Final Manuscript

NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY

(Counter)Publics Debate Womanhood in the 1980s: The Newsletters of Eagle Forum, Concerned Women for America, and the National Organization for Women

A DISSERTATION

SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS

for the degree

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Field of Communication Studies

Anndrea Ellison

EVANSTON, ILLINOIS

December 2016

Abstract

The progressive women’s movement in the United States during the mid-twentieth century enjoyed increased support and success until national politics were dominated by conservatives during the 1980s. This dissertation analyzes the discourse around women’s issues created by two of the largest conservative women’s organizations, Eagle Forum and Concerned Women for America, and one of the largest feminist organizations, the National Organization for Women, during the

1980s. Each of these organizations created documents that then circulated within corresponding publics: the grassroots antifeminist public, the evangelical women’s political public, and the liberal feminist public, respectively. Public sphere theory, especially as it is used in the field of rhetoric, would postulate that the proliferation of publics debating women’s issues during this time period would provide space for divergent ideas and voices to be heard in the public sphere, and thus create a better functioning democracy. However, this case study uses the newsletters of these organizations to show that, in fact, the introduction and growing influence of conservative women required a response from the liberal feminist public, and the resulting interaction between these three publics actually shrank the discursive space. More radical ideas—both to the right and to the left of these three organizations’ views—then faced higher obstacles to entering public discourse. I conclude, then, that rhetoricians can use public sphere theory to account for the ways that publics interact to create exclusion as well as inclusion. I also argue that newsletters as a genre have had a historically important, but varied, relationship with publics.

Acknowledgments

First, I would like to express my profound gratitude for my advisor, Angela Ray. She persevered with me to finish this project, and she continually showed her support of my efforts. The last few weeks and months required a herculean dedication to me and to academic rigor. To my committee members, Robert Orsi, Robert Hariman, and Ralph Cintron, who created courses that deepened and sharpened my thinking, who engaged in conversations that shaped this project, and who read and gathered so quickly, I am in your debt. Janice Radway had a significant role in the development of this project and my own pedagogical strategies. For all of these scholars, I hope I can find ways to honor your contributions through my interactions with my own students. Thank you.

To my colleagues and friends, this process would have been so much more work and so much less rewarding. Jordie’s listening, notetaking, and empathy gave me the space to create my project, my career, and myself. Aileen’s care and support was boundless and so very needed. Ian is the consummate colleague and friend; there is no one I respect more. Elliot’s unwavering friendship and encouragement is the truest example of what it means to be in a cohort. I would not have this dissertation without Daniel; his positive feedback is always deeply meaningful and his suggestions are always on point. Tara provided stamina and brightness at critical points, and her insight is really astonishing in its integrity. Katie has the deepest and strongest heart of anyone I know; she inspires me to love others and to love myself. The world needs more people like Jen; it just does. Kate has been an incredibly helpful sounding board for a wide range of academic and relational issues, and she is consistently an example of the kind of academic I admire. And all the others: Kevin, Faye &

Sammy, Bart, and Dwayne, who have cheered me on, shared their own stories and ideas, and

4 grounded me in reality, I can only hope to have been as good a friend to you as you all have been to me.

Thank you to my family who supported me unconditionally through the chapter of my life that was dissertating. Aren’t we all glad that’s over?

Thank you to Jonathan, who encouraged me to begin this process and, in important moments, encouraged me to save my sanity by stepping away from work, I want all the best for you.

And, finally, to CM, whose guidance and wisdom allowed me to finish well. Onward.

Contents

Introduction 5

Chapter 1: Newsletters, the News, and (Counter)Publics 48

Chapter 2: Eagle Forum and the Grassroots Antifeminist Public Imagine Feminism as a Betrayal of Womanhood 87

Chapter 3: Concerned Women for America and the Evangelical Women’s Political Public Imagine Feminism as an Enemy of Womanhood 140

Chapter 4: The National Organization of Women, the Liberal Feminist Public, and a Feminist Response 186

Conclusion 228

Works Cited 241

Introduction

Any story of women’s political action in the United States during the twentieth century must account for two competing groups: progressive women, who advocated for legislation and policies aimed at raising women’s economic and political status, and conservative women, who advocated for legislation and policies aimed at instituting legislation that protected the heteronormative family and conventional gender norms. Both groups had periods of success and significant influence. The pendulum swung from progressive advancement to conservative regression; the waves of feminist progress ebbed and flowed. Scholars find one significant concentration of feminist activity during the 1960s and 1970s, which was followed by a staunch antifeminist backlash. Although many histories of feminism acknowledge that feminism did not disappear from the public eye, the 1980s are associated with a halting of feminist progress and a co-optation of feminists’ political voice by conservative women.

The mobilization of conservative women during the 1980s was not the first entrée of conservative women into the world of politics. Scholars have documented the various successful political actions of conservative women throughout U.S. history, but the conservative movement in the 1980s relied on the participation of thousands of women who became active in opposition to the women’s movement of the 1960s and 1970s.1 Scholars have accounted for the growing influence of conservative women and approval for conservative policies among the American public during the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s by noting the technological savvy and

1 Carol Mattingly, Well-Tempered Women: Nineteenth-Century Temperance Rhetoric (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1998); Catherine E. Rymph, Republican Women: Feminism and Conservatism from Suffrage through the Rise of the New Right (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006); Ronnee Schreibner, Righting Feminism: Conservative Women and American Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).

7 organizational efficiency of conservative organizations, women’s fear of male violence, and conservative men’s media savvy and deception.2 What needs to be added to these interpretations is an account of the interaction between conservative women and liberal women. Indeed, Beverly

LaHaye, one of the most prominent conservative women active during the 1980s, claimed that her impetus for first participating in national politics was dissatisfaction with feminists and their policies.3 The members of her organization, Concerned Women for America (CWA), believed that their perspective was not represented in national politics because the most vocal women were feminists, and they felt a calling to participate in politics for the first time in reaction to feminism. In other words, conservative women became active because they opposed the women’s movement, and their involvement then required a response from liberal women. This continued interaction shaped the available means of discourse surrounding women’s issues during the 1980s.

Rita Felski and Nancy Fraser argue that the women’s movement of the 1960s and 1970s introduced new terms into American discourse, such as “sexism,” “the double shift,” and “sexual harassment.”4 The women’s movement, Felski writes, achieved a “gradual expansion of feminist values from their roots in the women’s movement throughout society as a whole.”5 Fraser notes that within the boundaries of the communities of the women’s movement, “feminist women . . . invented new terms for describing social reality” and “recast [their] needs and identities, thereby

2 Sara Diamond, Roads to Dominion: Right-Wing Movements and Political Power in the United States (New York: Guilford Press, 1995); Andrea Dworkin, Right-Wing Women: The Politics of Domesticated Females (London: The Women’s Press, 1983), 21; Carol Virginia Pohli, “Church Closets and Back Doors: A Feminist View of Moral Majority Women,” Feminist Studies 9.3 (Fall 1983): 529-558. 3 “CWA Takes a Stand,” Brethren Missionary Herald, 1984, LaHaye Folder, Fundamentalism File, Bob Jones University Archives. 4 Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracies,” in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 123. 5 Rita Felski, Beyond Feminist Aesthetics: Feminist Literature and Social Change (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 167.

8 reducing, although not eliminating, the extent of [their] disadvantage in official public spheres.”6 In both of these accounts of the twentieth-century women’s movement, Felski and Fraser note feminists’ separation from a broader entity—“society as a whole” and “official public spheres.” They also note change over time— “gradual expansion of feminist values,” “invented,” and “recast.” Both scholars call the women’s movement a counterpublic, which is a public that responds to marginalization and oppression by forming a “parallel discursive space.”7 This space allows marginalized populations to address each other and to address that broader entity, “society,” in order to effect change. My project expands Felski’s and Fraser’s historical argument about the women’s movement to the 1980s in order to examine how the emergence of new publics, namely publics constituted by conservative women, affected this feminist counterpublic to the point that in the 1990s, as Donald Critchlow observes, “‘[l]iberal’ became a label to be avoided.”8 I argue that, contrary to many public sphere theorists’ hope that a proliferation of publics expands discursive spaces, the introduction of competing publics can shrink discursive spaces. Consequently, this project helps to explain the interaction of a liberal feminist public with conservative antifeminist publics during the 1980s, and it expands public sphere theory to account for this interaction and its effect on public discourse.

Therefore, the story of women’s political action that I focus on here centers on the larger women’s groups—Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum and LaHaye’s CWA, two conservative, antifeminist organizations, and the National Organization for Women (NOW), a more liberal feminist organization—that shaped and participated in a national public debate about women’s

6 Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere,” 123. 7 Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere,” 123. 8 Donald Critchlow, Phyllis Schlafly and Grassroots Conservatism: A Woman’s Crusade (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 7.

9 issues. This study analyzes the development of the conservative groups’ rhetoric and then examines the response that the liberal feminist organization crafted. For feminists, the conservative women’s movement, as Ronnee Schreiber claims, “mean[t] the necessity to clarify and specify movement claims, and require[d] accounting for women who take issue with feminist policies and goals.”9 This dissertation does not explore the myriad ways in which progressive and radical feminisms continued to act and shape countless communities of women throughout the United States, nor does it claim that larger, more public movements can be clearly demarcated from smaller, less prominent movements. One way to talk about these communities is to follow Felski and Fraser and use public sphere theory to delineate multiple publics, their relationships to each other, and their relationships to power. Consequently, this dissertation draws on public sphere theory to examine the limiting effects of competing publics on public discourse.

Each organization and its texts participated in a distinct public. Each public responded and interacted with the other two, and these three publics together formed a discursive space that was not limited to these organizations, but was shaped primarily by them. The circulation of these organizations’ newsletters was an essential part of the concatenation of texts that constituted these publics. Also, the interaction between these publics during the 1980s changed the nature of each public and its arguments, agendas, and discourse. Those changes can be seen in the newsletters of these organizations, which were the most consistent and authoritative texts each organization produced. I argue that in order to account for the development of public discourse surrounding

9 Ronnee Schreiber, “Pro-Women, Pro-Palin, Antifeminist: Conservative Women and Conservative Movement Politics,” in Crisis of Conservatism?: The Republican Party, the Conservative Movement, and American Politics after Bush, ed. Joel D. Aberback and Gillian Peele (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 132.

10 women’s issues in the United States during the 1980s, public sphere theory needs to be expanded in two significant ways.

The first is that one public can be both a public and a counterpublic, and understanding when and where publics act publicly and counterpublicly and how publics use publicity and counterpublicity rhetorically can help scholars to analyze change over time. Designating publics as either publics or counterpublics creates several problems for public sphere theory. Once publics are categorized as publics that conform to dominant norms, it becomes more difficult to account for dissent and difference. Similarly, once publics are categorized as counterpublics, it becomes more difficult to account for any conformity to dominant norms that might lead to greater participation with more dominant publics. In fact, the publics that this study examines contradict themselves by making claims about themselves, the state, and society that both conform to and reject the norms of the dominant public sphere. The newsletters of these organizations contain rhetorical markers that signify both public-ness and counterpublic-ness. In other words, I believe that the definition of the terms “public” and “counterpublic” need to be retained, while their competing and contingent features should be more clearly elucidated. I use Michael Warner’s concept of publics as a modern form of power in order to argue that publicity and counterpublicity are discursive constructions that signify conflicting relationships to power. During the 1980s publics constituted by conservative women gained power and influence over time, while radical feminist publics lost power and influence. I argue that one way to understand this change is to think about these publics using publicity and counterpublicity to affect public discourse, dominant publics, and power structures.

Furthermore, the labels “public” and “counterpublic” belie the complexity of publics’ actions and functions, especially in the increasingly neoliberal United States in the 1980s. Consequently, a more

11 accurate way to discuss the interaction of competing publics would be to designate their rhetorical functions as publicity and counterpublicity.

