Phyllis Schlafly and Grassroots Conservatism: A Woman’s Crusade
Critchlow shows how Schlafly, a dedicated Republican activist, used her talent to mobilize grassroots conservatives, the majority of them women, and how, in conjunction with intellectuals and politicians, she helped move the GOP to the Right.
.. For younger readers, the name Phyllis Schlafly probably will not mean much, which is regrettable, for she is truly conservatism’s founding mother.
.. During the ERA battle she would often anger her feminist opponents when she led off her talks saying, “I’d like to thank my husband for allowing me to speak here tonight.”
.. While there were certainly anti-Semites and racists on the Right, in the 1950s and 1960s when the civil-rights movement was at high tide, conservatives were more concerned about communism than race relations.
.. She received a fellowship to attend Radcliffe for graduate school and took a job at the American Enterprise Association as a researcher. She returned to St. Louis and married Fred Schlafly, an attorney for manufacturer John Olin.
.. Critchlow conveys a humorous story that occurred on a plane trip to Vancouver. At a refueling stop in Seattle, the pilot announced that a crowd had gathered to greet one of the celebrities on board the plane. Comedian Bob Hope, who was traveling with the Schlaflys, got up to exit the plane, but the pilot told Hope to sit down. The crowd wanted Phyllis Schlafly.
.. She became the feminist’s bête noire
.. The betterfunded and better-organized feminists possessed almost every advantage from the start, but they lacked unity. Schlafly dominated STOP-ERA. She was the organization’s national public face and vehicle for conveying the anti-feminist message. Supporting her were thousands of churchgoing women, united in their belief that ERA, Roe, and other feminist policies threatened the traditional values in which they believed.
.. But the fundamental distinction between the two organizations was religious. “A remarkable 98 percent of anti-ERA supporters,” Critchlow writes, “claimed church membership, while only 31 to 48 percent of pro-ERA supporters did.”
.. They were not unified politically, however. Some wanted to push for lesbian rights, others for gender equity, and still others for full equality with men on every level. Their divisions worked in favor of the determined Schlafly.
Why America Needs More Housewives Like Phyllis Schlafly
The conservative activist fought the organization and empowerment of women, by organizing and empowering women.
.. She taught them how to give STOP ERA talking points at their local representative’s office and she taught them how to send thank you notes afterwards. She taught them how to wear the “right colors for television,” and style their hair and makeup so that all STOP ERA representatives looked the same—looked like her. She held seminars where she played videos of herself speaking and would have them mimic her ability to give “20-second sound bites.” She taught them to stay on message. She taught them how to smile.
.. In 1978, in the very midst of leading the national campaign against the ERA, she attended and graduated from law school at the Washington University of St. Louis. Oh, and she also raised six children.
.. Schlafly was the woman who organized and empowered women to fight the organization and empowerment of women.
.. When I asked Karen DeCrow what she thought of Phyllis Schlafly, I remember she smiled and said she and Phyllis always got along. “I used to say that if I ever had a daughter, I’d want her to grow up to be a housewife, just like Phyllis Schlafly,” DeCrow told me and laughed.
A Playboy for President
This election was supposed to be a referendum on Hillary Clinton, long a polarizing figure because she seemed to embody the cultural transformations of the 1960s — the liberal, feminist, working-mother spouse of the first boomer president.
But in the year of Donald Trump, the religious conservatives who fought many of those transformations find themselves reduced to a hapless rump... So in word, deed and his wife’s “artistic” shots, it’s Trump rather than Clinton who has confirmed the full triumph of the sexual revolutions.
..Trump and Hillary are both children of the ’60s — but of its opposite ends, the Brat Pack era in Trump’s case and the flowering of boomer liberalism in Hillary’s... Much of what seems strange and reactionary about Trump is tied to what was normal to a certain kind of Sinatra and Mad Men-era man — the casual sexism, the odd mix of sleaziness and formality, even the insult-comic style...It was Hefner who fully embodied the male sexual revolt. Today he’s just a sleazy oldster, but in the beginning he was a faux philosopher, preaching a gospel cribbed from bohemia and various Freudian enemies of repression, in which the blessed pursuit of promiscuity was the human birthright.
