by Gail Collins
Schlafly came late to the anti-ERA cause. In 1972, when a conservative forum invited her to take part in a debate about the amendment, she pleaded ignorance and proposed that they talk about defense policy instead. But when the sponsors insisted, she started studying and quickly decided that the Equal Rights Amendment was another big-government plot, and one that would undermine the historic protection given to women—particularly mothers—through the “Christian tradition of chivalry.” Schlafly wrote an essay called “What’s Wrong with ‘Equal Rights’ for Women?” for a newsletter she published. Not long after, one of her subscribers called to say that it had been a crucial weapon in the defeat of the ERA in the Oklahoma state legislature.
The battle was on.
“DR. SPOCK WAS TRULY ‘LIBERATED’ FROM TRADITIONAL RESTRAINTS.”
While the ERA supporters often had only vague explanations for what good the amendment would do, the opponents drew dramatic pictures of the terrible things that could follow passage. Maybe the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts would have to be merged. Would child support become unconstitutional? What about unisex bathrooms? Since the language was so general, opponents felt free to argue that it could mean anything.
In speeches, books, and essays, Schlafly connected the amendment and the women’s movement (the two were generally interchangeable to the anti-ERA forces) to all the economic and social changes that were making the traditional housewife feel threatened, including rising divorce rates. Dr. Benjamin Spock eliminated sexist language in his baby books, she noted, and he also “walked out on his faithful wife, Jane, to whom he had been married for forty-eight years, and took up with a younger woman: Dr. Spock was truly ‘liberated’ from traditional restraints.” She claimed that the amendment would free husbands from having to support their families and that gender-neutral divorce laws might require that all wives go to work and provide half the family income.
It was a mixture of wild exaggeration and real problems that had nothing to do with the ERA. Few divorced women had ever been awarded adequate child support, and men seldom paid even the minimal amounts required by the courts. New divorce laws had made it easier for an unhappy husband (or wife) to end a marriage, but these were the product of reformist lawyers’ groups, not the women’s movement. And it was hardly the fault of the Equal Rights Amendment that more and more middle-class women were being pushed into the workforce—whether they liked it or not—to help support their families and pay their fast-rising mortgages. But the ERA was an extremely handy target for all the genuine anxiety and frustration.
Schlafly’s bottom line was that women were not really discriminated against. During one debate, the psychologist Joyce Brothers emotionally recounted how her mother had been an attorney, and the only job open to her was practicing with her husband. Schlafly flatly denied women had ever suffered any bias in the legal profession. “I was invited to attend the Harvard Law School in 1945 and there was absolutely no discrimination then,” she said assuredly. As her biographer Carol Felsenthal noted, that was five years before the law school dropped its ban on admitting any women.
One thing both sides did agree about was that the Equal Rights Amendment would make young women subject to any future military draft and that they could be sent into combat. It was an admission the ERA supporters could have dodged—the military probably had the power to set its own rules for who was drafted and where they were assigned. But most felt equal rights had to be coupled with equal responsibilities. And they were offended by arguments that young women were too fragile to stand up under the pressure of military training.
It was an admirable principle but a tactical disaster. The draft had just been abolished in 1973, and people could easily imagine it returning. Polls showed that only about 20 percent of Americans approved of the idea of drafting women or allowing them to take jobs that put them in combat. When Alan Alda, the popular star of M*A*S*H, testified in support of the ERA in Illinois, he was asked whether he would expect to see his own daughters conscripted if there was another draft. Alda’s answer—that he would but that he would also expect them to be conscientious objectors—probably did not win the hearts of any conservative lawmakers who were sitting on the fence.
“I’D LIKE TO BURN YOU AT THE STAKE.”
The ERA supporters kept pointing out, with rising frustration, that Schlafly herself was the farthest thing imaginable from the stay-at-home moms she was championing. While she liked to start speeches by thanking her husband for “letting me come”—because, she said, it drove the “libbers” crazy—even her conservative audiences understood this was a joke. Mr. Schlafly, who could not even dissuade his 51-year-old, manically overscheduled wife from going to law school, did not seem to be an overempowered head of the household.
In fact, Schlafly never argued that women shouldn’t have careers. While she celebrated the full-time housewife, her underlying attitude toward the job in an age of automatic washing machines and dishwashers seemed just as dismissive as Betty Friedan’s: “Household duties have been reduced to only a few hours a day, leaving the American woman with plenty of time to moonlight in full- or part-time jobs or to indulge to her heart’s content in a wide array of interesting educational or cultural or homemaking activities.” Still, she assured her followers that it was only motherhood and domesticity that could make women really happy. If they wanted careers, too, and they could manage to balance both, fine. But if they couldn’t, they should quit their jobs, stay home, and stop whining. (Schlafly never followed a particularly consistent train of thought when it came to what she regarded as proper feminine behavior. Despite her defense of traditional marriage, she extolled Katharine Hepburn, who devoted much of her life to an affair with the married Spencer Tracy, as a Positive Woman who “had enough self-confidence that she could afford to accord to her man a preeminence in their personal relationship.”)