The second way public sphere theory needs to expand is that a proliferation of publics does not necessarily expand discursive spaces; in fact, competing discourses from publics can limit the arguments, claims, and ideas available. Looking at the cases of Eagle Forum, CWA, and NOW during the 1980s shows that the necessity of defeating another public’s political arguments led to these three publics oversimplifying their opponents and neglecting to acknowledge alternative publics. Consequently, the proliferation of publics actually shrank the discursive space among them because these publics engaged only certain arguments and ideas, ignoring more radical ones.

Scholars have turned to theorizing a public sphere animated by multiple publics that expand the discursive space to account for oppressed or marginalized groups, ideas, and ways of being political.

A diverse and open public sphere should make more room for possible contributions. In theory, a proliferation of publics will mean that more ideas and more solutions to problems will be brought before everyone for debate. What I suggest through this project is that during the 1980s, the discursive space between women actively involved in politics shrank—meaning that fewer solutions and ideas were heard and thus available. Specifically, the emergence of publics constituted by the women of the New Right demanded a response from liberal feminists, which in turn made radical feminist discourse in the public sphere less legible and less available. The proliferation of competing publics, then, shifts the discursive space but does not always expand it.

In this introduction, I argue that a study of the interaction between three prominent women’s publics during the 1980s can help to clarify central problems with public sphere theory as well as help to analyze the historical shift that occurred around women’s issues during this time period. Therefore, I first set out what I believe to be the relevant issues within public sphere theory,

12 namely how to understand change over time, dissent and conformity to dominant discourse, and categorization of publics. I then identify three prominent women’s publics active during the 1980s and the relationship that each organization this dissertation covers had to those publics. Finally, I argue that the texts these organizations produced and circulated were essential to shaping these publics, and I describe my analytic approach to reading the organization’s monthly newsletters that addresses the issues with public sphere theory enumerated above.

(Counter) Publics and Their Problems

I draw on public sphere theory to connect issues of power and publicness. I begin with the critiques of Jürgen Habermas’s account of the rise of the bourgeois public sphere in order to show that two of the central concerns of public sphere theory are how to evaluate democratic discourse and how to correct imbalances of power. In order to do this, public sphere theorists have argued for the benefit of multiple publics participating in public discourse.10 Those same scholars talk about

“discursive spaces” created by competing publics and suggest various compositions of publics that can create the most just and efficient discursive spaces. The difficulty with this approach is that it neglects to explore the complications of democratic practice among multiple, competing publics.

When publics compete in the public sphere for political influence, what impact does that competition have on efforts of inclusion? In this section, I suggest three different ways to categorize discursive spaces and explain the relationship between publics and discursive spaces. I then examine the definitions of the terms “public” and “counterpublic” existing in public sphere theory in order to

10 Felski, Beyond Feminist Aesthetics; Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere”; Seyla Benhabib, “Models of Public Space: Hannah Arendt, the Liberal Tradition, and Jürgen Habermas,” in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Calhoun, 73-98.

13 argue that the designation of public and counterpublic is problematic when these categories remain mutually exclusive. I draw on the work of rhetorical scholar Erik Doxtader to develop an idea of publicity and counterpublicity that can help to account for the rhetorical actions of publics and how public discourse changes over time.11

Within contemporary rhetorical theory, conceptualizing the public sphere, multiple publics, and counterpublics has become a project of redeeming democratic discourse. Worries about the apathetic citizen, the marginalized citizen, and the disregarded outsider have motivated studies of how news creates distance between the citizen and decision-making, how discourses of public action allow feeling to supplant participation, how dissenting groups cultivate support and change social norms, and how alternate communities validate oppressed identities.12 The theoretical premise for the proliferation of studies using public sphere theory is that late modern democratic discourse is not effectively addressing the problems of late-modern democracies. Using Jürgen Habermas’s famous historical account of the rise of the bourgeois public sphere and harkening back to John

Dewey’s and Walter Lippmann’s complaints about an ineffectual public, rhetorical scholars seek a

11 Erik Doxtader, “In the Name of Reconciliation: The Faith and Works of Counterpublicity,” in Counterpublics and the State, ed. Robert Asen and Daniel C. Brouwer (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001), 59-86. 12 James W. Carey, “The Press, the Public Opinion, and Public Discourse,” in Public Opinion and the Communication of Consent, ed. Theodore L. Glasser and Charles T. Salmon (New York: Guilford Press, 1995), 373-402; Jenny Rice, Distant Publics: Development Rhetorics and the Subject of Crisis (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012); Daniel C. Brouwer, “ACT-ing UP in Congressional Hearings,” in Counterpublics and the State, ed. Asen and Brouwer, 87-109; Catherine Squires, “Rethinking the Black Public Sphere: An Alternative Vocabulary for Multiple Public Spheres,” Communication Theory 12.4 (November 2002): 446-468; Marlia Banning, “Truth Floats: Reflexivity in the Shifting Public and Epistemological Terrain,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 35.3 (June 2009): 75-99.

14 remedy by diagnosing discursive diseases that maintain social inequalities while offering alternative approaches that will expand discursive spaces.13

Habermas imagined that a vibrant public sphere in Europe was a corrective for an authoritarian state by offering physical spaces, such as salons and coffee houses, for private individuals to gather and discuss public affairs. These discussions would critique the state, and consequently the public could keep the state accountable for its actions. Numerous critiques of

Habermas’s work noted that not only did the bourgeois public sphere enact exclusions based on class, race, gender, and sexual orientation, but it also relied on those exclusions. Furthermore, social norms dictated what kinds of publics were deemed public and what kinds of publics remained

“merely personal, private, or particular.”14 In other words, certain ways of being and communicating came to stand for publicness while others were marginalized.

Habermas addressed social inequalities in the public sphere by contending that participants could bracket their differences, but his critics have claimed that this is an insufficient and improbable solution. For example, Nancy Fraser notes that the public sphere enacts a hegemonic rule of domination that is “based primarily on consent supplemented with some measure of repression.”15 The privileging of certain discursive patterns not only justifies the maintenance of power by “an educated male bourgeoisie and enlightened nobility,” in Felski’s terms.16 It also relies, as Benjamin Lee notes, on rational-critical discourse as the “standpoint of critique, since it can

13 Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991); John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems (Athens, OH: Shallow Press, 1991); Walter Lippmann, The Phantom Public (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2011). 14 Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 2005), 117. 15 Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere,” 117. 16 Felski, Beyond Feminist Aesthetics, 165.

15 specify what distorted communication is.”17 Throughout Western history, for example, women have faced obstacles to participating in the public sphere because of a belief in their “unreason, disorderliness, and ‘closeness’ to nature.”18 In other words, essentialized notions of gender and class became entangled with ideas of order, law, and reason. Consequently, the formulation of a public sphere that relies on those ideas of order, law, and reason necessarily relies, too, on essentialized notions of gender, race, and class.

In order to account for both domination and dissent within the public sphere, scholars argued that instead of one singular public sphere, multiple publics and counterpublics contributed and responded to public discourse.19 Fraser’s explanation for the need for theorizing publics and counterpublics includes the conviction that, “insofar as these counterpublics emerge in response to exclusions within dominant publics, they help expand discursive space. In principle, assumptions that were previously exempt from contestation will now have to be publicly argued out. In general, the proliferation of subaltern counterpublics means a widening of discursive contestation, and that is a good thing in stratified societies.”20 In other words, a dominant public marginalizes certain groups because they do not conform to social norms, and this marginalization leads to the formation of alternative publics. However, in order for a truly democratic public to function, these alternative publics need to be included into the public sphere so that it can be animated by different and contesting opinions and discourses. Furthermore, conceptualizing the public sphere as a single,

17 Benjamin Lee, “Textuality, Mediation, and Public Discourse,” in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Calhoun, 405, 404. 18 Geoff Eley, “Nations, Publics, and Political Cultures: Placing Habermas in the Nineteenth Century,” in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Calhoun, 310. 19 Felski, Beyond Feminist Aesthetics; Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere”; Gerard A. Hauser, Vernacular Voices: The Rhetoric of Publics and Public Spheres (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1999). 20 Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere,” 124.

16 unified discursive space erases the participation of these marginalized publics. Indeed, Lee claims,

“Instead of the degradation of a preexisting bourgeois public sphere by the forces of consumer capitalism, what we see is the coeval emergence of different publics, public spheres, and public spaces, each with their own forms of communicative organization.”21 So instead of dismissing marginalized populations and their public activity from a public sphere that operates on shared principles, the public sphere becomes a place of contestation between multiple publics and multiple value systems.

Because public sphere theory has been centrally concerned with expanding discursive space in order to redeem democratic practice, rhetorical studies of publics face two concerns. One, scholars need to find a theory that accurately accounts for domination as well as dissent and social change; and two, they need to create discursive solutions for greater democratic participation.

Within rhetorical studies, scholars have turned to theorizing multiple publics instead of one common public sphere in order to more accurately analyze democratic discourse and political participation. Gerard Hauser critiques the formulation of a single, unified public as “an idealized fantasy,” and he disagrees with the use of the term “the public” because of the difficulty of identifying what exactly the public might be. Instead, he argues for “reconceptualizing the public as a plurality of publics.” These publics, however, are not discrete groups but can best be understood as

“emergences manifested through vernacular rhetoric.” In order to identify and analyze these publics,

Hauser calls for “capturing their activity: how they construct reality by establishing and synthesizing values, forming opinions, acceding to positions, and cooperating through symbolic actions, especially discursive ones. Put differently, any given public exists in its publicness, which is to say in

21 Lee, “Textuality, Mediation, and Public Discourse,” 417.

17 its rhetorical character.”22 In other words, a public is constituted within a specific context and has specific boundaries and interactions with other publics for specific purposes, and studying the rhetoric of publics can help scholars identify and analyze these specificities. I am in complete agreement with Hauser’s argument here, and I follow his call to study the rhetoric produced by publics in order to more accurately understand their function and their impact on public discourse.

Hauser’s conception of a public is different than mine, however. He claims that “we may define a public as the interdependent members of society who hold different opinions about a mutual problem and who seek to influence its resolution through discourse.”23 In this formulation, a public is a site of deliberative discourse with a goal to resolve differences. The actors in this public are individual members of society. In my own formulation, I follow Michael Warner’s conception of a public more closely. I imagine publics as fluid and contingent bodies consisting of members who identify with the lifeworld articulated in a public’s circulating texts. The difference in my interpretation is that a public does not form in order to resolve problems, but merely in response to being addressed by texts.

Furthermore, what Hauser calls a public, I will call a discursive space. Publics interact with one another and form discursive spaces among themselves. Again, this is not always to resolve disputes, but merely a function of social activity. The way these publics interact with one another determines the boundaries, nature, and impact of the discursive spaces they create.

Catherine Squires builds on Hauser’s emphasis on the various discursive emergences of publics and extends this theory by identifying a number of different publics: enclave, counterpublic, and satellite public spheres. These publics are categorized, not by identity markers such as ethnicity, gender, sexuality, race, or nationality, but by “three types of responses a marginalized public sphere

22 Hauser, Vernacular Voices, 14. 23 Hauser, Vernacular Voices, 32.

18 might produce given existing political, economic, social, and cultural conditions.” The enclave public isolates itself from hegemonic publics in order to cultivate a rich discursive space within itself; a counterpublic engages competing publics and might use traditional social movement tactics, and a satellite public “seeks separation from other publics for reasons other than oppressive relations but is involved in wider discourses from time to time.” She adds that “this typology is not meant to be rigid; rather, each type represents a range of discursive and political responses that will emerge from a public sphere given the larger political context, internal concerns, available resources, institutions, and cultural norms.”24 Squires’s formulation helps characterize marginalized publics based on their rhetorical production rather than their relationship to hegemonic power structures. In other words, by expanding the public sphere into multiple publics, scholars can more accurately account for domination, change, and democratic participation.

