Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women

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Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women Page 34

by Susan Faludi


  Mandate for Leadership, the Heritage Foundation’s 1981 master plan for the Reagan administration, warned of the “increasing political leverage of feminist interests” and the infiltration of a “feminist network” into government agencies, and called for a slew of countermeasures to minimize feminist power. Mandate for Leadership II, three years later, was equally preoccupied with conquering the women’s-rights campaign; its authors asserted, “The fight against comparable worth must become a top priority for the next administration.” And Cultural Conservatism, another basic tract in the New Right library, wasted no time singling out “radical forms of feminism” as the source of a long list of social ills, from fractious youths to anti-American sentiments. Feminism’s radical operatives had made deep inroads into our government and schools, Cultural Conservatism warned. “One need not wander over to the Women’s Studies Department” anymore to encounter the “liberationists,” the book’s authors observed; now these pernicious ideas were deeply embedded in college literature departments, law school classes, TV talk shows, and “many a rock video.” Even when the New Right turned to “secular humanism,” they found feminism lurking between the lines. The schoolbooks that incensed them most were the texts portraying women in independent roles. The publications list of the Rock-ford Institute’s Center for the Family in America, a New Right think tank, read like a rap sheet against independent, single, professional, and, of course, feminist, women. In fact, only two of the twenty-one publication titles on its 1989 list didn’t deal with female crimes. Some typical offerings: “Perilous Parallel: Working Wives, Suicidal Husbands,” “Why More Women Working Means Lower Pay for Men,” “The Frightening Growth of the Mother-State-Child Family,” and “The Link Between Mother-Dominated Families and Drug Use.”

  “Feminism kind of became the focus of everything,” Edmund Haislmaier, a Heritage Foundation research fellow, recalls. As an economic conservative who did not share his colleagues’ desire for a regressive social revolution, Haislmaier came to observe the in-house antifeminist furor with an uneasy detachment.

  In retrospect, I’d have to say they blamed the feminists for an awful lot more than they actually deserved. The women’s movement didn’t really cause the high divorce rate, which had already started before women’s liberation started up. The feminists certainly didn’t have anything to do with disastrous economic policies. But the feminists became this very identifiable target. Ellie Smeal [former president of the National Organization for Women] was a recognizable target; hyperinflation and tax bracketing were not.

  SETTING THE ANTIFEMINIST AGENDA

  Soon after the New Right scored its first set of surprise victories in Congress, an ebullient Paul Weyrich assembled his most trusted advisers at the Heritage Foundation. Their mission: draft a single bill that they could use as a blueprint for the New Right program. It would be their first legislative initiative and an emblem of their cause. They would call it the Family Protection Act. But the bill they eventually introduced to Congress in 1981 had little to do with helping households. In fact, it really had only one objective: dismantling nearly every legal achievement of the women’s movement.

  The act’s proposals: eliminate federal laws supporting equal education; forbid “intermingling of the sexes in any sport or other school-related activities;” require marriage and motherhood to be taught as the proper career for girls; deny federal funding to any school using text books portraying women in nontraditional roles; repeal all federal laws protecting battered wives from their husbands; and ban federally funded legal aid for any woman seeking abortion counseling or a divorce. The bill was largely written in the negative; in its long list of federal programs to rescind, the act offered only one real initiative of its own—new tax incentives to induce married women to have babies and stay home. Under this provision of the bill, a husband could set up a tax-deductible retirement fund if his wife earned no money at all that year. Evidently, even a Tupperware-hawking homemaker was suspect.

  Other “family” legislative proposals from the New Right would follow in the next several years, and they were virtually all aimed at slapping down female independence wherever it showed its face: a complete ban on abortion, even if it meant the woman’s death; censorship of all birth control information until marriage; a “chastity” bill; revocation of the Equal Pay Act and other equal employment laws; and, of course, defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment.

