women's lives. That's1.00
00:09:18.000not what it did. It was a very, very narrow suffrage law, right? Meanwhile, over the ensuing1.00
00:09:23.060decades, the Supreme Court rules a bunch of times throughout the first half of the 20th century
00:09:29.100that women can be treated as different and lesser than men, especially in things like employment
00:09:34.920and in family law. So the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment is not interpreted as
00:09:41.860applying to women or as giving women the same protection of the laws as men, right? It is just
00:09:47.440sort of a weird legal interpretation regime that just writes women out of the 14th Amendment.0.98
00:09:55.740So women, for instance, like it's really hard for them to initiate divorces. When they do initiate1.00
00:10:01.100divorces, they tend to lose custody of their children. They have way fewer rights in inheritance.
00:10:07.720A lot of like, you know, rules around who can be the executor of an estate often go to men by0.80
00:10:14.620default with the rationale that they're better at math. I wish I was making that up. Women are1.00
00:10:18.940considered the responsibility of and under the control of their husbands when married,0.99
00:10:25.060which means that men have a legal right to rape their wives and a de facto right to beat them.
00:10:30.620They are excluded from many high-skill, high-wage jobs perfectly legally, and along with all of that, a lot of institutions that receive public money, like universities, like hospitals, can just say, oh, we don't really want to admit women, or we don't really want to treat this woman who, you know, is pregnant out of wedlock.0.95
00:10:50.100That's all legal. Right. So after Alice Paul introduces it in 1923, the ERA languished largely because it's opposed by unions, which is a whole can of worms that we can get into.0.99
00:11:05.560But mostly unions are trying to protect their male membership from female competition is sort of like the short version of that story.
00:11:12.520Right. But just because it hasn't been taken up, it doesn't mean that the ERA doesn't have like a kind of broad but soft support. Right. It's something that virtuous civic activism types always think that the country should probably get around to doing eventually.
00:11:29.500Feminism in many instances is something that lots of people like vaguely feel that they agree with, but very few feel any kind of like urgency about. And this is it's like that. It just doesn't have an activist class pushing for it. But it does get added to the party platforms.0.99
00:11:48.080The Republican Party adds support for the Equal Rights Amendment to their party platform in 1940, and the Democrats add it in 1944.
00:11:56.720So I think something that people forget about the second wave is that when the second wave feminist movement arose, a lot of the first wave activists from the suffragette era were still around.
00:15:03.940And there's a deadline by which that has to happen. The ratification by Congress is going to expire,
00:15:09.220And that deadline is March 22nd, 1979.
00:15:14.080Nobody expects it's going to take that long.
00:15:16.380In fact, they will ultimately extend this deadline and they still miss it.
00:15:21.200So the ensuing ERA fight is something that you can see as the story of a changing far right.
00:15:29.120We talked last time about the grassroots anti-communism era of the 1940s and 50s.
00:15:35.300The domestic far right is moving away from this focus on foreign policy and military strength and towards more domestic issues, so-called social issues or cultural issues, namely like really race and gender. Right. Yeah. And that's what the ERA fight is for the Republican Party. It's a story of turning their right wing sort of agenda from the foreign world to the domestic world and the social life of the U.S.
00:16:02.800For the country as a whole, the story of the ERA fight is a story of backlash, right? Because Phyllis finds a way to revive this degraded and embattled far right by harnessing fear and resentment of social movements of the 1960s.0.96
00:16:21.980And she did it in a way that inaugurated the kind of, like, organized backlash politics that we see in our own time.
00:16:28.600So I wanted you to read this paragraph from Schlafly's biography that is sort of like a summation of the ERA fight from a conservative perspective.
00:16:41.060The strange career of the ERA. Political fate.
00:16:44.620Ironically, the ERA helped revive the GOP right and the GOP generally.
00:16:49.200After Nixon resigned from office, the Republican Party stood arguably at its lowest point
00:16:52.960in its 120-year history, even lower than when Hoover left office in 1933.
00:16:57.960In 1974, only 18% of voters identified themselves as Republican.
00:17:02.880Yet within six years, many voters came to see the GOP not as a party of big business
00:17:07.300and the wealthy, but as a party of the little guy, the regular American Joe and his wife.
00:17:12.160While the Democratic Party belonged to elitists who imposed schemes of social engineering,
00:17:16.600social privilege, and special interest, all at the expense of the hardworking middle class.0.99
00:17:21.840The catalyst for this transformation was to be found in the grassroots reaction against feminism,
00:17:27.140legalized abortion, ERA, and the ban on prayer in school. Writing after the ERA had been lost,
00:17:34.160feminists Sylvia Ann Hewlett observed, quote, it was sobering to realize that the ERA was defeated0.93
00:17:39.540not by Barry Goldwater, Jerry Falwell, or any combination of male chauvinist pigs, but by women
00:17:45.840who were alienated from a feminist movement,0.83
00:17:48.300the values of which seemed elitist and disconnected
00:17:50.700from the lives of ordinary people, end quote.
