by Susan Faludi
By Connie Marshner’s own analysis, aspects of her youthful conservatism—like her insistence that she attend Sunday school regularly—began as “child rebellion,” a desire to irk her more liberal and only nominally Catholic parents. But at the same time that she was fighting her elders, she was absorbing their advice for future use. Her mother, a frustrated homemaker married to a navy officer, told her two daughters not to follow in her footsteps. “Mother read Friedan’s Feminine Mystique when it first came out,” Marshner says, “and I remember her saying, ‘You won’t understand how awful married life is until you read it.’ Mother was always saying to me, ‘You don’t want to marry and ruin your life. Be independent.’
“Her father, too, urged Connie and her older sister, who would become a lawyer, to get a good education and steer clear of low-paying “women’s work.” She recalls, “My father was very wise. He told me, ‘Don’t learn shorthand.’” The Coynes encouraged their daughters to appreciate the value of self-sufficiency—a lesson Connie would carry into adulthood. “It never occurred to me to be helpless,” she says. “I guess someone who is taught to be helpless needs to be liberated. But I was never taught that.”
As a young woman, she was so set on maintaining her independence that “I was determined never to marry.” But then she met Bill Marshner at a church service in the early ’70s. They were wed in 1973. That same year, the Heritage Foundation was established as the New Right’s first think tank. Connie Marshner’s former boss at YAF, and a Heritage founder, recommended her to the foundation’s organizers. She accepted their offer—a researcher’s job—and she and Bill moved to a Washington apartment convenient to her office.
Again, Connie Marshner quickly transformed her lowly assignment into a more influential position. When her superiors saw “how good I was at handling reporters’ phone calls,” they promoted the twenty-two-year-old to education director. She began generating a steady stream of articles and monographs opposing government subsidies for child care, decrying the baleful influence of feminism in textbooks, and advocating government policies that would discourage women from seeking fulfillment outside the home. Both cerebral and pragmatic, Marshner fortified her writings with scholarly references—among them, infant mortality rates in 18th-century Paris and the limits of Malthusian theory—and then used hardheaded business logic to win points with corporate leaders. Abortion, for example, was bad for commerce; one in five fewer babies, she told a group of executives, meant they would sell “five fewer Star Wars toy sets—which translates to fifty or more individual Star Wars action figures.”
In the winter of 1974, she discovered she was pregnant. “I assumed I would give it [the job] all up, but then we were dirt poor so I didn’t.” Bill was in graduate school and she had no maternity medical benefits; her emergency delivery and seven-day hospital stay nearly wiped out their savings. In 1976, she was pregnant again. By then, she was holding down two jobs—as a research consultant for the Heritage Foundation and a field coordinator for the Committee for Survival of a Free Congress. And she had just accepted a publisher’s advance to write a book on education. Bill, meanwhile, was enrolled in a divinity graduate program in Texas. Rather than move west and sacrifice her work, Marshner stayed on in Washington and sent her one-year-old son to her mother’s house in Baltimore. In the final months of the pregnancy she rejoined her family in Texas, so that her husband could handle the child care and cooking—“thank goodness for Bill”—while she finished the book, writing into the night. “I was typing the final draft when I went into labor,” she recalls.
After Bill’s graduation, they moved back to Washington. Her career was prospering. “The book really changed my status in the conservative movement,” she says, and when Weyrich decided, after the 1978 election, to organize a major conference for new congressmen, he put her in charge. At the opening session, she delivered a speech that would, as she points out, prove “prophetic.” The topic: “Why social issues are going to be important in the 1980s.” Marshner smiles as she recalls the moment: “It was a case of ‘You heard it here first.’”
Also prominent in her memories of the conference is a small but telling incident:
At the conference breakfast, I was sitting at the table with Paul and the other newly elected congressmen. And one of them asks for everyone’s opinion on a particular subject, but he skips over me. Then he picks up the schedule and sees my name as the next speaker and he looks at me strangely, and all of a sudden, I realize, Oh, he thought I was Weyrich’s secretary.
