Phyllis Shlafly Report Against The Equal Rights Amendment

The debate over the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment fractured Second Wave feminism along class, religious, and geographic lines while setting up Third Wave Feminism for its lack of intersectionality.

Second Wave feminists who campaigned for the ERA were mostly middle and upper class educated women, leaving behind the concerns of working class women. Gloria Steinem, a noted feminist and proponent of the ERA, for example testified on behalf of the ERA to the Judiciary Committee subcommittee dedicated to the ERA. Steinem was born in Toledo, Ohio to a middle class family. Her father’s mother was a dedicated member of the first wave feminist/suffragette movement and Steinem’s mother encouraged her to read and learn. Steinem then attended Smith

Phyllis Schlafly was a conservative, Republican, Catholic woman who published her own newsletter– “The Phyllis Schlafly Report.” In 1986, she published a piece against the ERA in her newsletter. In her piece, she claimed that the ERA would create protections for the gay community, institute abortion rights, and prevent single sex colleges. She also believed that the ERA would hurt women’s positions in society by destroying alimony laws and forcing women to register for the draft (“The Phyllis Schlafly Report Against the Equal Rights Amendment.”). She appealed to her conservative, Christian audience by claiming that the ERA would promote homosexuality and abortion (both condemned by major Christian denominations at the time) even though there was no direct textual evidence. Her claim that the ERA would prevent colleges from accepting only one gender and force women to register for the draft were more plausible side effects, however they were also unproven because no such wording was directly evident in the text of the ERA. Schlafly designed her argument to appeal to other Americans who believed in traditional gender roles and social norms. The southern Christian housewife reading “The Phyllis Schlafly Report” did not want to be registered for the draft. Schlafly also played to the idea that the wife took care of the kids and did not work and then she would need alimony if she and her husband were to divorce. Religious groups in the US were against the ERA for similar reasons. Roman Catholics testified to Congress that the ERA would destroy families because it would drag women away from their duties to maintain the home and a moral environment (Whitney). The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, more commonly known as the Mormon Church, states that it believes in equality between men and women but that the mother and father were