00:19:49.640But it's just a shocking amount of milk.
00:19:51.920Like, I'm eating anything that is not milk and cheese.
00:19:55.520These themes, these bugaboos, these weird conspiracy theories,
00:19:59.100They're so much older, even in their specificity, that I think we typically assume them to be.
00:20:05.700Well, again, she's kind of a conduit here, right?
00:20:07.440This is the direct path from water fluorization truthers to RFK Jr.
00:20:14.160I thought about this not so much with Schlafly, who I don't know as much about, but Nita Bryant, who I do know a lot about.
00:20:19.840The 70s, I think, kind of the mainstreaming of the concerned woman as a kind of political trope, right?
00:20:28.240You have a moment in the 50s and 60s where there are conservative women who just show up as straightforward political actors.0.98
00:20:36.720When Phyllis Schlafly wanted to get Goldwater elected, she did it as like a housewife, but like she did it by like writing a book and being like, I think we should nuke the North Vietnamese, right?1.00
00:20:47.440The way a political thinker might.0.78
00:20:49.260but you get the sort of the Anita Bryans of the world in the 70s are like they're positioning0.85
00:20:56.600themselves as pre-political and they're trying to tap into something that's pre-political to anyone
00:21:00.700who knew about the Birchers this whole like I don't drink pasteurized milk would speak a very
00:21:05.960clear language about a kind of conspiratorial politics well but you're not putting it like
00:21:12.020that you're like oh I'm just concerned about the kind of things we're not putting in our bodies
00:23:51.040And that means that the amendments get passed are the ones with like weak, divided sort
00:23:57.460of soft opposition, the ones that people oppose, but not that many people, not that strongly
00:24:03.060and not people who are acting together, right?
00:24:05.540The amendments with strong and unified opposition cannot pass.
00:24:10.960And so when the ERA was being sent to the states for ratification in 1972 after it passes through Congress, it looks like it's going to succeed exactly because it doesn't have much or very passionate opposition, right?
00:24:27.640But when they have to get the ERA through Congress, they have to persuade people who can vote in two bodies, right?
00:24:34.160members of the House of Representatives and senators. Now, what had been one fight in Congress
00:24:39.440is now 50 different fights all across the country for getting the amendment passed through the 50
00:24:46.640different state houses. Right. Yeah. So from 1972, when the amendment is passed through Congress to
00:24:53.7601975, 34 states ratify the ERA in quick succession. Right. And remember, they only need 38. Right.
00:25:01.340So this is really, really, like, basically a done deal.
00:25:08.640And we should say, I mean, like, the way the issue now reverts to the states also starts playing into the hands of what we recognize today as Republican backlash politics, right?
00:25:17.640Because on the one hand, national media don't tend to cover state stories quite as carefully.
00:25:22.960So you can sort of lie in ways that, like, at least in the 70s, I think on a national news show, you wouldn't be able to.
00:25:29.260Republican, especially Republican women's organizing at the state and local level was far stronger than on a national level.
00:25:36.420And you do get this kind of nullificationist streak in a lot of U.S. states and a readiness to be against something just because it kind of comes from Washington.1.00
00:25:46.860Yeah, and I think that's, you know, what Phyllis really plays on.
00:25:50.480By 1975, her anti-ERA movement has gained steam and the ratifications have stopped.
00:25:58.240Ultimately, six states actually rescind their ratifications, which we're going to talk about, because that's like...
00:26:06.960In the 1860s, a couple of states tried to rescind their ratifications of the 14th and 15th Amendment because they were like, whoops, we didn't think you meant that black men could vote.
00:26:18.300And in those cases, it was ruled that you could not rescind an amendment.
00:26:23.200So we're not really talking about 10 years. We're talking about three that she did this in. How did this work? How do we go from 1972 when the amendment passes to 1975 when it all reverses?
00:26:38.200She did the bulk of it in three years.0.99
00:26:42.300So what Phyllis does is she takes the sort of like weak and scattered and disorganized opposition to the ERA and turns it into a single hierarchical organization under her own central command.0.99
00:26:55.940from whose peak she can like direct strategy and from whose peak she can you know manipulate the0.89
00:27:03.980media into reproducing her own anti-ERA propaganda which is you know constantly raising the stakes0.98
00:27:11.720and raising the temperature and working to inflame you know sexist anger resentment and
00:27:19.080woundedness. Phyllis's real first salvo against the ERA comes in February 1972 with a issue of0.97
00:27:28.080her newsletter, the Phyllis Schlafly Report. And in the Phyllis Schlafly Report, she publishes an
00:27:33.480essay, What's Wrong with Equal Rights for Women? And it's sort of like an anti-feminist screed,
00:27:38.560and it's a call to action to her supporters to join her in fighting against the ERA. So it's got,
00:27:45.180you know, a couple of what will become sort of like boilerplate anti-feminist arguments.