A decade later, that moment is still sharp in her mind, yet she says the congressman’s slight barely bothered her. “I mean, I wasn’t pleased. It did teach me a lesson that men in politics, they think of girls as something to take orders. But I guess I have a funny mind; I forget people like that. I’m not one to hold a grudge.”
Marshner is able, if not exactly to forget the insult, then at least to salve its personal sting—by not counting herself as one of the “girls.” She seems to picture herself seated on the other side of the table, one of the honorary men, dispatching those “orders” to women. She got there out of sheer talent. “My experience in the job market was not anything that made me feel discriminated against. Everything I’ve gotten has been through merit.” She is the “exception” that proves the rule: her gender lacks ability, not opportunity, to make it in public life.
Campaigns for women’s rights, therefore, are “silly,” she says, because merit will always win out. If most women haven’t made it, that’s because most women don’t have what it takes. Judging by her writings and speeches, Marshner takes a dim and often disdainful view of her sex, a perspective she shares with Schlafly, who addresses housewives in her books as a camp counselor might sulky Girl Scouts. Just quit whining and be “cheerful” even if you don’t feel like it, she orders them in The Power of the Positive Woman. When Marshner refers to women, she uses a distancing second or third person, as if she doesn’t include herself in their numbers. “Women need to know that somebody will have the authority and make the decision”—and “your job,” she lectures women, “is to be happy with it.” When Marshner and Schlafly trained women for the protest rally at the White House Conference on Families, Marshner recalls that she was most impressed by Schlafly’s ability to “control the women. . . . When she said jump, they did.” Women need that direction from above, Marshner says: “You know, it’s very hard to organize women because they tend to be catty. They get all sidetracked on who will get what title. They just waste a lot of time.”
By 1979, Marshner had become director of the Free Congress Foundation’s “family policy” division and founding executive editor of the Family Protection Report. Then, the year of President Reagan’s election, Weyrich appointed Marshner to the “team of four,” an elite group that traveled across the country, hand-picking and training state leaders to foment grass-roots action. “In 1980, I was on ninety-nine airplanes,” she says. “I kept track.”
Meanwhile, her husband had found a job at a small college in Front Royal, Virginia. Connie didn’t want to move there, so she rented an apartment for herself in Washington. Then she persuaded an aunt in California to move to Front Royal to help Bill look after the kids. She visited on weekends. “Bill saw more of them than I did,” she says. “We had not only a commuter marriage but a commuter motherhood. And this was before it was fashionable! I guess I was ahead of my time.”
After the 1980 election, Marshner chaired a half-dozen advisory panels, directed a staff of five employees, continued giving speeches around the country, and debated everyone from abortion-rights activist Kate Michelman to former Sen. George McGovern. In 1982, the local county chairman asked her to run for the Virginia House of Delegates. She turned it down, but not out of a sense of feminine propriety. “I was intrigued but I was too busy saving the country to worry about one district in Virginia,” she says. Her third child was born the following year—and Weyrich, concerned that she might take time off, proposed that s
he set up a nursery in a spare office. “Paul was very accommodating,” recalls Marshner.
That year, with her career approaching its zenith—she bought a car phone to field all her business calls—Marshner spoke before the Family Forum conference in Washington, D.C. Her subject: “Who Is the New Traditional Woman?” Her answer sounded a lot like the New Traditionalist ad copy that Good Housekeeping would later script: “She is new,” Marshner said of this feminine icon, “because she is of the current era, with all its pressures and fast pace and rapid change. She is traditional because, in the face of unremitting cultural change, she is oriented around the eternal truths of faith and family.” Marshner drew no connection between the positive, “new” aspects of women’s lives and the fruits of feminism. In fact, Marshner told her listeners that the women’s rights movement was the enemy of the New Traditionalist. It had unleashed “a new image of women: a drab, macho feminism of hard-faced women who were bound and determined to carve their place in the world, no matter whose bodies they have to climb over to do it.” The archetypal macho feminist, she said, was the bad mother in the film Kramer vs. Kramer, who put her husband in charge of their child and went off to find herself. “Macho feminism has deceived women,” she said, “in that it convinced them that they would be happy only if they were treated like men, and that included treating themselves like men.”