Analyzing those publics that oppose hegemonic discourse becomes a way to remedy the marginalization of oppressed populations. By examining why publics oppose dominant social norms and how they do so, a theory of change and a prescription for more just democratic structures, behaviors, and discourses can emerge. Within public sphere theory, these publics are called counterpublics. Again, the common concern in discussions of publics and counterpublics is to account for the oppression of marginalized publics and to discover ways in which dominant public discourse can be made more expansive for those marginalized publics. Counterpublics offer a way to understand how marginalized and oppressed groups relate to dominant publics. Felski notes that

“the experience of discrimination, oppression, and cultural dislocation provides the impetus for the development of a self-consciously oppositional identity.”25 Likewise, Warner maintains that one

24 Squires, “Rethinking the Black Public Sphere,” 463. 25 Felski, Beyond Feminist Aesthetics, 167.

19 criterion for identifying a counterpublic is its self-conscious subordinate status.26 This subordinate status gives counterpublics their distinct boundaries and relationships to power. Counterpublics exist in order “to signal that they are parallel discursive arenas where members of subordinated social groups invent and circulate counterdiscourses to formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests, and needs.”27 Furthermore, with the exception of Warner’s concept of the counterpublic, the end goal of a counterpublic includes the reduction or elimination of the counterpublic’s disadvantage in the official public sphere. Felski and Fraser use the example of the

U.S. women’s movement in the 1960s and 1970s to show that counterpublics change dominant discourse, and that counterpublic address is directed both inward (in order to validate alternative identities) and outward (in order to promote greater parity among different identities).

Within rhetorical studies, theories of counterpublics offer ways to remedy social inequality and conflict among competing publics. For example, Marlia Banning critiques early twenty-first- century media practices for neglecting to provide audiences with accurate facts. Banning argues that

American audiences need facts because “What is implicit (if it is not made explicit) in most rhetorical models of the public sphere and the deliberative rhetoric central to public life is the assumption that spectators and interlocutors command some awareness and authority on the facts that are under review.”28 For Banning, then, the primary activity in the public sphere is deliberation in order to address common issues, and public sphere theory can be used to evaluate communicative practices within the public sphere that will serve efficient and just deliberation. Similarly, Erik

Doxtader, in his chapter of Robert Asen and Daniel Brouwer’s volume Counterpublics and the State, uses counterpublic theory to affirm the value of dissent in the case of reconciliation discourse in

26 Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 119. 27 Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere,” 123. 28 Banning, “Truth Floats,” 76.

South Africa during the 1980s. He pays particular attention to “the ways in which nontraditional and oppositional forms of communication have the potential to open and expand channels of public dialogue.”29 Doxtader’s chapter concludes with a hope for counterpublic theory: “[T]he work of counterpublicity begins in the faith that we can reconcile opposition and consensus without inaugurating a mediation in which one of these goods is subsumed into the other.”30 Here, Doxtader attempts to place difference in service of unity. He proposes an acceptance of both opposition and consensus in service of healthy democratic discourse and thereby demonstrates the consistent commitment of rhetorical scholars who use public sphere theory to emphasize deliberation and the mitigation of social inequalities.

While I agree that public sphere theory can contribute to rhetorical scholars’ understanding of public deliberative practices, I also argue, following Warner’s conception of publics, that deliberation is not all publics do. Publics are world-making, and dominant publics create lifeworlds that do not acknowledge certain other publics that Warner calls counterpublics. As Ronald Walter

Greene notes, “The stakes in Warner’s position require rethinking the notion of the counterpublic.

Counterpublics are not primarily strategic actors attempting to persuade a dominant public of the benefits of their particular policies. The conflict put into operation by a counterpublic is a challenge to the norms of the dominant public’s modes of address.”31 In other words, the emphasis on deliberation as the work of publics does not account for the ways in which marginalized publics challenge the norms of deliberation.

29 Doxtader, “In the Name of Reconciliation,” 61. 30 Doxtader, “In the Name of Reconciliation,” 76. See also Erik Doxtader, With Faith in the Works of Words: The Beginnings of Reconciliation in South Africa, 1985-1995 (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2008). 31 Ronald Walter Greene, “Rhetorical Pedagogy as a Postal System: Circulating Subjects through Michael Warner’s ‘Publics and Counterpublics,’” Quarterly Journal of Speech 88.4 (November 2002): 438.

In order to identify Eagle Forum, CWA, and NOW and their members as publics or counterpublics, there are multiple problems to overcome. The first is that all three organizations maintain some commitment to the status quo and have material connections to offices and positions of power while they also dissent and oppose the status quo. Should these organizations be considered publics or counterpublics? The second problem is institutional organization. Can formalized organizations have corresponding publics or counterpublics? Another problem is the relationship to the state. Are these an example of Fraser’s weak publics or Squires’s counterpublics or something else entirely? The next problem is one of agency. What can a public do, and what do the texts that circulate within that public do? The last problem is that these three organizations

(participating in different [counter]publics) cited different reasons for their exclusion from dominant public discourse. For Eagle Forum, it was a commitment to rationality and conservative politics; for

CWA, it was evangelical religious beliefs and practices; and for NOW, it was identification as women. If, as Fraser says, “counterpublics emerge in response to exclusions within dominant publics,” then what role does the stated basis of exclusion have in the formation of the

(counter)public?

These problems gesture toward some major questions in public sphere theory, such as how to identify a public in the world, how to find its boundaries, and how to classify its relationship to power. I argue that by thinking of claims of publicity or counterpublicity as rhetorical strategies, scholars can more accurately analyze democratic discourse and practice. Because groups can function as both publics and counterpublics based on their composition, agenda, and shifting relationships to power, one entity can rarely be identified as exclusively a public or a counterpublic.

Instead, publics can be identified by their claims of their relationships to power. For example, throughout the newsletters of the organizations in this study, each organization makes claims of

22 being ostracized from dominant publics, while at the same time claiming to represent and speak for dominant publics. In order to account for these apparently contradictory claims, I use public sphere theory to show that when the organizations claim to be ostracized and marginalized, these are claims of counterpublicity that achieve particular rhetorical goals for the organization. Similarly, when the organizations claim to represent dominant publics, these are claims of publicity that, again, achieve particular rhetorical goals for the organization. If public sphere theory, then, is used as a basis for analyzing rhetorical practices and discourses by all publics, then the categories of public and counterpublic do not have to be forsaken, but instead seen as contingent and competing. By clarifying how best to classify these three organizations, I address the issues of (a) defining publics and counterpublics, (b) clarifying the relationship between publics, power, and discursive spaces, and

Defining (Counter)Publics

I follow Warner’s definition of publics and counterpublics in that he develops these categories as particular relationships to power. My argument here is that the distinction between public and counterpublic should be an analytic concept in service of identifying a public’s relationship to structures of power as well as the responses to those structures. Because publics rhetorically identify and characterize the structures of power to which they are responding, any public can act as a public or a counterpublic and can operate as both for different purposes. This approach to publics and counterpublics does not reject the categories, but instead uses them as analytic tools to investigate a group’s relationship to power.

One of the common problems within public sphere theory is how to define a public and a counterpublic. Fraser theorized that strong democracies with stratified societies need strong and

23 weak publics. Strong publics are those that maintain some decision-making power, such as the U.S.

Congress or the British Parliament. Weak publics are those wherein deliberation and opinion formation occurs but which have no decision-making power. Fraser also discusses counterpublics as those publics that create an alternative discursive space that counters the dominant public sphere. In this formulation, a public is determined by its relationship to the state. While a relationship to the state is one significant feature of a public, this definition cannot account for the various structural and social oppressions to which counterpublics respond.

Felski’s definition of a counterpublic also includes the concept of dissent, including dissent against mass culture, rather than limiting dissent to opposition to the state. However, her definition of a counterpublic includes the focus, borrowed from John Keane, on “mutuality, discussion, and concern with concrete needs.”32 While many counterpublics do focus on concrete needs and advocate for change, this definition requires all counterpublics to be active in the dominant public sphere, thereby neglecting to account for Warner’s counterpublics or Squires’s enclave publics, which remain separate from the dominant public sphere and may or may not seek formal recognition. Furthermore, Warner’s concept of counterpublics includes the inability (or lack of desire) to achieve agency in the dominant public sphere, which means that a definition of counterpublics that focuses on dissenting action would not be able to account for those groups.

Rhetorical scholars have suggested various definitions of publics and counterpublics since the distinction remains unclear; as Robert Asen and Daniel Brouwer note, “scholars sometimes write about counterpublics with a frustrating vagueness.”33 Asen and Brouwer outline the many

32 John Keane, Public Life and Late Capitalism: Toward a Socialist Theory of Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 21, quoted in Felski, Beyond Feminist Aesthetics, 166. 33 Robert Asen and Daniel C. Brouwer, introduction to Counterpublics and the State, ed. Robert Asen and Daniel C. Brouwer, 8.

24 definitions of the term “counterpublic” that scholars used up to 2001. They conclude that “a wide variety of couplings [of public and counter] may be generated, none of which resolves once and for all the tensions of counterpublic theory. As a result, counterpublics will differ with regard to density, complexity, breadth, and access to resources and power; they may be episodic, enduring, or abstract.”34 Catherine Palczewski draws on Felski and Fraser to list the characteristics of counterpublics: “1) alternative validity claims may be developed; 2) alternative norms of public speech and styles of political behaviors can be elaborated; 3) oppositional interpretations of interests and needs can be formulated; 4) cultural identities can be constructed; and 5) activist energy to engage in political battles in the political and public spheres can be regenerated.”35 I am in complete agreement with these scholars’ assessment that any definition of counterpublic cannot resolve the tensions of counterpublic theory, and I agree with their characterization of all the different ways a counterpublic can be in the world.

The problem with these explanations, in my view, is that they want to render “public” and

“counterpublic” in empirical terms.36 Thomas Holt encounters this problem when he discusses the historical evolution of the Black public sphere. He notes that the media of the Black public sphere

“have always existed in an uneasy and complex relationship to the institutions of the white majority as well as to the ideology of democratic community, an ideology and value claimed by both whites and blacks but interpreted differently. The ensuing struggles over such competing meanings and values gave shape to the separateness of black publicity even as they forged intrinsic and inescapable

34 Asen and Brouwer, introduction to Counterpublics and the State, 10. 35 Catherine Palczewski, “Cyber-movements, New Social Movements, and Counterpublics,” in Counterpublics and the State, ed. Robert Asen and Daniel Brouwer, 166. 36 See also Michael C. Dawson, “A Black Counterpublic?: Economic Earthquakes, Racial Agenda(s), and Black Politics,” in The Black Public Sphere, ed. The Black Public Sphere Collective (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 199-227.

25 links between the spheres of dominance and opposition.”37 In other words, the Black public sphere both separated itself from dominant white culture and engaged it in order to effect change. Similarly,

Brouwer draws on Felski, Fraser, and Jane Mansbridge’s explanation of how counterpublics oscillate between discourse suited for inside the counterpublic and discourse suited for broader audiences.

He says, “Oscillation guarantees neither short-range nor long-range victories for activists, but without it counterpublics forego the possibilities of their critical and expansive work.”38 It is during oscillation, I argue, when one public can act as both a public and a counterpublic. The movement within the counterpublic is counterpublicity and the movement within broader discursive spaces that engages dominant norms is publicity. In this formulation, the various definitions of counterpublics can be maintained while acknowledging the contradictory work that publics do. A public can act publicly by conforming to the discursive norms set by dominant publics; it can advocate for change, argue a case, and persuade others to join a cause. In these ways, a public moves toward power. A public can act counterpublicly by rejecting the discursive norms set by dominant publics; it can identify the ways in which it differs from dominant publics, encourage inventive discursive ideologies, and unify and affirm its members. In these ways, a counterpublic galvanizes its members and creates a reason for action.

Publics, Power, and Discursive Spaces

In these formulations of the interaction between publics, dominant publics determine the limits of discursive space. Whatever norms or discursive patterns dominant publics accept as normal will determine what kinds of ideas and arguments get accepted into discursive spaces formed by

37 Thomas Holt, “Afterword: Mapping the Black Public Sphere,” in The Black Public Sphere, ed. The Black Public Sphere Collective, 327. 38 Brouwer, “ACT-ing UP,” 89.

26 participating publics. Attempts to grant voice to marginalized populations include granting their norms equal power with those of dominant publics, which would give those marginalized publics equal ability to set the limits of discursive spaces. The difficulty with this approach is that it neglects to explore the complications of democratic practice among multiple, competing publics.