00:27:51.900The family is the basic unit of society in Judeo-Christian civilization.
00:27:56.460Oh, yeah. Everyone's such an expert in Judeo-Christian civilization.
00:28:00.260Yeah. You know, like I will say for Phyllis, her genius is in organizing and political strategy.0.99
00:28:05.920Her genius is not in like political theory. She's not like a particularly inventive thinker,0.83
00:28:11.520But she does strike this kind of tone that's like strident and sneering, right?
00:28:17.680She's very good at getting her readers on her side by having a common enemy, right?
00:28:22.300So she talks about Ms. Magazine a lot in this essay.0.79
00:28:26.280And she derides the sharp-tongued, high-pitched, whining complaints of unmarried women who talk about how satisfying it is to be a lesbian.0.80
00:28:36.800in. I do like imagining just like Phyllis Schlafly seeing my own life and just getting like Kool-Aid
00:28:43.600man read with rage. The ability to like downright dehumanize single women on the right is just like1.00
00:28:51.000completely amazing to me. But like the real point she makes that I think is one that has had kind0.52
00:28:57.440of disturbing staying power is that housewives and women who are you know out of the workforce
00:30:05.540This is something you see all the time, like casting women's status as like housewives, help meets, you know, legal children as protection, as privilege, as aspirational.1.00
00:30:16.000This is what every trad wife does.1.00
00:30:18.280This is I'm sorry to like bring it to the Internet, but there's so many women I know over the past week as I was writing this script, we're reposting the same like still from an old movie from the 60s was like Brigitte Bardot.1.00
00:30:31.620And she's like, I told you I can't work.1.00
00:33:16.800Chicago deserves better than Phyllis Schlafly, is what I'm trying to say.
00:33:19.620Yeah, but, well, I think there's a comment on O'Hare.
00:33:23.540O'Hare is a worse airport than Chicago is a city, by far.
00:33:26.380And it's about airport hotels, where it's just like the level of divorce, sadness, and convention is just like out of control.
00:33:35.180Even when people are not trying to take people's rights away.
00:33:37.820But, you know, she works the phones, basically, and she gets her contacts from the National Federation of Republican Women, so women from a bunch of different states, to all meet her in St. Louis a couple months later.
00:33:49.660And that's more than 100 people are at that conference.
00:33:53.600And the intention is to create a national movement of right-wing women against the ERA.
00:33:58.400So they choose a stop sign as their logo. So every picture of Phyllis from this era has her wearing like a weirdly oversized red stop sign on her chest that says Stop ERA. And they grew pretty quickly because it consolidated basically the entire scattered anti-ERA movement like very, very quickly. Right.
00:34:20.380So they cannibalize groups like my favorite one, which is called Women Who Want to Be Women, WWWW, which is such a crazy name.
00:34:33.640So, you know, the Stop ERA pretty quickly develops like a downline of these state orgs.
00:35:41.500So for a while, they're calling themselves the alternative, but then they decide to stop calling themselves the alternative to women's lib because they're like, we're not the alternative.
00:36:05.620So, Stop ERA does some things that are designed to change the votes of state legislatures and some things that are designed to get attention, right?0.96
00:36:17.580So, whenever the ERA ratification is being debated in a state capitol, the state Stop ERA chapter will send women to the capitol.
00:36:27.260They tell their members to dress up, to wear makeup, to look nice, and to bring baked goods.
00:37:15.640And they've got this, like, dainty presentation with which they get their picture taken, right?0.99
00:37:21.020So it's ladies in, like, little matching skirt suits with pillbox hats and white gloves holding a pie and, like, displaying this big, ugly, like, stop sign on their chest.0.94
00:37:31.740It's my impression that for decades, the best way for a woman to get photographed in the United States was to hold a pie.0.98
00:37:38.320If you have anything to say at all.0.96
00:37:49.100And, you know, this is like a very, very dainty, proper feminine presentation, and it contrasts with the actual scenes that ensue at a lot of these state capitals, like in them and outside.1.00
00:38:01.120Because the Stop ERA protesters, they get into these screaming matches with the pro-ERA feminists.
00:38:07.680It reminds me a little of, like, what you'll sometimes see outside an abortion clinic, right?0.83
00:38:12.340Like there's a bunch of, you know, feminist clinic escorts who are like they're trying to walk women into the clinic.0.98
00:38:19.300And then there's a bunch of like wild, drooling anti-feminists like chuds who are just screaming at you.0.95
00:38:25.940This also tends to contrast with the tone that the movement takes in its actual communications, which like Phyllis's tone a lot of the time is really sneering, really sarcastic.0.99
00:38:38.360Right. But Phyllis is personally at the forefront of almost all of the state capital demonstrations.