She drove the pro-ERA forces crazy. They were used to thinking of themselves as the voice of American women, allied against the enemy: chauvinistic men. Having to fight against other women who depicted themselves as the true voice of their sex threw them off balance. And, of course, the fact that Schlafly was winning made it worst of all. “I’d like to burn you at the stake,” Betty Friedan snarled to her at one debate. Another ERA supporter mused, in public, about how wonderful it would be to run over her with a car. Still another said she wished somebody would slap her. And while none of those things ever happened, ERA supporters did hire someone to throw a pie in Schlafly’s face.
It was one of those awful fights in which each side believed it was battling for the forces of good and in which no compromise was possible. Legislators in swing states grew exhausted with the issue, as well as with its advocates and opponents. “These people pull at you, yank you, yell, scream, threaten, they all look wild-eyed to me,” complained one female legislator in Illinois.
“LET’S TERMINATE THE BABY AND START AGAIN NEXT MONTH.”
The final nail in the ERA’s coffin was the suspicion that it was a vehicle for abortion and gay rights. While supporters of the amendment doubted that was true, most would have been happy if it was. The women’s rights movement had become deeply invested in the abortion issue and in the fight for gay equality. The new political forces that had risen up to challenge the ERA were opposed to both. In fact, many cared much more about fighting abortion and homosexuality than they did about constitutional amendments of any stripe.
The abortion debate really first went public in the United States in 1962, with a story about the host of a children’s television show in Phoenix. Sherri Finkbine was Miss Sherri on Romper Room, and she remembers it as “probably the best job in the universe—you were on the air for an hour a day. You get to drink milk and eat cupcakes and you only have to take care of six kids.” The program was a kind of franchise—with local Romper Rooms directed out of a central office in Baltimore. Finkbine, who was 29, followed the directive of the day, including one memorable Soapsuds Fun Friday in which she was suppose
d to demonstrate how to mold a make-believe vase out of thick Ivory soapsuds and realized, halfway through, that she had inadvertently created a very realistic phallic symbol. “It couldn’t have been more graphic,” she laughed. “People from all the different departments were coming in to watch.” More than forty years later, she was still running into people who used to work at the NBC station in Phoenix who would joke, “Miss Sherri, how about a little Soapsuds Fun?”
At 29, Finkbine was also the wife of a high school teacher and the mother of four children under 7. The family struggled a bit financially, and Bob Finkbine made some extra money by escorting high school students on summer tours of Europe. During a particularly stressful trip, he went looking for medication to help him sleep and obtained some tranquilizers in England. “He took a few, and when he came home I can remember him putting them way up high in the kitchen cupboard. Above the sink,” Sherri said. She was pregnant with their fifth child, struggling with morning sickness and insomnia, and intent on staying in her job as long as possible, when she thought of the pills. She can still visualize herself crawling up onto the sink and taking them out.
It was only a few weeks later that Sherri saw a story in the local paper about a tranquilizer, never approved in the United States but popular in Europe, named thalidomide. It had been linked to terrible birth defects, babies born without arms or legs. She called her doctor and told him, “I think I took some of that awful medicine.” Tests showed the pills did contain thalidomide, and she had taken it at the worst possible time, during the early stages of pregnancy, when the fetus’s limbs were forming. The doctor told Sherri and Bob to come in for a consultation—on Saturday, when none of his other patients would be around.
“If you were my wife, I’d give you the same advice,” the doctor told her. “Let’s terminate the baby and start again next month.”
Sherri Finkbine had barely heard of abortion, and the doctor’s suggestion sounded simple and practical. She got pregnant easily, and there was no question in her mind that if she just “started over,” everything would turn out well, with another healthy new baby to add to the family, just as planned.
Abortion was illegal in every state, but Arizona permitted hospitals to perform them when the life of the mother was in danger. Doctors used that regulation loosely when it came to well-connected middle-class families, and Sherri was scheduled to have a quiet procedure that no one needed to know about. It would have happened just that way if she had not felt compelled to warn other women about the drug. She called the editor of the local paper, whose daughter had been with Bob Finkbine on the European tour. It turned out that their reporter was working on a story about thalidomide at that moment.
“He won’t use my name, will he?” Sherri asked.
On Monday morning, the paper arrived with the story in a black box on the front page. As promised, her name was not used. But there was enough about her husband’s occupation, the way that the drug had come into her possession, and other details to make it all pretty clear. “They did everything but give my address,” she said. That morning, while she was working at the TV studio, the hospital called and canceled the abortion. The Finkbines sued, and the case quickly became an international story. Sherri can still remember the TV reporter from her station “practically crying” when he came to her house to do the story. But she didn’t attempt to avoid being interviewed: “I was never the kind of person who said, ‘No comment.’ ”
When it became clear the lawsuit would never succeed, the Finkbines went to Los Angeles to prepare for a trip to Japan, where abortion was legal. But the Japanese, wary of the controversy, refused to give them visas. Meanwhile, the family was under siege at home. Death threats arrived in the mail, including one that promised to do to the four Finkbine children what their parents were planning to do to the fetus. Finally, with the kind of publicity that might normally be reserved for natural disasters or the opening of the Olympics, the Finkbines went to Sweden, where the abortion was performed.