It is difficult to determine what exactly “discursive spaces” are and where they show up.

Where are their boundaries? How does an idea or a debate move from outside discursive spaces to inside? What is the relationship between publics and the various discursive spaces in which they participate? In my view, there are a number of ways to formulate these spaces. First, “discursive spaces” could exist on a national or an official scale. In this formulation, a debate might get coverage by national news outlets or be taken up by politicians occupying government positions. Several examples in the early twenty-first century would include how to create and enforce immigration legislation, how to insure a more effective health care system, and how to regulate gun ownership.

Each of these issues received substantial treatment from national news outlets over time and spurred multiple efforts from federal, state, and local politicians to advocate for change. A second place to find “discursive spaces” would be the discussions occurring between and among publics that have taken up a particular issue. One could examine the discourse produced by political activist groups, corporations, and citizen forums concerned with immigration, the health care system, or gun ownership to determine how the debates and issues change over time. In this formulation, those who are acting in support of or in opposition to various policies, politicians, and laws create discursive spaces. A third place to find “discursive spaces” is to analyze cultural artifacts to examine how these issues get taken up in different ways and how debates are articulated in mass culture.

Popular and countercultural music, movies, literature, and fashion reflect, comment on, maintain, and oppose various positions on these issues, and they create discursive spaces that can be widened

27 or narrowed. In other words, discursive spaces must be public, must contain different viewpoints, and can show change over time.

As I use the term “discursive space,” I am drawing on Warner’s idea of how publics determine “the field of possible interplay.”39 Instead of characterizing the communicative behavior of publics as conversational or dialogic, Warner argues that a public’s discourse takes into account not only its own audience and interlocutors but also outsiders and those not engaged in the discussion. He says, “The interactive relation postulated in public discourse . . . goes far beyond the scale of conversation or discussion to encompass a multigeneric lifeworld organized not just by a relational axis of utterance and response but by potentially infinite axes of citation and characterization.”40 According to Warner, then, a public’s discourse not only posits arguments germane to shared problems but also extends an understanding of how argumentation and social interaction are conducted. These understandings become the unmarked norms of communication that privilege certain segments of the public while providing reasons to exclude voices, ideas, and communicative patterns that deviate from those norms. Warner’s point that “the projection of a public is a new . . . form of power” rests on his preceding discussion of the characteristics of a public, specifically self-organization through discourse, address to strangers, and membership through mere attention.41 He uses these three characteristics to explain how publics obtain power along with the ability to set the limits of the field of possible interplay.

First, a public is self-organized through being relationally addressed from within; a public is not organized by an outside institution, such as the state or the church. A concatenation of texts addresses a public that recognizes itself in those texts; the production and circulation of texts

39 Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 90. 40 Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 91. 41 Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 108.

28 addressed to a particular public is co-constitutive with the public to whom those texts are addressed.

These texts have a specific communicative ideology that is one of the conditions of possibility of the public that they create, and the language used in those texts “elaborates . . . a particular culture, its embodied way of life, its reading practices, its ethical conventions, its geography, its class and gender dispositions, and its economic organization.”42 In other words, the texts that address themselves to a public find a response from that public that recognizes its culture elaborated in those texts. This elaboration of a particular culture gives the texts and the public a positive content, but it also dictates the bounds of the public. The members of other publics who do not recognize that culture as their own are consequently excluded from that public.

Second, the discourse that corresponds to a public addresses itself to an audience that remains anonymous. Warner compares this concept with Louis Althusser’s notion of interpellation, wherein one recognizes oneself as the addressee of a policeman hailing, “Hey, you!” The difference is the publicity of the speech. Althusser’s example is not an example of public speech because it is directed at a particular person. Public speech is characterized by an indefinite number of addressees.

Warner concludes that “our partial nonidentity with the object of address in public speech seems to be part of what it means to regard something as public speech.”43 In other words, the notion that an indefinite number of strangers belongs to the same public as we do is essential to the fiction of a unified public.

Finally, membership in a public requires attention. In Warner’s formulation, granting attention to a public is no facile work. He explains that the voluntary association that modern publics demand differs from ways of belonging that existed before the early modern period since

42 Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 107. 43 Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 78.

29 there is no “categorical classification, objectively determined position in the social structure, or material existence” that grants membership in a public.44 Rather, the members are those who decide to acknowledge the texts that create a particular public. Of all the texts that “clamor” for attention, members of a public choose to turn to certain ones and not others. The consequence of this aspect of publics is that “[t]he direction of our glance can constitute our social world.”45 Here, Warner identifies the fiction that our consciousness decides the reality of the world. This fiction is important in granting power to publics because society gives the weight of reality to those publics, and they become dominant publics. Those publics that are not dominant publics, in Warner’s formulation, are counterpublics because they are not recognized by society as reflecting reality. In other words, counterpublics remain outside the glance that constitutes our social world, and this externality can benefit the counterpublic’s development of alternate identities.

These attributes of Warner’s concept of publics are also those that provide the boundaries for those publics. Even though the fictions that create publics make it essential that publics expand without interruption, the same fictions create the public’s boundaries. Publics offer their members distinct lifeworlds that reflect and shape norms and values. The content of these norms and values come from a particular culture, and people who do not recognize that culture—and thus give the public no attention—are outside the public’s boundaries. As Warner puts it, “The unity of the public

. . . is also ideological. It depends on . . . an arbitrary social closure (through language, idiolect, genre, medium, and address) to contain its potentially infinite extension.”46 In other words, the fiction of infinite extension creates the acceptance of a public’s norms as what qualifies as normal; it also allows alternate publics to go unacknowledged. If members of a public understand their own norms

44 Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 88. 45 Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 89. 46 Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 117.

30 as universally applicable, then it becomes more difficult for them to validate the claims, practices, and objections of publics who do not conform to those norms (a counterpublic in Warner’s formulation). In other words, when publics are granted the status of being a public, they are essentially being granted power. Consequently, a counterpublic is more than just a dissenting group; its legibility to the dominant public is compromised, and its function is to transform the space of public life itself.

This understanding of a counterpublic leads Warner to declare, “This is one of the things that happen when alternative publics are cast as social movements—they acquire agency in relation to the state. They enter the temporality of politics and adapt themselves to the performatives of rational-critical discourse. For many counterpublics, to do so is to cede the original hope of transforming, not just policy, but the space of public life itself.”47 For Warner, in other words, counterpublics have two choices: conform to the dictates of the dominant public in order to agitate for change (and become a public) or remain separate from the dominant public by generating discourse that is illegible to the dominant public and risk ineffectual engagement. What I argue in this dissertation is that publics can do both. They consistently contradict themselves by doing so, but a public can contain competing attributes. I do not mean to make the categories of public and counterpublic vacuous, but instead to show that they are continuously contending and connected to a public’s particular agenda and purpose. In other words, public-ness and counterpublic-ness become rhetorical strategies, not empirical attributes of a group.

Publicity and Counterpublicity

47 Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 124.

Publicness (or publicity), as I define it, is the ability to determine the limits of discursive spaces, and because a public can act publicly and counterpublicly at different times and for different purposes, the competition between these two functions creates change in accepted norms, discursive spaces, and public discourse. The cases studied in this dissertation demonstrate that as certain publics use both publicity and counterpublicity, the relationship between multiple publics and dominant discursive spaces shifts. Specifically, conservative women, such as the leaders and members of Eagle Forum and CWA, participated in emerging publics whose political arguments required a response from NOW. The political debate among these organizations was shaped by the fields of possible interplay that each public extended. These fields of possible interplay created a discursive space in which more radical ideas went unacknowledged. Dominant norms shifted to the right and included conservatives and liberals but not radicals.

If claims of being a public are a move toward power and claims of being a counterpublic are a call to action against power, then the designation of publics and counterpublics is a rhetorical act.

Consequently, groups act publicly and/or counterpublicly; they are not publics or counterpublics. As

Doxtader explains, “Counterpublic is a verb.”48 He uses Hannah Arendt’s definition that emphasizes a counterpublic’s replacement of violence with speech and action. If this is the case, he notes, then

“[c]ounterpublicity would seem to be the proper name for this work.”49 Thinking of counterpublicity in this way also resolves one of Doxtader’s complaints about assigning the label “counterpublic”: the label solidifies a group’s relationship to power and then reifies its identity as being outside power.

However, if we assign the label of counterpublicity to particular rhetorical acts, then we can also assign the label of publicity to certain rhetorical acts; both are executed to produce a particular result

48 Doxtader, “In the Name of Reconciliation,” 65. 49 Doxtader, “In the Name of Reconciliation,” 66.

32 within a particular context in relation to a particular audience. As Asen and Brouwer recommend,

“The task of scholars is to attend to the contingent, particular constructions of counter entered into by participants of the public sphere.”50 What should be added to this recommendation is that participants of the public sphere can participate both publicly and counterpublicly, and scholars can locate those participants’ publicity and counterpublicity.

In this formulation of publics, publicity, and counterpublicity, the wording is important to clarify. I have argued against using “public” and “counterpublic” to identify empirical groups acting in the world, but I want to retain the explanatory nature of the word “public.” There are groups in world that have been constituted through a circulation of texts that act and interact between each other and that form discursive spaces. However, the formation of a public is never complete. A public’s boundaries shift and remain porous; its function and purpose adjust to social change; and its interlocutors vary constantly. The public itself is a fiction, but the texts that circulate within it and the consequences of the actions of a public’s members are concrete and identifiable.

Among feminist activists and feminist scholars, histories and analyses of the 1980s criticize conservative women’s opposition to feminist progress and urgently seek to repair the damage done by their activism. While acknowledging the problems of conservative women’s policies for the status of women, I want to explore the effects of conservative women’s participation in the public sphere during this period. In other words, only part of the frustration with conservative women’s activism relates to their agenda; the other part concerns the interruption that conservative women caused in feminist progress. This interruption and subsequent influence in national politics can be understood by thinking of conservative women as forming a new public to which the feminist public needed to respond. During the 1960s and 1970s, as multiple feminist publics emerged, they formed agendas

50 Asen and Brouwer, introduction to Counterpublics and the State, 10.

33 and identities that countered the patriarchal hegemony. The primary opposition for these publics was the male-dominated public sphere, but once conservative women’s publics gained increasing political strength in the late 1970s and early 1980s, feminist publics needed to respond to these publics. As a result, feminist publics, which were never a unified entity, fractured even further into factions. Some continued to participate in dominant discursive spaces, and others continued to advocate for more radical ideas that were often unacknowledged in the discursive space created by the large political action organizations and their corresponding publics.

Eagle Forum, CWA, and NOW’s Publics

During the 1980s, Eagle Forum, run by Phyllis Schlafly; the National Organization for

Women (NOW), founded in 1968; and Concerned Women for America (CWA), founded in 1979 and run by Beverly LaHaye, achieved prominent positions with political influence and public support.51 Given the definition of publics I have developed so far, I argue that Eagle Forum, CWA, and NOW are principal actors in three distinct publics. These publics are greater than the organizations’ memberships, but each organization is essential to its corresponding public and offers it a coherent focus and framework. The texts produced and distributed by these organizations constitute a predominant portion of the concatenation of texts circulated within these publics. In this section I describe those publics and briefly sketch the historical context.

Part of my argument throughout this project is that the formation of a public is always incomplete and that the empirical existence of publics is impossible to identify definitively. That does not mean that publics are not distinguishable, however. The formation and maintenance of

51 While Eagle Forum was not founded until 1972, Schlafly had been politically active since the 1950s and began the Phyllis Schlafly Report in August 1967.

34 publics depend on the circulation of texts that communicate coherent ideas about the world, norms and values, and models of behavior, which Warner calls the “lifeworld” of a public. He says, “Public discourse says not only, ‘Let a public exist’ but ‘Let it have this character, speak this way, see the world this way.’”52 Furthermore, publics have different relationships to power, and I have termed the moves toward and away from power publicity and counterpublicity. In other words, there are two main criteria for distinguishing publics: one, the publicity and counterpublicity of the public, and two, the lifeworld that its texts create.