00:38:45.220She's traveling constantly. And by 1975, she has testified at more than 40 state legislature hearings against the ERA.
00:38:55.180Right. So she's really putting into work. And there's like two kind of genius ideas that Phyllis has that I think make Stop ERA a big success.
00:39:04.640Right. And the first is that she's recruiting women from churches.0.97
00:39:10.760So in the first couple months of Stop ERA, Phyllis is mostly recruiting women from the ranks of the right wing activist organizations where she already has a lot of friends.
00:39:20.240Right. The National Federation of Republican Women, the Illinois Federation of Republican Women, the DAR and some old friends from the Goldwater campaign.
00:39:28.700She says she milks those contacts. But one problem is that like Phyllis.
00:39:33.620They're kind of old. Yeah. Phyllis is almost 50 at this point, which is not actually old, I think, in my estimation anymore. But, you know, she's not a photogenic hot woman. Right. She's not pregnant. She's not.
00:40:04.120I think feminists of the second wave in our popular imagination now tend to be associated with a sort of like willful rejection of sexuality.1.00
00:40:12.560That's not actually how a lot of them were looking.
00:40:15.800They looked like they were wearing miniskirts and they had long hair and they had no bras on and they were young enough for that to be like quite lovely.
00:41:28.260And she builds it by getting women and, like, honestly, not more than just a few men from all of these different, like, mutually suspicious backgrounds and denominations to work together because she finds something to unite them around that they care about more than their divisions, which is anti-feminism.
00:41:48.480So Tanya Melec is a former Republican strategist, and she turned liberal and had this conversion experience, specifically in response to the Republican Party's anti-feminism.
00:42:00.180And she put it this way. Do you want to read this?
00:42:02.560It was Schlafly with her authoritarian leadership and expert grassroots organizing who made the religious right a political player.
00:42:09.380It was Schlafly, first of the Goldwater and then the new right team, who unearthed the political gold of misogyny.
00:42:15.000It was Schlafly who translated fear of women's liberation into a political force in the Republican Party and thereby extended the foundation of the Republican Southern strategy.
00:42:25.080Now, not only did the strategy flourish on the backlash of the civil rights movement, but it was broadened to include a backlash against the women's movement, too.
00:42:34.700The political gold of misogyny is, I think, a phrase that's going to ring in my ears.0.62
00:44:58.560She pitches that as a virtue, right?0.95
00:45:00.780Yeah. They're not fancy women with, you know, independent capacities for critical thought. So she also gets a bit of luck when Phyllis becomes allied with North Carolina Senator Sam Irvin. Do you know anything about Sam Irvin?1.00
00:45:15.880I don't. That's ringing a little bit of a bell. I mean, he's a North Carolina senator in the 70s. I'm going to guess he's a Democrat, probably a Dixiecrat, right?
00:45:23.420He is a Dixiecrat. He will also, around the time that he and Phyllis start working together, become the chair of the Senate Watergate Committee.
00:45:37.960So, like, for our purposes, the thing we need to know about Sam Irvin is that he was a passionate and really committed ideological misogynist and a big ERA opponent.
00:45:49.040He had been one of the only senators to vote against it in 1972.
00:45:54.460And when he did, I'm sorry, this is like a little bit of a side thing.
00:45:58.540But when the ERA was being passed by the U.S. Senate in 1972, Sam Irvin goes onto the floor to speak against the ERA.
00:46:07.420And he reads this like really creepy poem on the Senate floor about this young bride quaking with terror on her wedding night when she realizes she's like alone with a man.
00:46:18.620And I'm like, this is, it's just so many layers of wrong.
00:46:23.560But Irvin allows Phyllis to use his Senate's office resources to distribute her newsletter and all of her Stop ERA and Eagle Forum mailers, which means that her direct mail campaigns no longer have basically any overhead since the whole bill is being footed by the taxpayers.
00:46:42.600And another thing that Phyllis does is that she enrolls in law school at Washington University in St. Louis in 1975.
00:46:53.080And she says that she only does this in an effort to get her son to go to law school.
00:46:58.180Do you want to like read a little bit from this like Phyllis Schlafly interview where she talks about her decision to go to law school?
00:47:04.880I'm going to try and do a Blanche Dubois.
00:48:15.440Mother, you have everything else in the world now0.54
00:48:17.300and now you're trying to take away his law practice.
00:48:20.800I'm thinking of like conversations I've had
00:48:23.000with women my own age about our mothers
00:48:25.100where they're like, they're not allowed really.
00:48:27.620They haven't been allowed to cultivate self-respect.
00:48:30.020So whenever they're proud of something
00:48:31.800or they think that they deserve something,
00:48:34.460They can't just say that they have to create like this whole elaborate scheme in which they passive aggressively manipulate other people into saying it, you know, like like this is a whole long story, like largely fiction about how proud she is of everything she achieved.
