Phyllis Schlafly: the original tradwife
She was the anti-feminist who had it all
by Sarah Ditum
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.
“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
For feminists, this lack of sisterhood could be infuriating, and Schlafly reaped all the benefits of goading her opponents. Betty Friedan, author of The Feminine Mystique, came to pieces during a 1973 debate against the personification of the phenomenon she had defined. After Schlafly said women were simply unwilling to do the work required to be elected to office, Friedan called Schlafly “a traitor to your sex, an Aunt Tom” and said: “I’d like to burn you at the stake.”
Such an unfeminine outburst would always fail against Schlafly’s grace and composure, especially from a woman no one was likely to describe as beautiful (the satirical website Reductress put Friedan at number one on a list of “5 Historical Ugly Women Your Daughter Can Idolize for the Right Reasons”). When Schlafly wrote in The Power of the Positive Woman that “if the… strident ‘spokespersons’ of women’s liberation would quietly fade away, dignified and capable women would have a better chance of being elected to public office”, it’s easy to imagine that she had her encounter with Friedan in mind.
Cooler heads on the other side to Schlafly could only express a kind of reluctant admiration. Other conservative women, noted Andrea Dworkin in her book Right Wing Women, inevitably revealed conflicts and struggles as they fought to surrender their own desires and become the good wives and mothers that God and nature had supposedly fitted them to be. Anita Bryant or Tammy Faye Bakker had a streak of tragedy to them. They expounded family values in their own statements, but their lives seemed to be exhibit A for the feminist analysis.
Not Schlafly, though: “She seems possessed by Machiavelli, not Jesus. It appears that she wants to be The Prince. She might be viewed as that rare woman of any ideological persuasion who really does see herself as one of the boys, even as she claims to be one of the girls,” wrote Dworkin. Schlafly had no sympathy for weakness, and no apparent weaknesses of her own. In The Power of the Positive Woman, she presents herself, unabashedly, as the Positive Woman to be emulated. Any unhappiness or frustration in the reader simply reveals her own lack of “positive mental attitude”.
This might seem like unfeminine immodesty from Schlafly, but of course it’s allowable because she had already defined her scope to exclude any possible competition with men. Schlafly could be the best at being a woman, without threatening masculine authority. As a political campaigner, she was fearsomely effective. Before Schlafly’s lobbying, the ERA had appeared to have a clear path to ratification; thanks in large part to her efforts, it never passed into statute.
And yet, the place of women was a late blooming interest for Schlafly. She may have been a lawyer’s wife, but she had a master’s degree in government, and a long career in conservative think tanks, including influential work on anti-communism. Her first book was A Choice Not an Echo: The Inside Story of How American Presidents Are Chosen, which gave a paranoid account of how “a small group of secret kingmakers, using hidden persuaders and psychological warfare techniques, manipulated the Republican National Convention”.
In her later writing, she would mock feminists for believing in a “conspiracy of male chauvinist pigs” determined to deny them their happiness; but in A Choice Not an Echo, Schlafly is in full tin-foil hat mode as she describes a network of secret meetings and covert influence designed to hijack the Republican Party away from the Right. There is urgency to her message: the book was released in the summer of 1964, ahead of the November election in which Schlafly’s favoured candidate Barry Goldwater would represent the Republicans against Lyndon B. Johnson.
A Choice Not an Echo was judged a success in bringing activists over to the Goldwater cause. Goldwater himself, however, was a disaster. The Republicans suffered a historic wipeout: Goldwater won only his home state of Arizona, and five states in the deep south who were historically Democratic but were attracted by Goldwater’s resistance to the Civil Rights Act. America was not ready for the kind of culture war that Schlafly had in mind.
But it would be. Goldwater’s strange constituency of “businesspeople, Southerners, Midwesterners and libertarians” would eventually become the soul of the Republican Party: what seemed at the time like a total defeat for conservatism was actually laying the path for the coming of Ronald Reagan. And the inflammatory rhetoric and sense of victimhood that had made Goldwater repulsive in 1964 would return, eventually, in the form of Donald Trump — who would turn them into assets rather than faults.
Schlafly received little reward for her prescience, though. Newspaper reports said that she had hoped for an appointment to the Pentagon under Reagan; no appointment came, although her dedication to the Right-wing cause and her interest in security could hardly be doubted. Challenged by the feminist lawyer Catharine McKinnon on whether this was sex discrimination in action, Schlafly shrugged the implication away with her usual deftness: “It is the Reagan administration’s loss that they didn’t ask me, but it isn’t my loss.”
When she died in 2016, Trump — then the Republican nominee — eulogised her at her funeral. “Her legacy will live on every time some underdog, outmatched and outgunned, defies the odds and delivers a win for the people,” he said, as ever praising himself under the guise of praising someone else. (Schlafly had previously contributed a chapter to a book in support of Trump, though it is hard to think of anyone who more completely embodies all the aspects of 20th-century libidinism that she claimed to abhor.)
Perhaps this was her valediction: proof that she had finally been truly embraced by a Republican Party that she had helped to remake in her own political image. But it was proof, too, that she was easier to like dead than she had been alive. Dworkin was right that Schlafly saw herself as “one of the boys”, or at the very least as a superior kind of girl. Yet her value as a campaigner was always tied up with her sex, however much the early part of her life shows a far wider range of interests: she was useful, inasmuch as she was a woman speaking on the “woman question”, and no further.
Schlafly had no reason to see her career as a failure. She defeated the ERA and lived to see her kind of conservatism inherit America. The dire overreach of gender identity meant that, by the end of her life, she could congratulate herself on seeing through the excesses of the women’s movement from the beginning (however much that relied on, at best, a very partial version of the women’s movement). After her death, Trump’s presidency would ensure one of her dearest wishes in life: the undoing of Roe vs Wade.
Motherhood may well have been Schlafly’s greatest joy, but her status and success as a politician clearly mattered to her too. It is cheap but accurate to point out that her career made a lie of the beliefs she professed. She must have known, at least partially, that women were not all so naturally docile as she claimed: why care what the constitution says if you truly believe that women are created submissive? Like all trad wives, Schlafly celebrated a version of the domestic that she was incapable — or at least, unwilling — to accept as the entirety of her life.
Whether she’s a post-war women’s lib refuser, or a 21st-century influencer, the woman who earns her place in public life by proselytising for the feminine virtues of the private sphere lives her life in the jaws of a trap. The philosophy (definitely a philosophy rather than a strand of mysticism) that allows her to speak is one which, taken seriously, would deny her a voice altogether. Only intense cynicism can save her from her own contradictions. It was not Schlafly who suffered for her politics, and nor is it the tradwife who suffers now for her hashtags: it is the women who believe and follow them who end up in the snare.