I will call the public that Eagle Forum occupied the grassroots antifeminist public. This public’s organizations, partnerships, and historical precedents were different from the evangelical women’s political public. Critchlow explains that Schlafly’s Eagle Forum drew on the intellectual conservatism of William F. Buckley Jr., Russell Kirk, and Leo Strauss, but he notes that Schlafly was a part of the grassroots anti-Communist movement that was able “to translate conservative ideas to grassroots activists and motivate them to achieve political goals.”53 These activists emphasized the perils of big government and its intervention into private lives, as well as criticizing established conservatives such as the Rockefellers. By the time Schlafly ran for president of the National

Federation of Republican Women in 1967, she had an established following among conservative women, and the leadership of the Republican Party understood that the race between her and

Gladys O’Donnell had implications for whether the party would become more conservative with

Schlafly at the helm of the federation or more moderate with O’Donnell’s.54 Schlafly used her campaign—and subsequent defeat—to unify a diverse group of women in the Republican Party with

52 Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 114. 53 Critchlow, Phyllis Schlafly, 6. 54 Rymph, Republican Women, 177-187.

35 claims that the male Republican establishment intervened in the race to support O’Donnell.

Catherine Rymph explains that “Schlafly’s defeat was not a simple case of sexism, as her version might suggest. One cannot say definitively whether GOP regulars . . . sought to silence Schlafly’s supporters because they were conservatives, because they were ideologues, because they were outsiders, or because they were women. Among Schlafly’s supporters at the Federation, all these identities came together.”55 After O’Donnell won the campaign, Schlafly began her newsletter in order to strengthen her cadre of supporters. She organized annual meetings called Eagle Conference of Leaders, and it was at one of these meetings in 1972 where Schlafly formed STOP ERA that became Eagle Forum.

Eagle Forum became the primary organization of the grassroots antifeminist public. The grassroots antifeminist public drew on a long-standing distrust of big government, and Schlafly used that to justify her opposition to progressive social policy by framing such policy as government intervention. The grassroots antifeminist public used the fight over the Equal Rights Amendment and abortion to forge relationships with the religious right, but this public remained separate from the numerous religious political publics of the New Right.56 The organization’s texts used similar language as the religious right, but the organization had a different historical context and drew on different demographics. Schlafly shared many of the same political views as leaders of the New

Right, which arose during the late 1970s and early 1980s, but I argue in chapter 2 that her organization helped to constitute a distinct public. She believed that religion and politics occupied different realms, and she used religious discourse differently than other participants of the New

Right. This difference in approach led to distinctive political agendas, constituents, and

55 Rymph, Republican Women, 184. 56 Sara Evans, Tidal Wave: How Women Changed America at Century’s End (New York: Free Press, 2003), 171.

36 argumentative strategies. Specifically, Schlafly’s political history drew not on religious communities, but on antistatism and anticommunism. Gregory Schneider notes that “many of [her conservative] principles were imbued in her by her father’s hostility to Roosevelt and the New Deal and by her traditional Catholicism.”57 This political history allowed Eagle Forum to encourage ecumenical political cooperation. Furthermore, Schlafly’s rhetoric produced and relied on different constructions of power, and she created a distinctive model for conservative women.

I will call the public that CWA occupied the evangelical women’s political public.

Conservative Protestant women had been involved in national politics and women’s issues throughout U.S. history, but during most of the twentieth century, evangelicals—and especially evangelical women—had been absent from the political scene. During the early twentieth century, conservative evangelical theology and practice had encouraged evangelicals to separate themselves from the corrupting society, but after World War II Billy Graham and other evangelical leaders began to see political and social activism as a working out of personal faith. Lisa McGirr explains the successful influence of conservatives during this time when she says, “[T]hey have provided a total set of explanations for what they believe is wrong with America, focusing specifically on the dangers of federal power and control along with liberal efforts to distribute power more equitably in society.”58 By the 1970s and 1980s, evangelicals were a significant voice in conservative politics. The evangelical women’s political public overlapped with groups such as Moral Majority, the National

Christian Action Coalition, and Americans United for Life. Characteristics of these organizations that are specific to evangelicalism are their mistrust of the secular world, their acceptance of a

57 Gregory L. Schneider, The Conservative Century: From Reaction to Revolution (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2009), 77. 58 Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 272.

37 prophetic role in politics, a strong sense of religious liberty, and a belief in the religious and ethical foundations of U.S. constitutional government.59

Beverly LaHaye and eight other women founded CWA in 1979 in San Diego, California.

LaHaye and many of the other founders were spouses of the leadership of Moral Majority. Indeed,

Susan Faludi noted that even though the men of Moral Majority founded CWA with the intention of expanding their ground troops, it became its own entity with its own agenda and its own influence. 60

What makes CWA particularly influential—and what separates it from Moral Majority and other conservative groups—is its focus on women’s issues and its designation as a women’s political advocacy group.61 Leslie Dorrough Smith notes, “In something akin to niche marketing, CWA borrows heavily from the longstanding historical argument that women bear a special religious or moral essence, and thus it frequently claims that it occupies a unique cultural position that enables it to speak authoritatively on moral issues regarding sex, gender, and reproduction in a way others cannot.” CWA has used this influence—and its strong political ties—on Capitol Hill to great effect, and legislators in both houses and in both parties “may not expect the support of the CWA crowd, but they definitely don’t want to be targeted by them as a special enemy in the next election.”62 One of CWA’s rhetorical strategies is to claim that they speak not only for other conservative women but

59 Pohli, “Church Closets and Back Doors,” 531-536. 60 Susan Faludi claims that the Moral Majority leaders “originally funded CWA in hopes that the organization would generate reinforcement troops. Tim LaHaye offered his wife as a safe figurehead; the board members of Moral Majority packed CWA’s board of directors with their wives, who, they assumed, would do their bidding”; Susan Faludi, Backlash: The Undeclared War against American Women (New York: Anchor Books, 1991), 252-253. 61 Ronnee Schreibner claims that by claiming to be a woman’s organization, CWA must account for feminism in a way that men’s conservative organizations do not have to; Schreibner, Righting Feminism, 5. 62 Leslie Dorrough Smith, Righteous Rhetoric: Sex, Speech, and the Politics of Concerned Women for America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 20.

38 also for the mainstream of American women. In this way, CWA was a prominent—if not primary— participant in the evangelical women’s political public.

I will call the public that NOW occupies the liberal feminist public. First, “liberal” signals the dedication to a liberal subject and a commitment to working within the established government institutions for change. Other groups included in this public would be the League of Women Voters and Planned Parenthood, but not the Redstockings, the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union, or the

Feminists. The latter groups occupy a much more radical public than NOW ever did. Buechler claims that the mid-twentieth-century U.S. women’s movement consisted of the “central movement organizations such as NOW on the one hand and looser networks of self-identified feminist groups on the other hand. The periphery of the contemporary movement has consisted of the civil rights, antiwar, and New Left movements, some government bureaus and social service agencies, some professional women’s organizations, some labor unions with largely female memberships and feminist sympathies, some academic institutions supportive of feminist issues, and the like.”63 In other words, NOW occupied a more conservative position on the wide spectrum of feminist philosophies and agendas. However, Phyllis Schlafly and CWA consistently characterized NOW’s leaders and members as radical feminists when in fact NOW occupied a fairly liberal segment of the feminist movement. More radical feminists during the 1960s and 1970s (and throughout U.S. history) argued for the dissolution of gender distinction altogether.64 Some cultural feminists declared women inherently more valuable than men and encouraged separatist communities, while others declared all heterosexual sex to be violent.65

63 Steven M. Buechler, Women’s Movements in the United States: Woman Suffrage, Equal Rights, and Beyond (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990), 4. 64 Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1970). 65 Andrea Dworkin, Intercourse (New York: Basic Books, 1987).

When placing NOW within the context of the range of feminist activity during the 1980s, it is easy to see that the organization possessed many characteristics consistent with maintaining the status quo, which situates them in a different public than radical feminists. First, the organization had a hierarchical structure, which many concurrent feminist organizations eschewed. Second, the strategies the organization employed worked within established political institutions, whereas more radical feminist organizations sought to demonstrate the futility of such strategies through alternative means. Third, the argumentative strategies employed by NOW and the political agendas that it supported worked toward a state-sponsored and economic equality that many radical feminists found negligent of the structural change that would bring true equality for men and women. Fourth, the liberal feminist public used mass media and powerful political connections to appeal to a more popular audience, which means that they used publicity more often than more radical publics. Therefore, the lifeworld that NOW helped the liberal feminist public to create was significantly different from that of other, more radical publics.

An important feature that these three publics share, however, is the relationship of politics to their members’ lives.66 Each organization, in different ways, formulated politics as a means to an end: that end might be justice, a more accurate reflection of God’s principles, or equality. However, each also presented political action as a way to live out the personal values, beliefs, and commitments of the individuals who made up its membership. The organizations’ newsletters invite readers to acknowledge a duty that those personal commitments, values, and religious beliefs require and that the readers are then individually responsible for honoring. These women can live their individual identities through their political activism. They are re-creating the world, saving other

66 The ideas in this paragraph are in contrast to the intimate publics Lauren Berlant describes in The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008).

40 women and civilization from an awful fate, and belonging to an emotionally unified group of women. This means that these groups behaved as if a new world, a new civilization, a new understanding of “woman” and her role in the world could be achieved through political reformation. These organizations analyzed, supported, and decried pieces of legislation, presidential policies, and political attitudes not only because they had practical effects on daily life, but because these were the things of world creation. These publics were created around political activism and engagement, and they saw the political sphere as renewable, changeable, and integral to an individual’s living out personal commitments.

Why Newsletters?

The three organizations in this study occupied a prominent role in each of their corresponding publics: Eagle Forum in the grassroots antifeminist public, CWA in the evangelical women’s political public, and NOW in the liberal feminist public. In order to understand the broader implications for public discourse around women’s issues during the

1980s, I examine the texts produced and circulated by these organizations, with the goal of identifying the competing lifeworlds the respective publics created for their members, as well as any change over the decade that was effected by interactions among these publics. In other words, the three publics significantly affected the discursive shifts around women’s issues that occurred during the 1980s, and the three organizations that held central roles within those publics shaped the arguments, ideas, and identities available within the discursive spaces created by those publics. I argue that examining the discourse produced by these organizations—and therefore the most influential discourse within three prominent publics—is one important way to analyze the U.S. political landscape during the 1980s. In this section, I connect the role of discourse to the formation and maintenance of publics, and I explain that the primary texts that

41 these organizations produced and circulated were their monthly newsletters.

A public is not just shaped by texts, but it is co-constitutive with the texts that address it.

Hauser suggests that publics are not static units that merely react to the world around them, but it is through addressing a public that a public exists. He concedes that publics cannot be reduced to their communicative practices but argues that a public cannot exist without communication. He concludes, “For this reason, rhetoric foregrounds publics and is rudimentary to their individuating identities; publics are constituted by the character of rhetorical exchanges shared among their members.”67 Jenny Rice uses Hauser’s theory of the role of language in shaping publics to think about publics in a different way than Fraser and other public sphere theorists.

Rice claims that public sphere theory accepts “publics (and counterpublics) as bodies that join together in deliberation in a discursive arena,” whereas she sees “publics as active manifestations of talk.”68 The difference here is the chronology of existence for publics and their discourse. She writes, “Vernacular discourse . . . is more than a medium for previously existing publics. Talk is the very substance through which publics come to be formed. . . . Publics materialize as clusters of conversations happening at various times, across different places.”69 In other words, publics emerge in the rhetorical act of address.

Warner also pays attention to the co-constitutive nature of publics and their texts, but he emphasizes the circulation of those texts. It is circulation that shows the field of interplay upon which that public operates. Warner is frustrated by the analogy of conversation and dialogue that public sphere theorists often rely on; he argues that “sender/receiver or author/reader models of

67 Hauser, Vernacular Voices, 35. 68 Rice, Distant Publics, 19. 69 Rice, Distant Publics, 19.

42 public communication are . . . misleading.”70 He expands this characterization of the discourse of a public to include onlookers, outsiders, and a network of genres, arguments, and modes of address.