.. The men’s sexual revolution, in which freedom meant freedom to take your pleasure while women took the pill, is still a potent force, and not only in the halls of Fox News. From Hollywood and college campuses to rock concert backstages and Bill Clinton’s political operation, it has persisted as a pervasive but unspoken philosophy in precincts officially committed to cultural liberalism and sexual equality.
.. the Playboy mystique was emphatically not a joke in the lower middle class environs that produced his centerfolds and their most adoring fans.
.. among men who were promised pliant centerfolds and ended up single with only high-speed internet to comfort them, the men’s sexual revolution has curdled into a toxic subculture, resentful of female empowerment in all its forms.
.. He’s become the Daddy Alpha for every alpha-aspiring beta male, whose mix of moral liberation and misogyny keeps the Ring-a-Ding-Ding dream alive.
.. the cultural conflict between these two post-revolutionary styles — between frat guys and feminist bluestockings
Books as Bombs: Why the women’s movement needed “The Feminine Mystique.”
She was white and well educated; she had a financially dependable husband and a big house in a crime-free neighborhood; and she enjoyed the leisure to write, or do anything else she liked. The only expectations were that she manage the care of her healthy and well-adjusted children and be responsible for the domestic needs of her husband. By any material measure, and relative to the aspirations of most people, she was one of the most privileged human beings on the planet.
.. She was white and well educated; she had a financially dependable husband and a big house in a crime-free neighborhood; and she enjoyed the leisure to write, or do anything else she liked. The only expectations were that she manage the care of her healthy and well-adjusted children and be responsible for the domestic needs of her husband. By any material measure, and relative to the aspirations of most people, she was one of the most privileged human beings on the planet.
.. The Feminine Mystique” was a book that helped to change the world, or at least the way a lot of people saw the world, and it almost certainly could not have done so if Friedan had been completely open about her political background and motivations. She may have exaggerated her originality as well, but she succeeded where no other feminist writer had.
.. The number of women enrolled in college nearly doubled in that decade, for example, and the employment rate for women rose four times as fast as it did for men.
.. Friedan quoted the president of Mills College citing with approval the remark “Women should be educated so that they can argue with their husbands.”
.. Male-only institutions, from Harvard and Yale to the National Press Club, where invited female reporters had to sit in the balcony and were not allowed to ask questions during speeches, were prevalent.
.. The popular understanding was that the only reason for a marriageable woman to take a job was to find a husband.
.. If that was why women worked, it made perfect economic sense: because of the disparity in pay and career opportunity between men and women, virtually the only way a woman could improve her economic situation was to marry.
.. When sixteen million veterans, ninety-eight per cent of whom were men, came home, in 1945, two predictable things happened: the proportion of men in the workforce increased, as men returned to (or were given) jobs that had been done by women during the war; and there was a big spike in the birth rate. But what should have been a correction became a trend.
.. “The Second Sex” does not seem to have spoken to American women in the personal way that Friedan’s book did.
.. The fundamental argument of “The Feminine Mystique,” and of the second-wave feminism to which it gave rise, is that there is no such thing as women’s essential nature.
.. Jane Jacobs’s “The Death and Life of Great American Cities” was published in 1961. It has been credited with, in the long run, changing urban-renewal policies in the United States; in the short run, it helped bring an end to the career of New York City’s “master builder,” Robert Moses.
.. In all these cases, it can be said (and in most of them it has been said) that the changes the books are associated with would have happened anyway. As Coontz puts it, about Friedan, “Books don’t become best sellers because they are ahead of their time.” But people like to be able to point to a book as the cause for a new frame of mind