00:48:54.060Right. She's like, my Fred said, you're defeating the IRA. You're taking these trips around the country. You're raising six children. And now you're also going to law school. She's proud as shit of that. Yeah. Right. Yeah. This is a woman who's very, very invested in her own achievement. Right. But she can't or won't say that. Yeah. What she's doing is creating an elaborate story in which other people say that about her so that she can say it.
00:49:55.100What's always struck me is that the way conservative women especially talk about this is laced with so much contempt.0.98
00:50:01.940She's basically saying, my husband is an insecure dummy.1.00
00:50:05.700She's like, I am to be a faithful helper and a quiet support to my idiot, no good husband.1.00
00:50:12.100Right. And you're like, I'm sorry.1.00
00:50:13.840It's like, it feels like you hate this man.
00:50:15.960Like, yeah, it doesn't seem harmonious at all.1.00
00:50:18.660There's a little bit of a martyr complex in a lot of like women's gender conservatism, right? Like women are edified by suffering in a way like even more than souls under Christianity are, right? Like women in particular make a virtue of self-denial. And so they'll like show you how much they're denying themselves. They're like, oh, I wish I could have a cookie, but, you know, it just goes straight to my hips. And it's just like, just eat the fucking cookie, you know, like.0.87
00:51:21.360So Lishwaki does not want to go to law school because she's such a good mom.0.95
00:51:24.680She wants to go to law school because, A, doing so will make her more credentialed in her political career and better qualified for a role in a future Republican administration, which is something she is already eyeing.0.99
00:51:37.840And also, it gives her more credibility as an anti-ERA campaigner, because at this point, Phyllis has spent a couple of years doing these televised and sort of like onstage debates with feminists about the ERA, and feminists are, on the whole, much better educated than anti-feminists, and they will pose Phyllis a question in this debate.
00:52:01.360How can you speak so authoritatively about the ERA and say that I'm wrong in my interpretations of this amendment when I'm a lawyer and you're not?
00:52:10.000This is something you see a lot in Phyllis's politics.
00:52:14.160Like, she is now, at this point in her life, a rich woman, right?1.00
00:52:27.600You know, and this is a real chip on her shoulder, right?
00:52:30.660Like Nelson Rockefeller definitely grew up rich, right? Like these groups that she sees herself as rebelling against, be it the feminists or the Rockefeller Republicans, are people who I think she suspects are a little better than her.
00:52:45.240And she has this, like, mix of anger at the thought that they might have that idea and, like, insecurity that it might be a little bit true.
00:52:55.720And, like, Phyllis is, like many of us, somebody who's just continually driven by spite, right?
00:53:03.320This I cannot fault her for because that's pretty much what gets me out of bed.
00:53:07.580I had to look real hard for something I could relate to in Phyllis.
00:53:11.640And what I actually came up with was like, well, I, too, am full of rage and hatred. You know, like I just had to lower my estimation of my own character. So like this legal training that Phyllis gets, it also gives her more ammunition for the anti-ERA campaign. Right.
00:53:28.260And bizarrely, it also allows her to get on TV a lot. So I've, like, mentioned a few times that Phyllis is doing these televised debates about the ERA. She's doing them in, like, auditoriums, but she's also doing them a lot for, like, broadcasts.
00:53:43.920And she did this dozens and dozens of times during the ERA battle.
00:53:47.660And it was not, at least at first, because people were clamoring to have her on TV.
00:53:53.220It's because she sued and threatened to sue anybody that wouldn't put her on TV or on the radio.
00:53:59.340Because at the time, the FCC was still endorsing something called the Fairness Doctrine.
00:54:04.020Really, it meant that if there were, you know, opposing sides of the issue, a broadcaster had to provide each side of the issue equal time, even when one side is very mainstream and the other is very fringe.
00:54:17.760Right. So like this fairness doctrine applies even to topics of broad political consensus, like, say, the ERA in 1972.
00:54:27.120So every time that a broadcaster wants to have a feminist on TV to advocate for the ERA, Phyllis Schlafly calls them up and says, I'm going to sue you if you don't put me on TV next to her.0.50
00:54:40.060And she demands, in fact, the same amount of time to speak.1.00
00:54:43.940So around 1972, feminists start noticing that one of the only ways the ERA is being covered at all now is in the form of debates that are always against Phyllis.
00:54:56.420Because there's lots of different women who are willing and able to go on TV to advocate for the ERA, and basically the only person who's ever there to oppose it is Phyllis, right?0.97
00:55:07.860So suddenly, she's on TV all the fucking time.0.84
00:55:11.560She's on Phil Donahue over and over and over again.0.99
00:55:14.360She's on all of these news magazine shows.
00:55:19.040And like them, the actual performance that she puts on is not really like good faith exchanges, right? She's berating, she raises her voice, she misrepresents the amendment, she misrepresents the impacts of the amendment, she misrepresents her opponents, and she issues ad hominems and lies, right?