Here, publics require not only a quantity of texts but also a variety of genres, endless possibilities of reference among those texts, and attention from both members and onlookers of publics.

In her description of the various kinds of publics, Squires separates the discursive practices of a public from its political action. She criticizes notes that political scientist Michael Dawson “is correct to be concerned about the state of political action and organizational strength in the Black public, [but] he is conflating two separate phenomena: the discursive actions of a public sphere, and the political success of that sphere.”71 Once she separates these two ideas, she then categorizes different Black publics based on a number of aspects, including discursive practice: “Salient aspects of public spheres might include the following: the history of their relationships to the state and dominant publics; how diverse is a particular public sphere; what sorts of institutional resources are available to the collective; what these institutions’ relationships are to the political, economic, and media institutions of the dominant society; and how their modes of communicative and cultural expression are different from those of other publics and the entities within political and economic society.”72 Here, the discursive practices and communicative strategies that a public uses are both formative features of that public and distinguishing characteristics that combine with other material conditions to shape the form and function of a public. Consequently, the rhetoric found in a public’s circulating text can give scholars information about that public’s construction of its own identity, its relationships to power structures and other

70 Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 90. 71 Squires, “Rethinking the Black Public Sphere,” 452. 72 Squires, “Rethinking the Public Sphere,” 456-457.

43 publics, and its argumentative strategies.

This dissertation analyzes the texts of Eagle Forum, CWA, and NOW as a way to understand the grassroots antifeminist public, the evangelical women’s political public, and the liberal feminist public. During the 1980s these organizations created vast rhetorical archives. They gave speeches, sent out fundraising letters, debated each other in public forums, led rallies and marches, held annual conventions, published articles in various news outlets, and mailed monthly newsletters. This study focuses on the monthly newsletters because they provide consistency across time and across the organizations. Each organization maintained an editorial board (even though in

Eagle Forum’s case, the editorial board consisted of only Phyllis Schlafly), a regular publishing schedule for the newsletters, and a mailing list of paying members. The newsletters provided a crafted message for members and a broad range of content, including political arguments, advertisements for various products, book recommendations, instructions for sending letters to congressional leaders, news about organizational events, and organizational business. The newsletters shaped political commitments, offered models for political action, and communicated the lifeworld of the public. Even though each organization’s newsletters offer only a limited articulation of the public’s lifeworld, the content reflects the choices of the writers and editors, and these choices provided readers with ways of organizing information and creating political arguments.

The newsletters do not thoroughly reflect the diversity of the public; instead, they offer a selective and coherent articulation of one way that the public understood the world. Consequently, I understand the monolithic articulation of a public’s lifeworld in the newsletters as one credible and authoritative option for a public’s members. In the following chapters, I illuminate the articulation of a public’s lifeworld present in each organization’s newsletters, but I acknowledge that each corresponding public contained diverse and competing opinions that the newsletters did not express

44 but attempted to reconcile.

Throughout the 1980s each organization published a monthly newsletter that was circulated among its members. In order to receive the newsletter, a member needed to pay a small yearly fee and submit her name and address. The newsletters of NOW and CWA were very similar in form and content. They were formatted like newspapers published in major urban markets and contained news about organizational events; arguments about legislation; photographs of members, events, and speakers; and articles contributed by various writers. The form of the Eagle Forum newsletter was distinctive, since Schlafly almost always wrote it in its entirety, and it most often had only four pages. Usually the entire newsletter was dedicated to one topic with different articles addressing different facets of the subject or reprints of articles written by others. Each of the three newsletters addressed the organization’s members, which means that it addressed a friendly audience, functioned as a unifying text, and attempted to galvanize the reader into action. The newsletters reflected the organization’s official narrative since the contributors to the newsletters were staff members and because each newsletter had an authoritative editor or editorial board. When the newsletters included contributions from the members of the organization, these were edited for content and therefore served the editorial board’s purpose.

The newsletters provide the most consistent and authoritative messages circulated throughout the organizations’ corresponding publics. This is a common feature of organizational newsletters. David Nye’s discussion of the internal magazine of General Electric, for example, provides several significant ways newsletters function. First, the limits of circulation become the boundaries of the unified community.73 Nye explains that GE published an in-house magazine for

73 David Nye, Image Worlds: Corporate Identities at General Electric, 1890-1930 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985).

45 each factory. He argues that each factory had a separate publication in order to keep the company’s entire workforce from thinking of itself as a community, and thereby unionizing across the corporation’s locations. In this way, the newsletter functioned as a unifying text, and the limits of its circulation created the boundaries of the community. Second, the newsletter functioned as a top- down publication. Because the newsletters “came from powerful managers to their dependents inside the corporation” and because “[e]xecutives controlled every aspect of the communication, designating format, content, and audience,” these publications did not reflect the workers’ lives but promoted the hierarchy’s desired results.74 In other words, newsletters also functioned to persuade the reader of the company’s outlook. Nye notes that the creators of GE newsletters “did not seek complete accuracy” but instead promoted a vision of work that “benefited the company, not the work force.”75 Indeed, the publication became a catalog of the company’s ideological contradictions.

Similarly, the newsletters of the Eagle Forum, CWA, and NOW were crafted presentations of the organizations’ lifeworlds, which then circulated among the grassroots antifeminist, evangelical women’s political, and liberal feminist publics as authoritative texts. It was in the newsletters that the organizations used publicity and counterpublicity to make their claims, relate to institutions of power, conform to or challenge norms, and call their members to action. In this way, the newsletters of these organizations provide a significant portion of the publics’ discourse.

For this study, I read every newsletter from each organization published from 1979 to 1991.

Although both the Phyllis Schlafly Report and the NOW News had been produced and circulated for nearly fifteen years, CWA was founded and began its newsletter in 1979. Also, in 1979 the newsletters began discussing several themes that recurred throughout the 1980s, specifically the 1980

74 Nye, Image Worlds, 60. 75 Nye, Image Worlds, 90.

U.S. presidential election. In 1991 all three newsletters included extensive coverage of the Clarence

Thomas hearings about Anita Hill’s accusations of sexual harassment, and this event provides a salient conclusion to the themes of the 1980s and a shift in how these organizations interacted with one another. In analyzing the newsletters I looked for thematic differences and similarities, argumentative strategies, genres of articles, tone and affect, changes in each of these categories, and moments when patterns broke down. I wanted to determine the shape and composition of the lifeworld that each of these organizations presented to its readers and to identify moments when each organization used strategies of publicity and counterpublicity. I asked questions such as, How do the newsletters characterize political discourse and the public sphere? What kinds of actions do the newsletters suggest for their readers? What kinds of evidence do the newsletters use to justify their positions on legislation and political issues? Why are certain women (and sometimes men) praised or condemned?

By analyzing organizational texts circulated within three influential publics during the 1980s, this dissertation emphasizes the interaction among competing publics and the effect that interaction had on public discourse. According to public sphere theorists, a proliferation of competing publics will widen discursive spaces, provide marginalized publics access to dominant discursive spaces, and provide a more equitable democratic society. However, this study argues that competing publics can interact in ways that shrink discursive spaces, reify the boundaries of dominant discursive spaces, and maintain social inequalities. Therefore, public sphere theory needs to expand to account for how competing publics operate and the effect they have on the diversity of ideas and arguments.

Chapter Outline

Following this introduction, this project comprises four chapters and a conclusion. The first

47 chapter discusses the particular publics examined in this study and the relationship of those publics to the primary object of this study: the organization’s newsletter. I trace the history of the newsletter in order to show the context of this genre within news discourse more generally. I also argue that while many rhetorical scholars grant that publics are formed by the language used within them, I would add that the production and circulation of the texts that are the media for that language also contribute to the shape of those publics.

Each of the next three chapters examines one of the organizations and its public, and each chapter follows a similar structure. Chapter 2 addresses Eagle Forum and the grassroots antifeminist public. First, I argue that Phyllis Schlafly’s Catholicism informed Eagle Forum’s approach to politics and religion that allowed the organization to be ecumenical as well as focused on rational argumentation and the individual as opposed to the family. The Phyllis Schlafly Report established that the media and the American political system were centers of power, and it both validated those institutions and opposed them. The newsletters also articulated a lifeworld in which the realms of politics and religion are distinct from one another, the individual is the basic unit of society, and personal attacks against a homogenous group of “feminists” incited fear and animosity. Schlafly characterized all feminists as deficient in their womanhood, irrational, and disinterested in democratic practices. Chapter 3 addresses Concerned Women for America and the evangelical women’s political public. First, I argue that CWA was a part of the shift in evangelical culture in the twentieth century from an emphasis on isolationism and piety to an emphasis on engaging and changing the secular culture. Next, I identify the centers of power that CWA newsletters established as God and history. CWA aligned the organization, its leadership, and its members with God and history while at the same time justifying the organization’s work and urging its members to action through limiting the power of God and history. The CWA newsletters articulate a lifeworld in which

48 political agendas are a result of religious belief and practice, the family is the basic unit of society, and motherhood is the main role for women. The CWA newsletters characterize all feminists as secular humanists who oppose religion in any form, and as women who hate and resist the role of motherhood. The final analytic chapter addresses the National Organization for Women and the liberal feminist public. First, I argue that the NOW newsletters express a range of opinions, but that ultimately the newsletters attempt to reconcile competing opinions into a diverse and cohesive group. In fact, one of the centers of power present in the newsletters is plurality. The other center of power is the state. The NOW newsletters present the organization as both aligned with and opposed to both centers of power. The lifeworld that the newsletters articulate changes over the decade, and my argument is that these changes are as a result of the attacks that conservative groups, such as

Eagle Forum and CWA, mounted in an effort to defeat the feminist viewpoint in national politics.

The National NOW Times began the decade with a focus on the consequences of political legislation on the lives of women, and over the decade shifted the focus to equal rights. My argument is that this shift from a contingent and practical focus to a more abstract and principled one reflects the challenge the liberal feminist public faced in the rhetoric of conservative women’s publics.

In the conclusion, I use the analysis from the substantive chapters to articulate my contributions to public sphere theory. I argue that rhetorical scholars have used public sphere theory, for the most part, to emphasize how democratic discourse benefits from a proliferation of publics since more ideas would be heard and debated. The temporal focus of this study represents a time in American history when publics of conservative women increased their influence and their participation in national political debates. However, the addition of these publics did not improve democratic discourse. The conservative women’s publics felt the need to defeat their political opponents—liberal feminists. The political need to defeat feminists led to conservative women’s

49 publics mischaracterizing feminist publics, and these mischaracterizations then required a response from feminists. The relational discursive space was contentious, and these publics neglected to acknowledge the existence of alternative political agendas or modes of argumentation. In other words, the need for political dominance led to a discursive space among these publics that increased the obstacles for alternate publics to enter national debates. Therefore, rhetorical scholars can expand public sphere theory by acknowledging the limitations of calls for inclusion, since inclusion of alternate publics leads to increased competition that can decrease the number of ideas and political arguments present in political debates.

Chapter 1: Newsletters, the News, and (Counter)Publics

Phyllis Schlafly began writing a weekly column in 1976 that was nationally syndicated in newspapers; her radio appearances were so numerous that in 1984 she claimed she could perform in her sleep; she debated and spoke to any audience that would have her whether welcoming or hostile; and Eagle Forum, founded in 1972, sent regular fundraising letters to a long mailing list of its members. And yet when asked why her organization, Eagle Forum, printed and circulated newsletters in the 1980s, Phyllis Schlafly answered with incredulity, “Because that’s all we had!” The need for a newsletter was so obvious to Schlafly that the question of why she began one more than forty years ago engendered impatience. She continued, “We didn’t have email or blogs. We just had paper and mail.”1

Schlafly used paper and mail in innovative ways, however, to mobilize women who had not previously been participants in politics.2 The genre of the newsletter has a long and complicated history within the print culture of Western political life: it began as the primary source of news that circulated beyond a reading audience and evolved into a tool used primarily by countercultural and special interest groups. Schlafly, as the author of the Eagle Forum newsletters, as well as the staffs of

Concerned Women for America and the National Organization for Women, produced and circulated newsletters that became a significant portion of the texts that created specific publics, and the practices that these organizations used to create and distribute their newsletters corresponded to features of those publics. For example, in contrast to concurrent countercultural groups that opposed editing contributions to newsletters as a way to dismantle social and cultural hierarchies, these organizations maintained editors and editorial boards who fashioned a consistent message that

1 Phyllis Schlafly, President, Eagle Forum, in discussion with the author, January 2013. 2 Jane J. Mansbridge, Why We Lost the ERA (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 6.