Marshner delivered similar rallying calls for the traditional family at the 1984 Family Forums II and III in San Francisco and in Dallas, deliveries timed to coincide with the presidential political conventions in these cities. Then she flew back to the office—to accept the title of executive vice president of the Free Congress Foundation, making her the highest-ranking woman in the New Right Washington establishment.
Marshner’s own interest in the housewifely duties of traditional family life, as she freely admits, remains limited. “I’m no good with little kids and I’m a terrible housekeeper,” she says. “To me, it’s very unrewarding, unfulfilling work. By contrast, what I’m doing in Washington has real tangible rewards, accomplishments.” Yet neither she nor her husband believes this makes her a “macho feminist.”
In 1987, pregnant with her fourth child, it looked like Marshner might finally take her own advice: she decided to take a break from Washington politics. Weyrich again tried to talk her out of it; by now, the foundation depended heavily on her literary and speaking talents. But this time she turned him down. The harrowing 1984 death of her infant daughter, born with a congenital heart defect, haunted her. She wanted to be home for the new baby.
“Marshner’s out of it now,” Weyrich says, when asked about her in early 1988, waving a dismissive hand in the air. “She just left to have her fourth child. Okay, she’s still executive editor of the Family Protection Report. But basically she’s out of it. She’s a classic example of what I’m talking about—women just can’t do it all. . . . Every single one of the girls I’ve had here who’ve had children has left.” As he speaks, four women are hard at work in their offices down the hall—from his finance manager to his vice president of operations to his secretary. All of them have children; several are even single mothers.
Marshner also didn’t take time off to devote herself to traditional housekeeping. She immediately set up an office at the house, accepted a post as general editor for a Christian publishing house, began freelancing numerous articles and landed a contract for her fourth book—this one against day care. “I’m going to look at the data on the effects of day care,” she says, “and talk to mothers who use it about why they regret it.” Now that she is home, she seems quick to judge women who aren’t. “When you have a child, that has got to be your priority. If you don’t, sooner or later you will pay the price, either in maladjustment or your own consciousness.”
The woman she judges most harshly, and unfairly, is herself; the backlash ideas she helped unleash have come back to roost in her own psyche. She wonders now if her preoccupation with her career might have “caused” her daughter’s heart defect. “I think the boys would probably have been happier if I stayed home,” she says. The boys, however, who are listening from the living room couch, disagree. “Those were great days,” sighs Mike, who is twelve. “I liked it when you worked.”
A SPIRIT-CONTROLLED WOMAN . . . OR A CONTROL-SEEKING SPIRIT?
The woman who is truly Spirit-filled will want to be totally submissive to her husband . . . This is a truly liberated woman. Submission is God’s design for women.
BEVERLY LAHAYE,The Spirit-Controlled Woman
God didn’t make me to be a nobody.
BEVERLY LAHAYE, INTERVIEW, 1988
The founder of Concerned Women for America always tells the press the same story of her antifeminist “awakening”: One evening in 1978 in her San Diego living room, Beverly LaHaye was nestled at the side of her husband, Moral Majority co-founder Tim LaHaye; they were watching the evening news. Barbara Walters was interviewing Betty Friedan, and when the feminist leader suggested that she represented many women in America, LaHaye leapt to her stockinged feet and declared, “Betty Friedan doesn’t speak for me and I bet she doesn’t speak for the majority of women in this country.” She vowed then and there to rally other “submissive” women who believe, like her, that “the women’s liberation movement is destroying the family and threatening the survival of our nation.”
