You could call Phyllis Schlafly the first trad wife. A mother-of-six, she would introduce herself in public as a “lawyer’s wife”, and embodied all the feminine virtues: “A blonde with deep blue eyes, a figure that can still be called willowy and a winning smile, she does not have to shout to get attention,” panted the NYT in a 1976 profile.
In her 1977 book The Power of the Positive Woman, she celebrated the “unique dignity” of the housewife’s vocation. Status, money, travel, power were all false gods: “None of those measures of career success can compare with the thrill, the satisfaction, and the fun of having and caring for babies, and watching them respond and and grow under a mother’s loving care. More babies multiply a woman’s joy.”
Psychology, not sexism, explained the difference between male and female lives. Men and women have different bodies; it followed that they would have different brains too. “Where man is discursive, logical, abstract, or philosophical, woman tends to be emotional, personal, practical, or mystical. Each set of qualities is vital and complements the other.” It would be mere quibbling to ask where “logical” ends and “practical” begins, or to locate the precise boundary between “philosophical” and “mystical”.
What mattered to Schlafly, who was born 100 years ago today, was that there are two sexes, whose stable, global and ineradicable differences cast them in complementary roles, which meant that she was also casually contemptuous of same-sex relationships. To Schlafly, abortion was a kind of violence not only against the unborn, but (and perhaps more importantly) against relations between men and women. To seek to make women somehow free from reliance on men — as the women’s liberation movement did — was nothing less than “neuterising society”.
With her modest tailoring, rigidly set hair and chic strings of pearls, Schlafly would be easy to mistake for an old-fashioned kind of woman. But her paeans to feminine accomplishments could sit happily in the Instagram captions of a modern domesticity influencer, and her analysis of gender politics barely distinguishable from the work of “reactionary feminists” such as Mary Harrington and Louise Perry. Schlafly was a reactionary, but she was also a visionary.
As she mobilised her rhetorical skills and her network of volunteers against the Equal Rights Amendment to the US constitution, the feminists floundered in response. Their prescription of freedom for women was experienced by the Schlafly cohort as an attack on feminine privileges; worse, it was an attack on the kind of woman these God-fearing homemakers were. They were a living riposte to the idea of a women’s movement: these women wanted no part of it
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