51 served the organization’s leadership. Therefore, the newsletters encouraged readers to align with and to develop an appreciation for those in power, and they employed a vision of a public that had tolerance for hierarchies. At the same time, the organizations capitalized on the genre of the newsletter to portray themselves as countercultural—outside and opponents of the mainstream.

These organizations took what had become a countercultural genre, altered significant characteristics of its countercultural features, and circulated it among a public in order to justify the organizations’ critique and maintenance of dominant norms. In other words, these organizations and the newsletters they published enacted the simultaneity of public-ness and counterpublic-ness. This chapter will trace the history of the newsletter through its sixteenth-century origins through the development of journalism, particularly in the United States, to the underground print culture of the mid-twentieth century in America and the organizations of the women’s movement in the 1960s and

1970s in order to show two things: first, that the newsletter has a distinctive place in the history of journalism that has yet to be thoroughly examined, and, second, that these organizations’ use of the newsletter contributes to the enactment of publicity and counterpublicity.

This project is less concerned with discovering what makes a newsletter a newsletter than with understanding the newsletters that Eagle Forum, CWA, and NOW produced and circulated in the 1980s as cultural objects that affected the particular lifeworld of publics. As shown by the example above regarding editorial practices, the distinctive features of these newsletters correlate to the values and norms to which a public subscribes. I apply to newsletters Michael Schudson’s approach to journalism when he says, “To understand journalism as a part of contemporary culture requires seeing how it works as both a set of concrete social institutions and a repertoire of historically fashioned literary practices. It requires, further, seeing how these institutions and

52 practices are set within and in orientation to political democracy.”3 In other words, I am concerned with the function the newsletters perform within the organizations that publish them, paying special attention to the historical literary practices the newsletters draw upon and encourage.4 Furthermore,

I am most interested in how these newsletters comment on and interact with the broader American political landscape. The newsletters examined in this study are publications of organizations sent to paying subscribers, but the newsletters address more than just dedicated followers.

This project shows that what makes these newsletters distinctive, in contrast to publications of more radical groups on both the right and the left, is their commitment to and use of the established political institutions and procedures (i.e., Congress, the presidency, passing legislation, and initiating lawsuits) to achieve the organizations’ agendas. These three organizations claimed opposition to the mass media and society in general, but the production and circulation processes the organizations used for their newsletters, the political action the organizations encouraged, and the justification for the political claims that made up the content of the newsletters demonstrate that these organizations all held centrist positions with a shared approach to politics and a shared understanding of what the public sphere is and what it requires. The National NOW Times called

Phyllis Schlafly and CWA the radical right, and Phyllis Schlafly and CWA called NOW the radical left. By denouncing each other as radical—the outer bounds of a political spectrum—these organizations limited the range of political action for women to relatively moderate positions. By establishing the boundaries of political action only to include participation in the established government institutions, these organizations made more radical claims and political agendas illegible

3 Michael Schudson, The Power of News (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 2. 4 Throughout this project, I will attribute action to newsletters. For clarity I will construct sentences where “newsletters” are the subject of action verbs, instead of “the writers of the newsletters” or “the organizations that produced and circulated newsletters.” Understanding the reception of the newsletters is outside the scope of this project.

53 and invalid. In other words, these organizations bent the countercultural features of the newsletters in order to paradoxically situate themselves as not only opposed to the mainstream but also aligned with the mainstream. In the following chapters, I examine the content of each organization’s newsletters to determine the political action the newsletters encouraged and the political claims they made, but in this chapter I weave histories of journalism, the American public sphere, social movements and organizations, and American religious beliefs and practices to create a critical history of the newsletter in order to understand how the newsletter changed over time and to place the organizations’ publications in a historical and generic context.

Original Newsletters, Earliest Journalists

The newsletter’s form and function have changed throughout its history, but one characteristic has remained constant: the newsletter delivers news. Newsletters began as the primary source of news, became a complement to printed newspapers offering information that newspapers could not, and then developed into a medium for alternate news and opinions that challenged the consolidated news industry. Schudson explains “news” as “a form of culture” that he calls “public knowledge.”5 In his discussions of mass media as a “central institution in modern life,” he explains that the news industry amplifies and organizes information for audiences that gives certain events, people, and stories credibility and importance. The power of the mass media, however, is only granted through “the belief, justified in viable democracies, that the knowledge of citizens can from time to time be effective.”6 In other words, news frames information for its audience. The newsletters of the organizations in this study operate in a similar way, but on a smaller scale. As

5 Schudson, Power of News, 3. 6 Schudson, Power of News, 21.

Schudson says, “When the media offer the public an item of news, they confer upon it public legitimacy.”7 Here, it is the genre of news that provides that grants importance to an event. The newsletters organize and amplify information into a coherent message that enacts and reflects a public’s lifeworld. In this way, the newsletters were a cultural object produced by particular literary practices that circulated and organized a public’s knowledge.

Understanding the newsletter as a cultural object requires clarifying the role of the newsletter in the history of news and journalism.8 In fact, the earliest form of journalism, as news writing came to be called by the nineteenth century, was the manuscript newsletter.9 While historians of the printed newspaper trace its origins to these same manuscript newsletters, the newsletter retained its manuscript format throughout the eighteenth century—and even into the twentieth when the underground print culture of the 1960s and 1970s used off-set printing to reprint the handwritten content and hand-drawn graphics of many of their publications. Manuscript newsletters were both the forerunners of the printed newspaper and distinctive publications that developed along with printed newspapers and journalism in general.

The earliest ancestor of the sixteenth-century manuscript newsletters that were the immediate predecessors to printed newspapers can be found as early as the foundation of the

Roman Republic in the fifth century B.C.E.10 Commissioned guards protected Senate records kept at the Temple of Ceres, but only those whom Frank Luther Mott called “the earliest journalists” could

7 Schudson, Power of News, 25. 8 See Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere; and Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, new ed. (London: Verso, 2006). 9 The Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “journalism,” accessed September 3, 2013, http://www.oed.com.turing.library.northwestern.edu. 10 The Acta Diurna would not be an example of an early newsletter, but of an early newspaper since it was an official publication of the Roman government and did not circulate by a subscription list; Frederic Hudson, Journalism in the United States, from 1690-1872 (New York: Harper and Row, 1873), xxix.

55 take notes on these records and distribute them.11 Agents of the republic scattered throughout the area, such as provincial governors or tax collectors, needed the news of the Senate proceedings, and when the earliest journalists took notes from the Senate record, added local gossip, and sent them to other provinces, the documents became newsletters. These documents relayed news to merchants and bureaucrats in order to connect agents of the Roman Republic to Rome, and their circulation became a common occurrence for over a thousand years until the fall of the Western Roman

Empire. In fact, while a proconsul in Cilicia, Cicero wrote to his newsletter supplier to express disapproval of the substitution of sports news for substantial political news.12

These Roman correspondences disseminated political and trade news to those holding powerful positions, and the manuscript newsletters in early modern Europe functioned in a similar way.13 Services for transmitting news and messages appeared as early as the twelfth century, but the formal business of newsletter agencies appeared in Venice in the sixteenth century.14 These newsletters contained news about political and social events that affected trade and political decisions in other parts of the world, and the subscribers were the political and economic elite.

Jürgen Habermas notes, “To be sure, the merchants were satisfied with a system that limited information to insiders; the urban and court chanceries preferred one that served only the needs of administration. Neither had a stake in information that was public. What corresponded to their interests, rather, were ‘news letters,’ the private correspondences commercially organized by

11 Frank Luther Mott, The News in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962), 2. 12 See Mott, News in America, 2; and James Melvin Lee, History of American Journalism, rev. ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1984), 2. 13 Hudson, Journalism in the United States, 6. 14 Charles E. Clark, The Public Prints: The Newspaper in Anglo-American Culture, 1665-1740 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 17; Mott, News in America, 3; Hudson, Journalism in the United States, xxix.

56 newsdealers.”15 For these early newsletters, the literary practices that newsdealers used, such as limited circulation by paid subscription and limited content to the kind of news valued by the elite, corresponded to a limited public knowledge. In other words, literary practices affect the formation—or lack of formation—of a public.

By the sixteenth century, however, newsletter writing had changed significantly. Major

European cities had established newsletter-writing agencies that circulated newsletters to client lists and other news agencies. Scribes produced the newsletters by copying other newsletters by hand either in part or in whole, including the place and date of the origin of each news piece, commenting on the reliability of the information while also adding their own news and passing them on to subscribers and colleagues.16 Most newsletters also had empty space for the recipient to add further comments before circulating it to other readers. 17 The distinction between fact and rumor was not evident in the newsletters. George Matthews compares the newsletter of Renaissance Europe to the twentieth-century press agency’s teletype: “[T]rue reports and false rumors, trivial occurrences and important events follow one upon the other without interruption and without discrimination.”18

These modified practices responded to an increase in the demand for news in Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. News had been sold and traded for centuries, but changing political and cultural conditions allowed for the establishment of professional newsletters. The political life of early modern Europe was contentious: there were a greater number of European conflicts within and among states, the electorate had enlarged, and opinions were becoming more

15 Habermas, Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 16. 16 Paul Arblaster, “Posts, Newsletters, Newspapers: England in a European System of Communications,” Media History 11.1/2 (April 2005): 22. 17 Arblaster, “Posts, Newsletters, Newspapers,” 22. 18 George T. Matthews, News and Rumor in Renaissance Europe (The Fugger Newsletters) (New York: Capricorn Books, 1959), 20.

57 and more polarized.19 Throughout Europe regularly printed newspapers did not appear until the eighteenth century, so in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, manuscript newsletters became the primary medium for news to meet the demand generated by the development of the modern system of merchants and diplomats, which became a growing and broadening population that had political and financial interests.20

Manuscript newsletters and early printed newspapers shared a consistent style and format, both in England and in the American colonies.21 Early printed news sources in England relied heavily on information from manuscript newsletters and adopted the systematized format and rhetoric of newsletters.22 James Melvin Lee has found copies of news sheets that combined print and manuscript text. These combination sheets also included a blank page “in order that the latest news or freshest advices might be written in by hand.”23 Many early newspapers reproduced the newsletter verbatim in print, or merely reproduced the conceit of a letter with a greeting as a header and a salutation at the bottom of the page or for separate news items.24 Language specific to the genre of newsletters also appeared in early newspapers. Because of space constraints on manuscript

19 See Arblaster, “Posts, Newsletters, Newspapers,” 33; and Henry Snyder, “Newsletters in England, 1689-1715, with Special Reference to John Dyer—A Byway in the History of England,” in Newsletters to Newspapers: Eighteenth Century Journalism, ed. Donovan H. Bond and W. Reynolds McLeod (Morgantown: School of Journalism, West Virginia University, 1977),” 4. 20 Lee, History of American Journalism, 2. 21 In the early eighteenth century, newsletter and newspaper producers in England and the American colonies circulated their publications among themselves and regularly used the other publications as sources. See Clark, Public Prints, 64. 22 Matthias Shaaber, Some Forerunners of the Newspaper in England, 1476-1622 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1929), 54, 108, 229, 253. 23 Lee, History of American Journalism, 1. 24 Clark, Public Prints, 22.