00:55:40.280But this might be a good time to go through some of Phyllis's like big claims and arguments against the ERA.0.55
00:55:50.560So the first is a wife's right to support.
00:55:55.960Yeah, I know that that's one of the arguments, but it doesn't make any sense to me.
00:55:59.220A wife's right to support was Phyllis's term for a series of state laws that designated wives as dependents of their husbands.
00:56:09.140And Phyllis claimed that if the ERA went into effect, women who had been financially dependent on their husbands, like divorcees and widows, basically, would not be entitled to financial compensation or financial support if they were abandoned or left alone.1.00
00:56:30.520This is something that some feminists had actually sort of been trying to work around, right?0.98
00:56:34.720But functionally, what she's talking about is alimony law.1.00
00:56:37.680Which is, as you alluded to at the beginning, like trivially easy to make gender neutral, right?
00:56:44.640But Phyllis sort of likes to gloss over that because what she's actually talking about is government and legal recognition of a default in which women are confined to the home.1.00
00:58:18.040They may be the party of Social Security and the New Deal.0.99
00:58:21.500We are the party of having only people that you believe are of your gender while you're taking a big dump.0.97
00:58:29.380I'm a pretty ecumenical shitter, to be honest.0.97
00:58:31.580The Phyllis Schlafly Report, her newsletter, during this era has a ton of like crazy homophobic and transphobic cartoons of like men in dresses coming out of the women's room in a big long line.0.77
00:58:41.460And it could be something that the Trump campaign tweets today, you know.
00:58:45.280Elon Musk has them like as a screensaver.
00:58:47.560She's trying to, like, throw a lot of different issues at the wall to see what sticks.
00:58:54.800By now, Roe v. Wade has happened in 1973, January 1973.
00:58:58.520And she's like, well, this is a cockamamie idea, she says, that you can find a right to an abortion in, like, the 14th and 9th Amendment, which is what Roe found.
00:59:08.340But if we pass the ERA, it won't be a cockamamie idea.
00:59:10.840That will mean abortion on demand.0.64
00:59:14.160There's sort of like this nascent anti-abortion sentiment that's starting to be galvanized around Roe, and she does sort of like press on that button a lot.
00:59:22.000The one I remember most is the thing about the draft, right?
00:59:24.780She's like, oh, women would get drafted into the Army, right?0.51
01:01:47.020And they didn't really talk enough, I think, about what it would mean in practice for women to serve in combat roles in the military, in a world where there is the draft.
01:01:58.080which is ultimately what they were advocating for. Right. Yeah. They were just sort of like, well, we'll lobby against the draft.
01:02:03.600It's like, well, OK, but, you know, you're also advocating for a piece of legislation that will lead to this outcome.
01:02:13.260So you like you have to be a little more accountable for it.
01:02:15.480They just didn't really have enough political will within their organizations to get further than we oppose the draft.
01:02:21.580Right. And then I think the other thing that we have to think of when we assess Phyllis's work with the ERA,
01:02:28.080is that she really drew on this, like, infinite resource
01:02:32.740that could power the economy if only we could harness it,0.96
01:02:36.120which is, like, women's hatred of other women, right?1.00
01:03:26.580They're the people who are like flawed in the same way that I'm flawed or who seem like a version of myself that's like doing a little bit better, you know.
01:03:36.380And these were women in Schlafly's movement who were able to much more fiercely hate feminists and to mobilize against them because they had this affinity, right? Because they had this like affective investment in these feminist women because they shared the category of women but were inhabiting it differently, right?
01:03:58.720And they thought, OK, your feminism is an indictment of me and my circumstances.
01:04:05.340And this is like, I think, central to Phyllis's genius and her ultimate success that she understood this.
01:04:12.660Yeah, I mean, this is something that I think a lot about with Me Too backlash or with the way that Republican women were able to overlook all the very credible allegations against Donald Trump.
01:04:23.500Essentially, once you live long enough in a compromising position within unfair and unjust system,
01:04:31.060the lift for recognizing that injustice gets higher, right?
01:04:36.200Because you have to sort of say everything that was true of my life up to this point is to some extent invalid.
01:04:42.080And it is easier to kind of kill the messenger instead of say like, no,
01:04:46.720like the fact that you're making me feel that shows that you're sneering and looking down at me0.96
01:04:51.020rather than saying, like, which also many women did in the 70s,
01:04:54.440like, yes, I am ready to reassess my life.