  In the 1980 election, the New Right would figure in the national presidential campaign almost exclusively on the basis of its opposition to women’s rights. Their most substantial effect on the Republican party was forcing its leaders to draft a platform that opposed legal abortion and the Equal Rights Amendment—the first time since 1940 that the ERA failed to receive the GOP’s endorsement. The Republican convention’s acceptance of the New Right’s antifeminist agenda that year, in fact, carved one of the only clear dividing lines between two national party platforms whose boundaries were blurring on so many other fronts, from foreign policy to law and order. And their candidate for top office distinguished himself most clearly from his predecessors by his views on women’s rights: Reagan was the first president to oppose the ERA since Congress passed it—and the first ever to back a “Human Life Amendment” banning abortion and even some types of birth control.

  Yet strangely, most chroniclers of the New Right’s errand into the capital—supporters and opponents alike—characterized feminism as a “fringe” issue. Press accounts, even those emanating from liberal and leftist journals, generally presented the right-wing movement’s opposition to abortion and the ERA as distracting sidelights to the meatier, more “important” policy aims—decreasing government regulation, cutting the budget, bolstering defense. The first round of history books on the movement were no better. Richard G. Hutcheson, Jr.’s God in the White House, a typical account, allotted only two pages to the ERA and explored every possible cause for the right wing’s mobilization except feminism, from Watergate to the “new narcissism.” “[T]he ‘hearth and home’ issues” on the New Right agenda, Alan Crawford concluded in Thunder on the Right, were merely “nonpolitical, fringe issues at best.”

  But while these commentators judged the New Right’s attack on the women’s movement to be a sideshow, the players in the right-wing fundamentalist drama knew better. For them, public punishment of autonomous feminist women was no less than the main event.

  THE WAR OF WORDS

  “We are different from previous generations of conservatives,” Weyrich said in a speech in 1980. “We are no longer working to preserve the status quo. We are radicals, working to overturn the present power structure of the country.” They were also the “new macho preachers,” as they were soon dubbed, swaggering and spouting a tough line from the TV screen. Reverend James Robison, “God’s Angry Man,” boasted of his past violent exploits (including the claim that he “planned rapes”); Reverend Tim LaHaye liked to tell the press about his days as a military man when he would “punch anyone’s lights out.” As they emphasized repeatedly in their texts and speeches, they were “warriors,” marching into enemy territory behind a barrel-chested Christ holding high the flag. “Jesus was not a pacifist,” Falwell liked to say. “He was not a sissy.”

  Yet the fundamentalist soldiers had trooped to Washington precisely because they feared they had already become the “weak men” that Falwell’s writings repeatedly and anxiously derided. As much as the New Right warriors billed themselves aggressive and free agents of change, their maneuvers were all reactions against what they saw as the dominant enemy—the proponents of women’s rights. Despite the verbal bravado, the New Right was wholly dependent on another movement for its identity. This is, of course, the situation for any conservative group attempting to preserve or resurrect a threatened way of life. “Paradoxically, conservatism requires liberalism for its meaning,” political writer Sidney Blumenthal observed in The Rise of the Counter-Establishment. “Though [conservatives] have a sense of mission,
they have difficulty rising above the adversarial stance.” But the New Right men found themselves in a position of dependency that was doubly demeaning: not only were they reacting rather than acting, they were reacting against women. At least John Birchers could picture themselves beating back the advances of Communist thugs. The New Right preachers faced the embarrassing task of fending off the ladies.

  There seemed no escape from this posture of passivity built into a backlash movement. But the New Right men finally found a way. “For twenty years, the most important battle in the civil rights field has been for control of the language,” Mandate for Leadership II asserted—especially, such words as “equality” and “opportunity.” “The secret to victory, whether in court or in congress, has been to control the definition of these terms.” By relabeling the terms of the debate over equality, they discovered, they might verbally finesse their way into command. By switching the lines of power through a sort of semantic reversal, they might pull off a coup by euphemism. And in this case, words would speak louder than actions.

