The Mrs. America miniseries, which premiered in mid-April on FX, is cleverly done, with engaging portrayals of Phyllis Schlafly by Cate Blanchett and Bella Abzug by Margo Martindale. It gets a fair amount of detail wrong in order to make its somewhat heavy-handed points, including Gloria Steinem’s allegedly saying, “Revolutions are messy; people get left behind.” (This sounded so unlikely that I emailed Steinem to ask; she did not say it.) It has Phyllis Schlafly allegedly saying, “We are living in a feminist totalitarian nightmare,” and gives us a cringe-inducing and entirely made-up scene of Fred Schlafly having his way with his exhausted spouse. The series also portrays the movement, at least at the beginning, as a catfight. Yet it gets the big picture more or less right—and provides a reason to revisit the 1970s and early ’80s to consider why, although the ERA helped galvanize the feminist movement and steadily connect it with much of Middle America, the amendment did not get through the last three states. The lesson for today is simple: Pay attention to what a majority of Americans want.
The ERA movement fell short in 1972–1982 for many reasons. Only one of these, but one that holds a lesson for our own time, was the focus in my 1986 book, Why We Lost the ERA. Lani Guinier informally dubbed my focus “the dynamic of deafness.” In that dynamic, the very energy that motivates social activists to forgo other commitments and the pleasures of everyday life to throw themselves into the cause also leads them to listen only to one another. Their echo chamber reinforces their commitment but increases their distance from the people they have to convert.
Because the feminist movement privileges the experience of every woman, it is less susceptible than most social movements to looking inward. The ERA is thus a “best-case analysis.” If the dynamic of deafness reared its head here, it is even more likely to cripple other social movements. Predictably, it is happening again today, as diverse social movements have proliferated. A dynamic of turning a deaf ear to outsiders and self-reinforcement among insiders tends to take over any group that needs to mobilize its members.
Feminist thinking had crossed lines of class, race, and politics. The struggle for the ERA itself helped cause this sea change in attitudes.
Most Americans supported the principles of the Equal Rights Amendment in 1970 and in 1980, as they do today. However, they did not support at least one of the policies that many ERA activists were saying would be the consequence of the amendment. In 1980, only 22 percent of Americans thought women should be drafted and eligible for combat. In fact, the Supreme Court would have been very unlikely to insist, over the objections of Congress and the military, that the amendment required this result (due to the long-standing “doctrine of military necessity” by which members of the armed forces do not have many rights of the civilian population). Yet many proponents of the ERA wanted the amendment to make women equal to men in the armed forces, because they thought that outcome was just. Reinforcing one another in this commitment, they did not put themselves in the shoes of the ordinary non-politicized women of the states that had to ratify the amendment or the legislators who worried about what adding it to the Constitution might entail.
Today, ironically, with a conservative Supreme Court, the chances of any untoward interpretation of the ERA are even smaller than they were in 1982. In addition, public opinion in the country has moved much further in a feminist direction. Today, if a woman leader on the right began her description of herself on a much-watched television show by saying she was “submissive” toward her husband, as the real Schlafly did, she would lose much of her audience immediately. (In Mrs. America, this description was voiced by Schlafly’s husband, perhaps because it did not suit the dignified and self-contained image that Cate Blanchett projected.)
Only ten years later, feminist ideas had spread so broadly that 63 percent of women in the Chicago area, responding to a survey question, said that they had called someone a male chauvinist, either to his face or talking about him to someone else. More than half of women with only a high school education had done so. So had more than half of Black women, and more than half of women who called themselves “conservative.” Feminist thinking had crossed lines of class, race, and politics. The struggle for the ERA itself helped cause this sea change in attitudes. Today, the recently rejuvenated ERA can garner votes in the heartland and even in somewhat Southern states because the principle remains strong, many feminist sentiments have become mainstream, and most of the reasons against it have evaporated.
THE RESURRECTION OF THE ERA is, by the way, a delightfully democratic story. It begins when a sophomore at the University of Texas at Austin named Gregory Watson discovered, while writing a paper about the ERA in an undergraduate government course, an unratified amendment introduced to Congress by James Madison as part of the original set of 12 amendments in what became the Bill of Rights, only ten of which made it through the states. Watson argued that the remaining states could still ratify the “Madison Amendment,” specifying that no increase in salary for members of Congress could go into effect until after the following election, which gave voters a chance to retaliate. He got a C on the paper from a teaching assistant, appealed the grade to the professor teaching the course, and was turned down. Smitten with the idea, however, he began a one-man crusade to bring the amendment again before the unratified states. One by one, unratified states voted for the amendment. By 1992, there were enough, and the 27th Amendment was entered into the Federal Register. It became part of the U.S. Constitution. No one paid much attention.