01:06:59.260She gets under our skin because Schlafly exploits and exposes the core vulnerability of the feminist struggle.0.99
01:07:08.900The thing that makes sexism unique among other axes of oppression and the thing that, to my mind at least, makes feminism kind of like ultimately impossible, which is that women will conspire against themselves and participate in their own subordination, right?0.99
01:07:27.120And this brings me to the sort of like explanations of Schlafly and like explanations of the phenomenon that Schlafly represents, right? Freud would say, okay, well, you know, women are inevitably, naturally, inherently masochists.0.98
01:07:42.640I sort of prefer the radical feminist understanding of women's anti-feminism, which is that like women avoid feminism and seek out subordination to men because they are, among other things, making a somewhat rational choice based on a realistic assessment of their own gendered vulnerabilities.0.91
01:08:00.480I think this is like basically what you've been saying, Adrienne. The fight is impossible. Doing so requires me to grapple with my own complicity in harming myself and others in ways that I'm not sure that I can handle, right? And even if I succeed in changing myself and in changing my life, I might be materially deprived. I might be vulnerable to violence, right?
01:08:26.980What the anti-feminists offer women is this fantasy that there's an escape from the problem in the first place, right?1.00
01:08:35.040Which also makes it so significant that she's essentially peddling, as you say, a fantasy or a story, right?1.00
01:08:40.060In the end, you get a kind of version of domesticity that Schlafly herself didn't live, that her mother didn't live.
01:08:45.880I wouldn't want to aspire to it, but also even if you were to aspire to it, it wouldn't come naturally to you, right?
01:08:52.260Even if that is your life's ambition, it's not easy.0.95
01:08:55.120Or you get this kind of picture of, like, the gentlemanly husband who, like, just bears no relationship to the farting, cheating weirdo who, like, comes home and pours himself a fucking martini the first thing that he gets home, right?0.70
01:09:10.000You're like, why not just live in fictions?0.99
01:09:57.720Yeah, I left something back there. Let's go retrieve it.
01:10:01.820But, you know, like, when you are financially dependent on a man, as Schlafly encouraged women to be, that means you're dependent on their character, you're dependent on their whims, you're dependent on their moods, right?
01:10:17.520And all those human failures that men have because they are, in fact, human beings and not these, you know, like gladiators that Phyllis wants to pick them as, they become your problem in a way that's really outsized, right?
01:10:32.760It means if you are financially dependent on a man, you can't leave him if he hits you because you can't afford to leave him, right?
01:10:37.880If you're financially dependent on a man, you have no say in where you guys move to or live.
01:10:43.220If you're financially dependent on a man, it's really hard to talk back.
01:10:46.860It's really hard to like win an argument or get your way, right?
01:10:51.340When you're a housewife, you have a boss and the boss is your husband because you are in a dependent role in very material terms that extend out to emotional and psychic terms.
01:11:04.340But, you know, Phyllis just kind of wants to wave all of this away.
01:11:09.620So maybe as a coda, I have a question.
01:11:12.660The type of person you're describing makes perfect sense to me,
01:11:16.920and it's very moving the way you're describing them.
01:11:18.940And I can see why in the 70s there were a lot of them.
01:11:21.740At the same time, the 70s are also, of course, famous for women who took very different stances,
01:11:26.840who did in fact walk out on husbands, who did in fact change their lives,
01:11:30.220who did in fact join the movement, etc., etc.
01:11:32.420So I do want to hear from you just as a coda, how was it actually done?
01:11:36.400How did Phyllis marshal this considerably large group of women, but not the overwhelming majority of women, into this victory?
01:11:46.100What did the victory actually look like?
01:11:48.460What connects these rhetorical and strategic gambits to what would become this ignominious defeat of this amendment?1.00
01:11:57.900She marshals votes and she makes it really unpleasant to oppose her.1.00
01:12:02.300So one thing I think we've alluded to is that, like, Phyllis is mean, but she makes it unpleasant and, like, almost logistically impossible for pro-ERA feminists to do almost anything at all, right?
01:12:14.460I think we've talked off mic a little bit about, like, the women's year in 1977, which was this, like, big national conference in Houston, Texas that was sponsored by the federal government, and each state sent delegations to come up with recommendations for the status of women, right?
01:12:32.000And it was supposed to be basically a victory lap for the ERA. But the ERA by 1977 has stalled considerably. And what Phyllis does is she sends her little foot soldiers to all of these state convention nominating events.
01:12:46.200And she gets them to like sort of commandeer the state commissions for a lot of these Republican controlled conservative states.
01:12:55.400So in Houston, you've got 16,000 people in an arena who are supposed to be coming up with ideas for how the status of women can be improved.
01:13:06.400And the feminist coalition there is very big.
01:13:08.880You've got Republicans, you've got Democrats, you've got first ladies.
01:13:12.040And then you've got these anti-ERA women who are on the floor, who are shouting stuff down at the state nominating conventions.0.98
01:13:21.040They're giving it to their husbands who will take the mic and threaten violence.
01:13:24.040They're not letting anybody else stand for election to these state delegations.
01:13:28.840You know, it actually gets like really crazy.
01:13:30.840And again, it reminds me a lot of trying to get an abortion, like the scene outside of an abortion clinic.
