by Susan Faludi
Although LaHaye was quick to label her take-charge desires a “spiritual submission to God,” the steps she outlined in her writings about it later were suspiciously action-oriented. Her semantic strategy was the opposite of that of her New Right male peers; while they concealed their feelings of weakness in active-sounding terminology, LaHaye hid her newly assertive self behind a screen of passive-sounding rhetoric. The New Right male leaders falsely claimed to be in command; she falsely claimed to have no interest in taking the helm.
By tapping “spiritual power,” LaHaye wrote in The Spirit-Controlled Woman, a fundamentalist woman could “step forth in all confidence,” “overcome her passivity,” and become “a capable person.” In LaHaye’s version of spiritual growth, self-confidence was next to godliness and timidity a black mark on the soul. A spirit-controlled woman must “recognize her fearfulness as a sin and cope with it accordingly.” Through such inversions of religious tenets, she could dare to concentrate on building self-esteem, an independent identity and a public voice—all the while claiming to be doing it only through, and for, Jesus.
LaHaye’s journey toward spiritually mediated liberation began in earnest the day she forced herself to accept an invitation to talk before a women’s church club. She told them about her confidence-boosting ideas, and to her amazement the women applauded and crowded around afterward, seeking her counsel. She agreed to talk to other women’s groups. Her popularity grew quickly on the Christian speaking circuit. With her husband, she began directing “Family Life Seminars,” hosting a weekly cable television program and a live call-in radio talk show on family living. Soon a publisher approached her with a proposal to write a self-help book for Christian women. “I said, ‘Oh no, I’m not a writer,’” she recalls. “Then I thought, wait a minute. I can do that.” The Spirit-Controlled Woman, published in 1976, sold more than a half-million copies. In the next decade, LaHaye wrote five more books for Christian women, self-development tracts with chapter titles like “You Can Help Yourself” and “Can a Courageous Woman Be Silenced?”
At the same time that she was busy writing The Spirit-Controlled Woman, LaHaye was finishing up a long-term book project with her husband, Tim. In 1976, against the advice of all their fellow Christian marriage counselors, the LaHayes finally published The Act of Marriage, a sex manual. The book instantly became the evangelical equivalent of The Joy of Sex; it was read by millions. The Act of Marriage: The Beauty of Sexual Love was a revolutionary document for evangelical readers, both for its frank and graphic content (it covered foreplay, lubrication, and multiple orgasms—in remarkable detail) and for its female perspective on sexual pleasure. Not only did the book teach Christian men how to gratify their wives in bed, it informed them in no uncertain terms that an orgasm is every woman’s right: “Modern research has made it abundantly clear that all married women are capable of orgasmic ecstasy. No Christian woman should settle for less.” The book’s observations often suggested that a female hand was wielding the authorial pen: “Regrettably some husbands are carryovers from the Dark Ages, like the one who told his frustrated wife, ‘Nice girls aren’t supposed to climax.’ Today’s wife knows better.” The manual urged women to check their submissive behavior at the bedroom door:
“Many women are much too passive in lovemaking. . . . Lovemaking is a contact sport that requires two active people.” The LaHayes even declared the vaginal orgasm a myth, sang the praises of clitoral stimulation—“Your heavenly Father placed [your clitoris] there for your enjoyment”—and referred dubious readers to a Biblical passage that they said justified their enthusiasm (Song of Solomon 2:6: “Let his left hand be under my head and his right hand embrace me”). As if all this weren’t enough, the authors actually endorsed birth control, and for this reason: to maximize women’s enjoyment of sex.
The Act of Marriage may have read as if Beverly LaHaye were on the verge of a feminist conversion, and one worthy of Germaine Greer. And, indeed, in other arenas, too, she seemed to be endorsing basic feminist tenets. She declared herself a supporter of equal rights for women, said she was “totally in favor” of pay equity, and called herself a firm believer in “a woman’s right to be free from sexual harassment on the job.” Yet she was never prepared to take the final steps, which had the potential of separating her from her church, husband, and social universe. Instead, in the years following the book’s publication, she wound up leading a countercharge against the women’s movement. Having introduced equal rights to the evangelical bedroom, she now moved to fight it on all other fronts. Having attracted a huge following by telling women to “step forth in all confidence,” she now mobilized her female army for a campaign to chase themselves home.