That year, however, a professor at NYU noticed, and later three feminist legal scholars at William and Mary in Virginia, supported by the association of women at their law school, argued in a full journal article that if the Madison Amendment could be ratified after all those years, so could the ERA. The original seven-year deadline for ratification, after all, was not in the amendment but was only a majority act of Congress, and Congress had already acted once (in 1978) to extend it for three years. If Congress had the power to extend the deadline for three years, it could extend the deadline indefinitely. States could go forward and ratify, then pressure Congress to extend the deadline. Although five states had voted to rescind, precedent was against them. Ohio and New Jersey had rescinded their ratifications of the 14th Amendment but were nevertheless listed among the ratifying states. With this argument inspiring them, feminists in the least Southern of the unratified states went to work. First Nevada ratified. Then Illinois. Then Virginia. That made up the three remaining states needed for passage. The issue is now in the hands of Congress, where both houses must extend the deadline, and the courts, which must decide on the status of the states that have voted to rescind.
Mrs. America takes us back to the second half of that first decade of struggle. The ERA sailed through the states from 1972, when it passed Congress, to 1977, when Indiana ratified, leaving only three more states to go before reaching the required 38. Then it stopped dead. The reason was Mrs. Schlafly. Mrs. America shows how a woman whose book A Choice Not an Echo had been highly influential in the Goldwater campaign for president turned her sights on the ERA. She used her long-honed political skills to exploit the fact that Illinois, where she lived much of her life, had a state constitution that required a three-fifths vote in each house of the legislature, not a simple majority as in most states, for any U.S. constitutional amendment. She got that minority vote both by organizing homemakers and, more significantly, by helping to channel the wrath of the evangelical churches in the south of the state.
The series is all about the top, not about the base.
As Robert Wuthnow has pointed out, the evangelical churches in the U.S. had traditionally been “quietist,” a stance that prescribed separation from politics. Then in 1973, the Supreme Court decided in Roe v. Wade that abortion in the first trimester must be legal on grounds of privacy, a right that was not itself in the Constitution but that the justices had previously found in the “penumbra” of the other rights in the Constitution. This decision brought the evangelical churches into politics, with fateful consequences. When I went to Springfield in June 1980 to lobby for the ERA and interview activists there on both sides, I found that all but one of the STOP ERA homemakers with whom I talked was from a fundamentalist church group. (The outlier thought the ERA was a communist plot sponsored by the Trilateral Commission.) These evangelical women, believing literally in St. Paul’s dictum that women must be subject to men, were the main STOP ERA troops in Illinois, not the middle-class homemakers that the Mrs. America credits, repeated in each episode, show vacuuming the ERA away.
Schlafly, a Catholic, did not start out embracing Protestant fundamentalists, but she knew she needed them for her movement. So too the Trump coalition brings together, fatefully for the Republic, both Wall Street billionaires and small-town evangelicals who otherwise have little regard for one another.
As Marjorie Spruill has shown, first Roe v. Wade and then the larger feminist movement let what was then called the “New Right” move from a primarily anti-communist stance to one defending the “American family.” This move broadened the appeal of the right. It now took as its enemies the “crazy” feminists and their allies, who wanted to upend all traditional values. In response, the National Organization for Women banned socialist and lesbian banners in their ERA demonstrations. NOW even set up a separate ERA storefront in Chicago, where only ERA literature could be found, sequestering their other causes in their main NOW storefront. But Schlafly successfully linked the ERA with those other causes, as well as claiming that the amendment would mandate women in combat, the end of alimony, unisex bathrooms, and other unpopular outcomes.
As the final episode shows, Schlafly’s success prefigured Ronald Reagan, who latched on to these social issues and used the power of the federal government to redouble the strength of the conservative movement and reverse social gains. With evangelicals now strongly active in politics, the traditional Republican Party, which as the party of Lincoln had been a far stronger supporter of the ERA than the Democrats, no longer exists.
WHAT CAN WE LEARN from this saga? The producers of Mrs. America would have us learn that one woman—at least one as beautiful and determined as Cate Blanchett—can stop a bunch of East Coast feminists, white or Black, in their tracks. It gets right both the political shrewdness of Schlafly and the surprise of the feminist elites. It doesn’t capture well, however, that the ERA movement was truly a movement. The series is all about the top, not about the base. Each of the first seven episodes is even named for a woman at the top. This makes for good TV drama, but it doesn’t get where the real action was—in the states. And that is where the action is today. Each state has its own set of cultures, its own priorities, and its own grassroots activists. That’s how the ERA got through the last three states recently. The top should provide those actors with information, money, and coordination.
What else can we learn? Avoid the dynamic of deafness. We see the echo chamber today in social media and siloing, as well as in schisms in the progressive movement. The dynamic is accentuated when activists begin to give up their work and home life for the cause. The reinforcement of others in the movement keeps activists going. It also often keeps them deaf to the concerns of people outside their self-invigorating culture, their geographic confines, and their class. That deafness is not immoral or condemnable. It’s natural. But it causes mistakes. An extraordinary historical moment, such as the vicious police murder of a Black man, caught forever on video, can open ears and hearts. Polls show more white support for Black grievances than in decades. As I write, there is reason to hope that this could be the rare moment when people turn from their inward-facing enclaves and begin to listen to one another. As always, the risk is that differing interpretations of events and experiences will once again widen divisions even among people of goodwill. The lesson from the ERA struggle continues to be: Listen.