Sherri never returned to Romper Room. “An executive from NBC in Phoenix called and said, ‘We think you’re unsuitable to handle children,’ ” she recalled. The station did give her a fifteen-minute talk show, which she kept until she became pregnant once again. Since pregnant women never appeared on television in that era, it was the end of her TV career. But she did hear from the NBC executive who fired her from Romper Room: “Darned if about a year later he didn’t call me because his daughter needed to abort a pregnancy.”
“AND YOU KNOW, I WOULD HAVE HELPED HER.”
Early in America’s history, abortion was regarded as a form of birth control, and the general presumption was that a fetus became a human being at the “quickening”—the moment that a woman began to feel it moving around in her body. That had changed in the nineteenth century, and many Americans had been taught from childhood that abortion at any stage was the same as murder. Most people found the whole idea of abortion, at minimum, disturbing. But they often had more sympathetic attitudes when the pregnancy involved a fetus that was seriously deformed. (Some polls showed that half of the Americans questioned supported Sherri Finkbine’s decision to seek an abortion.)
Women had been having illegal abortions for far more pedestrian reasons—because they were unmarried or because they could not afford to raise another child—and many people knew someone who had had a pregnancy terminated. Anne Wallach remembered that when she was a student at Radcliffe in the late ’40s, she accompanied a friend who was given an abortion by a dentist. “It was terrible,” she said. “It was dirty, and the girl was in a lot of pain, there was a lot of bleeding. I spent the weekend with her in her dorm room. It was not a happy experience by any means.”
The memories of those traumatic abortions made the issue an emotional one for the young activists in the women’s movement. “For my first abortion in 1960 I took the Cuba option… ,” wrote Susan Brownmiller. “Here’s what I remember: Banging on a door during the midday siesta in a strange neighborhood in Havana. Wriggling my toes a few hours later, astonished to be alive. Boarding a small plane to Key West and hitchhiking back to New York, bleeding all the way.” But very few women discussed the issue publicly. Then, in March 1969, the feminist group Redstockings staged a public speak-out titled “Abortion: Tell It Like It Is” at a church in Greenwich Village. New York Magazine sent their young star writer, Gloria Steinem, to cover it. Listening as one woman after another got up to tell her experiences with an illegal abortion, Steinem felt she had reached a turning point. “I had had an abortion when I was newly out of college, and had told no one,” she wrote later. “If one in three or four adult women shares this experience, why should each of us be made to feel criminal and alone? How much power would we ever have if we had no power over the fate of our bodies?” It was the moment, Steinem said, when she stopped being a journalist standing on the sidelines and became a committed activist.
In 1970 Hawaii approved a law permitting abortion on demand, with a lengthy residence requirement, but the change had little impact on the mainland. New York, however, was a different matter. The state was considering a bill that would simply leave abortion in the first six months of a pregnancy up to doctors and their patients. It was sponsored by Constance Cook of Ithaca, a Republican who was one of four women in the 150-person lower house of the legislature. The debate began in the all-male senate, where the legislative secretaries—virtually the only women who worked in the capitol outside of the cafeteria staff—lined the walls of the chamber to listen. Clinton Dominick, who the New York Times called one of the senate’s “most respected members,” told his colleagues that he could best relate to the issue through his wife, the mother of five who told him that if she’d found she was pregnant again at 48, she would have sought an abortion.
“And you know, I would have helped her,” he said quietly.
Supporters of the bill from poor districts angrily pointed out that their constituents were the ones most likely to die from botched ille
gal abortions. But opponents retorted that it was unborn children who were in danger of dying. “This is murder,” said a Democrat from Brooklyn. A Republican who was the father of a child with Down syndrome described the pain he felt at hearing people say that abortion was justified if there was a danger the baby would be like his beloved boy. The bill finally passed the senate, 31 to 26, after five hours of emotionally fraught debate.
In the assembly, Cook thought she saw her bill going down to defeat when several former supporters voted no. A Bronx Democrat, Anthony Stella, said he originally thought his heavily Catholic district would feel it was “not my job to legislate morality.” But they had been telling him different in no uncertain terms, he said. Others reported that they had been denounced from the pulpit or in church newsletters. Cook made her usual pragmatic argument for putting the whole issue “into the hands of a doctor” rather than the politicians. But her male colleagues were hardly as calm. “I point the finger at every member who votes for this bill and say, ‘You, sir, killed these innocent children,’ ” said one. When the final vote came, it was a tie—the equivalent of defeat.