In drawing women to her new cause, LaHaye played on both traditionalist fears and feminist aspirations. She emphasized how changes in women’s status might threaten their traditional marriages and leave them “unprotected.” At the same time, she gave hundreds of thousands of Christian women an acceptable outlet for the assertiveness that she had recognized as fundamental to human growth and that she had helped foster. “I discovered an organization where I could think, use my brain,” said Cheryl Hook, a Chicago homemaker, who was spending thirty hours a week on CWA activities. By working for Concerned Women for America, women could be vocal and forceful—without setting off any alarms at home or in the pews. They were, after all, only speaking up for their sex’s right to stay quietly at home.
After founding Concerned Women for America in 1979, LaHaye set up a national network that could dispatch hundreds of thousands of women on short notice. She organized what she claimed was the nation’s largest women’s group (estimates range from 150,000 to a half-million members) into two thousand “prayer/action chapters”—with the accent on action. Even the prayers were notably this-worldly in sentiment. “Father, we pray that money being considered by the legislature is not used for teenage pregnancy,” began one, served up at a 1986 breakfast prayer meeting in a Maryland hotel. “We ask that You confuse the plans of our enemy, particularly our enemy Planned Parenthood.” LaHaye used her network to swamp Congress with bags of letters and to detail hundreds of out-of-state women to “local” antiabortion protests around the nation. In 1986, her rapid-response team descended on Vermont and, with the aid of a $350,000 war chest, helped defeat the state’s Equal Rights Amendment.
In the press, Concerned Women for America was often described as the Moral Majority’s ladies’ club, a sort of Daughters of the New-Right Revolution. The characterization wasn’t entirely unjust; the CWA women were certainly treated like auxiliaries by the New Right and the Reagan administration, who often deployed them tactically as fund-raising and letter-writing foot soldiers. New Right leaders, in fact, originally funded Concerned Women for America in hopes that the organization would generate reinforcement troops. Tim LaHaye offered his wife as a safe figurehead; the board members of Moral Majority packed CWA’s board of directors with their wives, who, they assumed, would do their bidding.
But as time went by, Concerned Women for America evolved from a spousal service society into a one-woman fiefdom. Beverly LaHaye’s unchallenged authority became the envy of men like Paul Weyrich. “She has the kind of loyalty from her people,” he said, “where literally she can call them up and say, ‘Don’t do that,’ and they’ll drop it.” Much to their chagrin, the New Right male leaders were unable to command the same kind of obedience from LaHaye herself. She refused to support candidates as they specified. When Falwell, Ed McAteer of the Religious Roundtable, and the other top men of the New Right endorsed Bush, LaHaye broke the united front and backed Jack Kemp. Later, she abruptly yanked her endorsement after Kemp annoyed her. His offense: he sent a letter to CWA members over her signature, calling him the “only true conservative,” without asking her permission first.
In 1983, LaHaye moved her office from San Diego to Washington, D.C., where she built up a twenty-six-person Capitol Hill staff, launched a five-attorney legal division to take on the
courts and wielded a $6 million annual budget. She began jetting around the country, then the world. One year she went to Costa Rica nine times. While on the road, LaHaye dispatched orders via her new car phone. And she made it clear she would have no successors; by 1987, she had become president for life.
• • •
“I THINK the women’s movement really hurt women because it taught them to put the value on the career instead of the family,” Beverly LaHaye says. She has granted an interview in her Washington, D.C., office. It is her sixth today, she reports.