  Under this linguistic strategy, the New Right relabeled its resistance to women’s newly acquired reproductive rights as “pro-life;” its opposition to women’s newly embraced sexual freedom became “pro-chastity;” and its hostility to women’s mass entry into the work force became “pro-motherhood.” Finally, the New Right renamed itself—its regressive and negative stance against the progress of women’s rights became “pro-family.” Before, the anti-ERA group Eagle Forum had formally dubbed itself “An Alternative to Women’s Lib.” But after the 1980 election, it changed its motto to “Leading the Pro-Family Movement Since 1972.” Before, Weyrich had no choice but to describe his enemy as “women’s liberation.” But now, Weyrich could refer to his nemesis as “the antifamily movement.” Now he was in charge—and the feminists would have to react to his program.

  This Orwellian wordplay not only painted the New Right leaders out of their passive corner; it also served to conceal their anger at women’s rising independence. This was a fruitful marketing tool, as they would draw more sympathy from the press and more followers from the public if they marched under the banner of traditional family values. In the ’20s, the Ku Klux Klan had built support with a similar rhetorical maneuver, downplaying their racism and recasting it as patriotism; they weren’t lynching blacks, they were moral reformers defending the flag.

  The New Right leaders’ language was, in many respects, as hollow as the Klan’s. These “pro-life” advocates torched inhabited family-planning clinics, championed the death penalty, and called the atom bomb “a marvelous gift that was given to our country by a wise God.” These “pro-motherhood” crusaders campaigned against virtually every federal program that assisted mothers, from prenatal services to infant feeding programs. Under the banner of “family rights,” these spokesmen lobbied only for every man’s right to rule supreme at home—to exercise what Falwell called the husband’s “God-given responsibility to lead his family.”

  LADIES IN RETIREMENT

  While the “pro-family” strategy allowed the New Right men to launch an indirect attack against women’s rights, they also went for the direct hit—using female intermediaries. When they wanted to lob an especially large verbal stone at feminists, they ducked behind a New Right woman. “Women’s liberationists operate as Typhoid Marys carrying a germ,” said their most famous spokeswoman, Phyllis Schlafly. “Feminism is more than an illness,” asserted Beverly LaHaye, founder of the New Right’s Concerned Women for America. “It is a philosophy of death.” In time-honored fashion, antifeminist male leaders had enlisted women to handle the heavy lifting in the campaign against their own rights.

  Yet in mounting their attack on a public stage, the New Right women had to speak up and display independent strength—exhibitions that revealed them to be anything but the ideal models of passive and sequestered womanhood that they were supposedly saluting. These female leaders who relayed the movement’s most noxious antifeminist sentiments to public ears embraced far more of the feminist platform than either they or their male leaders let on—or perhaps realized.

  Schlafly was only the earliest, most well known, and extreme, example. The woman who opposed the ERA because it “would take away the marvelous legal rights of a woman to be a full-time wife and mother in the house supported by her husband” was a Harvard-educated lawyer, author of nine books and a two-time congressional candidate. And she was far more favorably disposed to the agenda of the women’s movement than her public reputation suggested. In her antifeminist treatise, The Power of the Positive Woman, she actually gives an approving nod to feminist-inspired equal-rights legislation and ’70s-era federal sex discrimination suits that paved the way for “a future in which [the American woman’s] educational and employment options are unlimited.” All the women her book points to as positive role models are, in fact, stereotypical Superwomen: Olympic athletes, powerful political leaders, and ambitious business executives. To her mind, Margaret Thatcher is “surely one of the outstanding Positive Women in the world.” At times, Schlafly almost sounds as if she is lauding the other side’s accomplishments. “The Positive Woman in America today,” she writes gleefully, “has a near-infinite opportunity to control her own destiny, to reach new heights of achievement, and to motivate and influence others.”