Shortly thereafter, she chaired a meeting for this purpose at a local church. “I didn’t know if anyone would even show up,” she says, “but twelve hundred women filled that room. I couldn’t believe it! The only way I could explain it is that the majority of women out there do not agree with Betty Friedan and the ERA.” There was, however, a more likely explanation for the big turnout: by 1978, Beverly LaHaye’s name guaranteed a crowd in the evangelical community—and not because of her opposition to feminism.
The real awakening of Beverly LaHaye had occurred two decades before this electronic encounter with Betty Friedan, at a 1965 motivational conference for Sunday school teachers. At the time, LaHaye was a “fearful, introverted” housewife who clung to her husband’s side and was so shy that “it was difficult for me to entertain in our home,” much less venture outside it. She was the Submissive Woman she would later celebrate, and she did not enjoy it. “I refused most invitations to speak to women’s groups because I felt very inadequate and questioned if I really had anything to say to them,” she wrote in The Spirit-Controlled Woman, in a chapter titled “The Missing Dimension.” Its contents could have as easily belonged to the famous chapter in Friedan’s Feminine Mystique, “The Problem That Has No Name”:
One very well-meaning lady said to me in the early days of our ministry, “Mrs. LaHaye, our last pastor’s wife was an author; what do you do?” That was a heavy question for a fearful twenty-seven-year-old woman to cope with. And I began to wonder, “What did I do?” Oh yes, I was a good mother to my four children, I could keep house reasonably well, my husband adored me, but what could I do that would be eternally effective in the lives of other women? The answer seemed to come back to me. “Very little!” There was something missing in my life.
Likewise, LaHaye’s analysis of housework might sound familiar to early readers of Ms. She wrote:
When her youngest child was still in diapers, LaHaye went back to work, full-time, as a teletype operator for Merrill Lynch. “Thirty years ago, ministers didn’t get paid very much. We couldn’t survive, so I had to go to work,” she explains. But that wasn’t the only reason. “I liked working there. It was kind of exciting. You had to get there at six A.M. because that’s when the stock market opened in New York. They paid well. And I enjoyed it.” She hired a “housekeeper,” as she calls her nanny, a black single mother who “couldn’t find work because she lacked job skills.”
In my case it was not the major problems that succeeded in wearing me down; it was the smoldering resentment caused from the endless little tasks that had to be repeated over and over again and seemed so futile. Day after day I would
perform the same routine procedures: picking up dirty socks, hanging up wet towels, closing closet doors, turning off lights that had been left on, creating a path through the clutter of toys.
The teletype job helped build her confidence, but it was the changes triggered by the 1965 Sunday school conference that finally supplied “the missing dimension” in her life. The speaker, the popular Christian psychologist Henry Brandt, talked to the teachers about every human being’s basic need for self-improvement and expression. The words stirred dormant passions within the young preacher’s wife. “Down deep in my heart, I felt I would like to stand up and express myself,” she says later. “And I never thought that would change.”
The psychologist’s words got her thinking about a way to overcome her fears. So did a Biblical passage that he alluded to—a line from Timothy that promised the Holy Spirit would deliver disciples not only love but “power.” “This is what I needed!” LaHaye said to herself, as she later wrote. If she had “a new power within,” she reasoned, maybe she could combat her timidity and develop “confidence.” In the months that followed, LaHaye began to cobble together a self-improvement plan that was part pop-psychology and part religion, founded on the principles of assertiveness training and buttressed by Christian dogma. As she diagnosed the problem later in a self-help book for Christian women, she and many other housewives suffered from “a rather poor self-image,” “passivity,” and a “sense of inferiority.” She wanted to assert herself and exert “strength,” but she wanted to do it without challenging the church or threatening her husband. And she found she could, if she made it clear that she was seeking only “spiritual power.” It was acceptable to crave authority by framing it as a desire for “access to the power of the Holy Spirit.” No one in the evangelical community could object to her ambitions, as long as they were holy.