As might be expected, the business cards on the desk of this champion of femininity are pink. So are her nails, the chairs arranged around her boardroom table and the frilly window curtains. Yet she wears a well-tailored suit. On the wall behind her hangs a framed photograph of Ronald Reagan and herself, clasping hands. Some of her other decorative choices lean to the presidential, too: an Oval Office—size desk and a large American flag stationed at its side. A large mirror hangs at a strange angle on the opposite wall—but it’s not for applying pink lipstick. “Mrs. LaHaye had that mirror put up there like that,” Rebecca Hagelin, spokeswoman for Concerned Women for America, explains, “so she can look at it from her desk and see Capitol Hill.”
“Feminism really blotted out motherhood,” LaHaye asserts from be-hind her desk. “Family must come first for a woman; it’s just not natural any other way.” Just then, LaHaye’s personal assistant slips into the office, bearing a Filofax. Apologizing for the interruption, the assistant proceeds to review LaHaye’s traveling schedule: “This weekend you’re out of town till Sunday,” she says, reading from the Filofax. “On the 5th, it’s your National Day of Prayer speech, then the 6th is St. Louis, the 7th through the 8th is Florida, the 9th through the 17th Costa Rica, the 18th that speech in New Jersey, the 19th Washington again, the 27th and the 28th Massachusetts. . . .”
LaHaye approves the itinerary, the assistant departs, and the director of Concerned Women for America returns to her defense of traditional motherhood. “Women must put family as their top priority. If that means giving up the career, then so be it. It’s just the natural way. It’s built into us as women.” What of her own long bouts away from home? “Oh well, my children are grown. When my children were growing up, it was another matter,” she says, her early-morning work shifts at Merrill Lynch conveniently forgotten.
“These career women, what’s happening to them is their biological clocks are going off,” she says, supporting her antifeminist precepts with evidence from popular culture rather than the Bible. By the late ’80s, the backlash was so widespread that LaHaye could find as many useful media buzzwords as scriptural quotations. (Her latest antifeminist book, The Restless Woman, would invoke the all-popular trends of “postfeminism” and “baby hunger,” footnoting not Heritage Foundation tracts but the New York Times and Glamour.) Career women, she continues in the same vein, “looked up one day from their desks and they realized they couldn’t have it all. . . . That’s why the trend is that more and more women are leaving the work force.” Asked for evidence to support this “trend,” she says, “I don’t have the statistics in front of me, but I read about it in the paper. . . . Look at the movies. They’re all about having babies now. Like Three Men and a Baby.”
LaHaye excuses herself: she has a “management meeting” she must attend. She grants permission to talk to a few women on staff; no one is allowed to speak without clearance from the top. Elizabeth Kepler, director of legislative affairs, is one of the women on the approved list, and she has just breezed in from “the Hill,” where she’s been lobbying all week against federally funded day care.
“I just love it, absolutely love it,” Kepler says, flopping into a chair. She furtively pokes some pesky shoulder pads back into place as she talks. “I was drawn to Washington for the excitement. You know, power. How people come into power, how they use that power.”
How did she wind up at Concerned Women for America? “To be honest, I was more interested in the general process of Washington politics than this organization itself.” She hastens to add that she is in “total agreement” with the organization’s goals of restoring women’s traditional roles. But would she personally like to go back to the roles women were limited to in her mother’s day? She shakes her head. “It would be frustrating. I’m glad I live in the time I do.”
At twenty-seven, Kepler is single, and describes herself as “very content” and in “no rush” to wed. Unlike some of her more liberal counterparts in mainstream professional careers, she finds the talk of man shortages and biological clocks “pretty silly.” If she does have children, she’s not sure she would quit her job. Although she is lobbying this week against federally supported child care, she says she would not be averse to leaving her own child in day care, though she prefers a “family-based” center. Her explanation is couched in pseudofeminist terms. “I just think that the federal government shouldn’t tell us what kind of day care our children should have. I believe women should have a choice.”
Down the hall, Susan Larson, director of management, is reviewing office reports. Recently wed, she advocates a return to traditional marriage. But accepting the CWA post meant putting her career before her husband’s; he followed her to Washington—without any job prospects. And in her house, she adds, “I change the car oil and my husband does the laundry.”