01:13:36.380Like, how part of it is just that it makes the political arena so unpleasant and so stressful and so maximally taxing for even, like, minimal achievement and organizing that she basically harasses the pro-ERA feminists into, like, exhaustion, right?1.00
01:13:56.240And she makes the issue so toxic that a lot of legislatures just want to be done with it.1.00
01:14:01.380I know from your excellent introduction to Right-Wing Women by Andrea Dworkin that, in fact, that book, she doesn't sort of pick on right-wing women just as a curio.1.00
01:14:12.860She picks on right-wing women because they picked on her at one of these ERA fights, right?1.00
01:14:17.020She really was mobbed by them and is sort of trying to understand what the fuck makes these people tick.0.97
01:14:22.440Yeah, it's exactly the Houston Conference in 1977.0.96
01:14:26.160Andrea Dworkin goes there to cover it.
01:14:27.960She's a journalist working, I think, for Ms. Magazine.0.99
01:14:30.080And she's trying to have conversations with these anti ERA right wing women who've been sent there by Schlafly. And eventually, you know, she keeps getting chased away from the like committees from Mississippi and Utah. And eventually a bunch of them surround her in this mezzanine. And she thinks that they're about to throw her off of a balcony. They're telling her to go the fuck away and leave them alone.0.92
01:14:54.160Jeez. And, you know, she finally, like, flees and goes and tells her editor, Gloria Steinem, who's like, well, you have to write about this. And that's where the book Right Wing Women has its, like, genesis.0.98
01:15:04.620Wow. And in 1977, Flafly also publishes The Power of the Positive Woman, which I must admit I didn't read, but I'm guessing is also an ERA book.
01:15:14.420Don't read it. Yeah, it's an anti-ERA book. Like she pitches the introduction as a self-help book where she's talking about the positive woman in contra to like the dissatisfied, embittered, self-pitying feminist. But then the rest of the book, which is like 200 pages long, it's not like massive. It's pamphlet sized, you know.
01:15:34.900Yeah, Schlafly, for all her many vices, at least was a pretty brief writer.
01:15:40.200Yeah, she says a few things and it's the same ones over and over again.0.98
01:15:43.620Like half of the book is actually just evidence that the National Organization for Women is too friendly to lesbians.
01:15:50.040And then she like reprints all their resolutions, like apologizing to lesbians and supporting lesbian rights.
01:15:54.720And that's like a solid like 25 pages.
01:15:57.940The last three weeks I was teaching a class at Stanford about LGBT history in the Bay Area.
01:16:03.600And as part of that, I went to an archive and I read a bunch of interviews with gay and lesbian people around the Bay in the 1970s, late 1970s.
01:16:11.140There was one interview with a lesbian couple.
01:16:14.040And in the transcript, you can sort of tell that all these kids are running around.
01:16:17.340And it takes about two or three pages into the interview for you to realize that these are only one of the women's children.
01:16:25.100And the way the other woman sort of says, like, well, yeah, I can't see my children because I'm gay.
01:16:30.540They were with us for years, but then he took them away because he suddenly decided to care
01:16:34.420and the judge sided with him and he has them now.0.99
01:16:57.120If you think about the Patricia Highsmith novel, The Price of Salt, right, the first lesbian pulp novel with a happy end, the happy end is that they possibly get to stay together and she loses custody of the kids, right?0.98
01:17:06.560It's just like, that's where we are, right?1.00
01:17:09.280This is the state of affairs that Phyllis Schlafly wants to freeze in fucking amber.1.00
01:17:13.100She talks at length in The Power of the Positive Woman about the horror of allowing lesbians to have custody of their children.1.00
01:17:21.800Like the intensity and the vitriol of her homophobia is quite disturbing.1.00
01:17:26.880And she stayed that way until the end.
01:17:28.980One of her last accomplishments of her life was really like being a cheerleader and architect of some of the opposition to gay marriage in the 2004 George W. Bush re-election campaign.0.99
01:17:40.700And then one of the last things she did before she dropped the fuck dead was write a book endorsing Donald Trump for president.1.00
01:17:51.980We don't miss you, but I do think she is a fascinating figure and a little bit of a cipher for our own time.
01:18:00.840Thank you for letting me yap at you about this.
01:18:03.180I think listeners are going to get hopefully a much shorter version of this, but I have like commandeered Adrian's entire afternoon just to make him like listen to me talk at him.
01:18:12.320So like three cheers for Adrian for being such a good sport about Phyllis Schlafly.
01:18:16.800Well, you sat through Wagner for a lot longer.
01:18:20.500Thank you for walking me through this amazing story.
01:18:24.540Thank you for sharing your magnum opus with us here.
01:18:27.640As always, we're so thrilled that you all are willing to embark with us on these rabbit holes.
01:18:33.160We look forward to speaking with you again in another episode of In Bed With The Right.