  The New Right women’s organizations that emerged in the late ’70s and early ’80s weren’t mere adjuncts to the male-led lobby. In fact, they often modeled the structure of their “auxiliary” groups more on women’s rights organizations than the male New Right hierarchies. And they borrowed political tactics and rhetoric, too, from feminist events, speeches, and literature. It was the 1977 International Women’s Year in Houston, which endorsed an essentially feminist platform, that first provoked the New Right women who attended to speak up and organize. Out of the conference, a host of New Right women’s groups sprang up and eventually consolidated into the National Pro-Family Coalition. President Carter’s 1979 White House Conference on Families, another feminist-minded gathering, served as the coalition’s springboard into national politics. This time, when the feminist agenda dominated the conference, the New Right women produced a shadow conference with a similar format—and they staged a walkout, formed an “alternative” assembly, and set their own agenda.

  For many of these women, the experience was an exhilarating first brush with political activism, a liberating discovery of their public voice. “IWY was our ‘boot camp,’” Rosemary Thomson, author of The Price of Liberty and coordinator of the Eagle Forum’s contingent at the White House Conference on Families, proudly told a sociologist after the showdown. “Now we’re ready for the offensive in the battle for our families and our faith.” A national organizer for the Eagle Forum explained, “I had never given a speech, written a speech, testified, never been on radio, never been on television. . . . [Y]ou start getting some self-confidence. You beat a lawyer in a debate a couple of times and you start thinking, ‘Well, gee, that’s pretty good. I didn’t know I could do that.’”

  Ultimately, however, the New Right turned the rising confidence and aspirations of these women to its own ends. The movement needed both articulate intellectuals to occupy the podiums and adroit organizers to fill the stands; the New Right women provided both. Two women in particular, Connaught “Connie” Marshner, the highest level woman in the Heritage Foundation, and Beverly LaHaye, the director of Concerned Women of America, the largest female New Right group, would take on the direction of these respective missions.

  THE HERITAGE FOUNDATION’S SUPERWOMAN

  A woman’s nature is, simply, other-oriented. . . . Women are ordained by their nature to spend themselves in meeting the needs of others.

  CONNAUGHT C. MARSHNER,The New Traditional Woman, 1982

  If anywhere along the line, from 1979 to 1984, someone had said to me, ‘You should spend more time with your kids,’ I would have been highly offended.

  CONNAUGHT C. MARSHNER, INTERVIE
W, 1988

  “Oh yeah, the Family Protection Act,” Connie Marshner is recalling. “I wrote the fact sheet on it. I sold it. I became its chief marketer.” Just after supper one evening in the spring of 1988, Marshner is sitting in the living room of her home in a suburb of Washington, D.C. Her husband, Bill, clears the table and then retreats to the kitchen to wash the dishes. She was too busy working today to cook, she explains, so it was takeout Chinese food for dinner again. While she balances her newborn in one hand and a pile of research papers in the other, she recalls the first heady days when she sat down to write the Family Protection Act.

  “I was becoming so caught up in politics. I remember, I was in this neighborhood [child care] co-op at the time, but it quickly became clear I was never going to repay the favor. I was just too busy. Finally, well, the other mothers basically asked me to leave.”

  Marshner’s political career began in 1971, at the University of South Carolina; undergraduate Connie Coyne was majoring in English and secondary education, but spending all her time at the campus chapter of Young Americans for Freedom, a conservative political organization. Right after college, she became an assistant to the editor of YAF’s magazine, the New Guard. When her boss moved to YAF’s Capitol Hill office, he offered her a job as his secretary. She quickly accepted, but she had no intention of staying in the clerical pool. Soon after her arrival, the boss gave her a paper, an attack on a child care bill, to type; she took it home instead and wrote, as she recalls, “the definitive analysis of what was wrong with it.” Her paper “became the conservative critique of Mondale’s Child Development bill that eventually led to its defeat.”

 

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