In another room, publicity director Rebecca Hagelin is on the phone to her husband. “Now, let’s see, the carpet needs to be vacuumed,” she instructs. “And if you could straighten up the living room a bit.” It’s past six P.M., and Hagelin is still at the office. Her husband is at home making dinner, taking care of their baby and preparing the house for guests that evening. The Hagelins might have found the blueprint for their domestic arrangement in an early-’70s manual for liberated couples: they split the chores and trade off child care. “See, I really wanted to have a baby, but I really wanted to work,” Hagelin says. “I love to work.” She likes the fifty-fifty arrangement. “That’s the way it is in the ’80s, it’s not an either-or situation. It really is possible to have it all.”
• • •
THE NEW Right women were, in some respects, the reverse image of their more progressive “yuppie” sisters who got trapped in the backlash eddies. While mainstream professional women were more likely to voice feminist principles while struggling internally with the self-doubts and recriminations that the backlash generated, the New Right women were voicing antifeminist views—while internalizing the message of the women’s movement and quietly incorporating its tenets of self-determination, equality, and freedom of choice into their private behavior.
If the right-wing activists at Concerned Women for America seemed less anxiety-ridden about the “price” of their own liberation than the average liberal career woman, maybe that’s because these New Right women were, ironically, facing less resistance in their world. As long as these women raised their voices only to parrot the Moral Majority line, as long as they split the chores only so they could have more time to fight equal rights legislation, the New Right male leaders (and their New Right husbands) were happy to applaud and encourage the women’s mock “independence.” The women always played by their men’s rules, and for that they enjoyed the esteem and blessings of their subculture. On the other hand, working and single women in the mainstream, who were more authentically independent, had no such cheering squad to buoy their spirits; they were undermined daily by a popular culture that parodied their lifestyle, heaped pity and ridicule on their choices, and berated their feminist “mistakes.”
The activists of Concerned Women for America could report to their offices in their suits, issue press releases demanding that women return to the home, and never see a contradiction. By divorcing their personal liberation from their public stands on sexual politics, they could privately take advantage of feminism while publicly deploring its influence. They could indeed “have it all”—by working to prevent all other women
from having that same opportunity.
10
Ms. Smith Leaves Washington:
The Backlash in National Politics
Having committed their intellects and numbers to installing their man in office, the New Right women anticipated new opportunities for themselves in the post-1980 White House. Instead, with Ronald Reagan’s election, women began disappearing from federal office.
On the bench, new female judicial appointments fell from 15 percent under Carter to 8 percent. The number of female appointees requiring Senate confirmation plunged, too, making Reagan the first president in more than a decade not to better his predecessor’s record. On the White House staff, the number of women appointed dropped from 123 in 1980 to 62 in 1981. In fact, even 62 was an inflated figure; the Reagan administration padded the numbers by suddenly labeling women in lower-ranking government career jobs—such as third-level assistant secretary posts—“political appointments.”
At the start of Reagan’s second term, without reelection pressures to inspire even nominal equal opportunity efforts, the administration immediately discontinued both the Coalition on Women’s Appointments and the Working Group on Women. Appointed women’s numbers fell even more steeply, and for the first time since 1977, not one woman ranked high enough to attend the daily senior staff meetings or report to the president. At the Justice Department in 1986, Ed Meese had yet to hire a woman as a senior policymaker two years after taking office—in spite of federal regulations requiring the department to set such hiring goals. The Federal Women’s Program, established in 1967 to recruit women to government agencies, was essentially disbanded: its recruitment coordinators at the various federal agencies were either assigned other duties, stripped of their budgets, or quietly laid off. “Each year, our budget has been cut and it was cut again this year,” Betty Fleming, the personnel management specialist who was second in command in the Federal Women’s Program central office in 1991, explains. But, she says, she wasn’t complaining; they didn’t need the funds, because “We’re just going to meet and talk.” Finally, as part of Reagan’s Paperwork Reduction Act, the federal government quit collecting most recruitment statistics on women altogether. Now the federal government could quit seeking women—and no one would be the wiser.