58 newsletters, the style of writing was simple and brief, and news events were listed chronologically without background or commentary.25

Because early newspapers took on the genre constraints of manuscript newsletters, it might seem that the relationship between newsletters and newspapers is simply chronological: first newsletters, then newspapers. Lee declares, “On one matter there has been no difference of opinion: in every country the printed has grown out of the written newspaper.”26 This narrative, however, overlooks the fact that newsletters flourished beside newspapers throughout the history of journalism and that newsletters continued to evolve into print media as well. In fact, Charles Clark has argued that, in fact, the newsletter and the newspaper evolved together.27 Manuscript newsletters continued to flourish beside early printed newspapers for two main reasons. The first is that manuscript newsletters could circumvent censorship laws applicable to printed material.28 Even though newspapers appeared in England as early as the 1620s, they contained mostly foreign news, since printing domestic political news meant risking libel charges, confiscation, and imprisonment.29

Formal censorship ended in England in 1694, and while the government no longer threatened to

25 Clark, Public Prints, 21; Lisa M. Parcell, “Early American Newswriting Style: Who, What, When, Where, Why, and How,” Journalism History 37.1 (Spring 2011): 2. 26 Lee, History of American Journalism, 1. 27 Clark, Public Prints, 18, 21, 23. 28 Censorship also had effects that surfaced in newsletters, however. Augustus Jessop claims that the tone and quantity of letters altered according to censorship and suspicion; Jessop, Studies by a Recluse, in Cloister, Town, and Country (London: T. F. Unwin, 1893), 249. Letter writers during the medieval ages were mainly concerned with proving their conformity to orthodoxy, but “[w]hen James I came to the throne English society seemed to recover from the constraint which had oppressed it so long, and then everybody began to write letters—their name is legion.” During this period, letter writing became an accomplishment like violin playing, but fewer letters appear from the Commonwealth era, signaling that “everybody [was] suspicious of his next-door neighbour.” Therefore, censorship, while directly affecting newspaper printers still affected the newsletters’ content and quantity. 29 Snyder, “Newsletters in England,” 3.

59 suppress newspapers, a ban on printing the proceedings of the House of Commons still applied.

This ban—as well as libel laws favoring the government rather than the printer—gave newsletter writers an opportunity to provide exclusive information.30 Manuscript newsletters thus shifted from the primary documents in the news print culture to one genre among various kinds of news documents that fulfilled different purposes. Paul Arblaster notes that manuscript newsletters filled in the gaps left by officially approved newspapers with “the information which could be passed on freely as the currency of social intercourse, and that which could only be whispered in confidence to an ally.”31 Second, until the technology for the printing press became cheaper and quicker, it was cost effective to maintain a smaller circulation of manuscript newsletters.32 The handwritten manuscript newsletter, then, continued alongside the printed newspapers, because printed newspapers became the source for news approved by—and aligned with—state power, while newsletters became the source for news hidden by—and opposed to—state power. In other words, the newsletter evolved from a genre that served the elite to a genre that provided alternative information.

Even though the shift from manuscript newsletters to printed newspapers was not sudden or complete, it did effect changes in the newsletters’ audience and function. The story of the first newspaper in America demonstrates this shift.33 Duncan Campbell, a postmaster in Boston, began creating and distributing newsletters to the governors of the New England colonies around 1700; these letters were then passed on to others and sometimes even posted publicly. Duncan’s son, John

30 Clark, Public Prints, 17; Snyder, “Newsletters in England,” 4. 31 Arblaster, “Posts, Newsletters, Newspapers,” 22. 32 Lee, History of American Journalism, 1. 33 This was also the case in England. The Weekly Newes became the first printed newspaper in England. It appeared in 1622 and was written by Thomas Archer and published by Nathaniel Butter; Lee, History of American Journalism, 6.

Campbell, took over the postmaster position in Boston when his father, who had occupied it for nine years, died in 1702.34 When John Campbell continued the practice of newsletter writing, he used the reports he received from captains of ships and his postriders to write newsletters and circulated the letters to the subscriber list that included colonial postmasters, but also governors and public men throughout the colonies.35 Eventually the number of requests for the newsletters exceeded what he could produce by hand, so he began to print them.36 Campbell then published the first regularly printed newspaper in America called the Boston News-Letter, and it appeared in 1703.

Campbell’s move to printing his newsletter was a risky one. Just thirteen years before the

Boston News-Letter, on September 25, 1690, Benjamin Harris issued the first and only edition of

Publick Occurrences Both Foreign and Domestick. The masthead of the newspaper declared the intention of providing regular printed news, but Massachusetts Bay Colony Governor Simon Bradstreet and his council suppressed and called in the editions before forbidding the printing of anything without a license. Harris had printed the newspaper without permission, but he had also criticized the Iroquois

Indians who were allied with the English against the French and speculated about sexual affairs among the royal family in France. The order for suppression criticized the reports in Publick

Occurrences for being “doubtful and uncertain.”37 Campbell accounted for the perils of censorship by

34 There is some contradictory information about the familial relationship between Duncan and John. Lee claims that John was Duncan’s son, but that he also had a brother named Duncan who was the preceding postmaster; Lee, History of American Journalism, 21. Mott claims that Duncan was John’s brother and copying assistant; Mott, American Journalism: A History of Newspapers in the United States through 250 Years: 1690-1960 (New York: Macmillan, 1941), 11; and Clark notes that one biographical source identifies Duncan as John’s father, while another says that Duncan was “probably” John’s father; Clark, Public Prints, 73. 35 Mott, American Journalism, 11; David Paul Nord, Communities of Journalism: A History of American Newspapers and Their Readers (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001), 50-52. Charles Clark notes that two biographical sources indicate John Campbell was a bookseller but that the evidence is scanty; Clark, Public Prints, 77. 36 Lee, History of American Journalism, 18. 37 Clark, Public Prints, 73.

61 avoiding domestic news and filling his printed newspaper with mostly European and Atlantic news.38

In other words, the threat of censorship of print materials worked in the American colonies very much like the threat of censorship in Europe, and therefore manuscript newsletters became the vehicle for suppressed political information. The evolution of news media toward print materials shifted the role that newsletters occupied; instead of being the primary news source that circulated among a subscriber list (and most likely beyond that list through oral recitation), newsletters became a supplement to the mass news media. This function of newsletters has implications for the kind of public that the circulation of newsletters created. Instead of circulating as a text aligned with dominant publics, newsletters became a text that circulated in opposition to those dominant publics.

Developing Consolidated Journalistic Media

The development of the news media in the United States, especially the newspaper industry, throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries solidified the role of newsletters as alternative publications. Early in the print history of the new nation, people accessed news—and “public knowledge”—through both printed and manuscript texts, such as printed newspapers, newsletters, pamphlets, monthlies, quarterlies, magazines, journals, and bulletins.39 By the twentieth century, though, journalism had changed significantly, and printed newspapers became the main source of public knowledge while newsletters offered an alternative to the mainstream. This shift is the context for the newsletters that Eagle Forum, CWA, and NOW printed in the late twentieth century.

Through the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries, readers of newspapers did not expect neutral observation. Newspapers were published by political parties and

38 Clark, Public Prints, 73-79. See also Schudson, The Power of News, 45. 39 The American Newspaper Directory published in 1898 includes listings with each of these designations in their names.

62 contained overtly biased news and editorials written for an educated and elite readership.40 The readers of newspapers were subscribers who paid in advance for newspapers, and in order to sell more subscriptions, editors published partisan accounts of debates rather than attempting to present a balanced news story.41 However, this readership broadened during the “fiercely partisan campaigns of the press in the 1830s and 1840s” when the practice of the electorate reading newspapers both solidified and expanded. Historian Mary Ryan notes that “[b]y 1850 . . . the whole electorate was mobilized by newsprint.”42

Furthermore, the expansion of the nation westward, the electorate’s increasing suspicion of political parties, the changes in print technology, and the shifting attitude toward reading among urban populations led newspaper publishers to produce newspapers that would appeal to a wider audience. After the Civil War, the number of gainful workers dramatically increased, which led to a decline in consumer prices.43 In response, subscription prices for newspapers declined, but owners supplemented their income through advertising. In the 1870s, while subscription prices dropped, start-up costs for newspapers increased: newspapers were doubling in size from four to eight pages, more sophisticated printing presses were being used that were more expensive, and printing larger

40 Because of the biased nature of newspapers, some journalism scholars have argued that pamphlets and not newsletters were the forerunners of American newspapers. Wm. David Sloan and Julie Hedgepeth Williams, The Early American Press, 1690-1783 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994), 211ff. 41 Diane Winston, “‘Mapping the Royal Road’: An Introduction to the Oxford Handbook on Religion and the American News Media,” in The Oxford Handbook on Religion and the American News Media (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 7. 42 Mary Ryan, Civic Wars: Democracy and Public Life in the American City during the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 13. 43 The United States decennial census determined the number of “gainful workers,” which was a category from 1870 to 1940. Sociologist Philip Hauser notes, “[T]he gainful workers of the United States comprised persons who reported an occupation in response to the census inquiry”; Philip M. Hauser, “The Labor Force and Gainful Workers: Concept, Measurement, and Compatibility,” American Journal of Sociology 54.4 (January 1949): 340.

63 newspapers meant more paper and ink. The increased size, however, did offer more advertising space.44 As the American empire expanded westward, literacy increased, and communication infrastructure such as railroads, telegraph offices, and post offices became better established, the number of new newspapers nearly doubled.45 Therefore, by the 1880s and 1890s newspapers had evolved from party-press publications for the elite to politically independent and profit-driven publications with an expanded readership. In other words, as newspaper publishers adopted different practices of producing and distributing newspapers, the relationship between major newspapers and publics changed. They began to appeal to wider populations and consequently offered the moral amplification and organization for a larger and potentially more dominant public.

In the late nineteenth century, journalism was becoming more and more professionalized and was a lucrative industry for the owners of newspapers. This shift precipitated an emphasis on rationalized industrial practices, including an expectation that newspapers should provide neutral observation instead of partisan bias. Ryan says that during the 1870s, “The big urban dailies were no longer the fiefdom of crusading editors but million-dollar industries manufacturing news by employing scores of reporters.”46 These larger entities required different practices than the smaller newspaper publishers. James Carey notes, “The methods, procedures, and canons of journalism were developed not only to satisfy the demands of the profession but to meet the needs of industry to turn out a mass-produced commodity.”47 These practices moved newswriting away from the partisan press toward a mass media press, a move that Michael Schudson argues led to four

44 Jeffrey Rutenbeck, “Newspaper Trends in the 1870s: Proliferation, Popularization, and Political Independence,” Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly 72.2 (Summer 1995): 371. 45 Rutenbeck, “Newspaper Trends in the 1870s,” 361, 371, 372. 46 Ryan, Civic Wars, 276. 47 James W. Carey, “The Problem of Journalism History,” in The American Journalism History Reader: Critical and Primary Texts, ed. Bonnie Brennen and Hanno Hardt (New York: Routledge, 2011), 26.

64 expectations that journalism be “negative, detached, technical, and official.”48 These modified professional habits meant that journalists created validity and credibility by emphasizing political strategy rather than outcome and relying on highly placed government officials or a small number of experts as sources. Consequently, newswriting became “absorbed in ‘inside baseball’ analysis rather than fascinated by the question of how government should run the country.”49

These changes in journalism were responsive to the culture around it. Thomas Connery places the shifts in late nineteenth-century American journalism within the context of a cultural shift toward realism, by “presenting versions of reality as it expanded and solidified its role in rendering

American life.”50 Journalism, he says, participated in this broad cultural shift by responding to an

“emerging curiosity throughout society about contemporary life and existence, about real people, places, and events, about the present rather than the past, about life being lived rather than life as it should be lived.”51 Thus, journalistic writing became more and more constrained by the expectation of objectivity. It reflected and strengthened the move toward a fact-based paradigm, “grounded in science rather than religion and philosophy.”52

The shift toward “objective” news reduced the role of opinion in major news outlets and newspapers, but alternate publications, which now included newsletters because of the primacy of newspapers, provided the opportunity to produce and circulate opinion and news that fell outside of credible journalism. News writing, then, participated in the consolidation of print culture that Carl

Kaestle and Janice Radway argue took place between 1880 and 1940. They note that “[t]he culture of

48 Schudson, Power of News, 9. 49 Schudson, Power of News, 10. 50 Thomas B. Connery, Journalism and Realism: Rendering American Life (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2011), 2. 51 Connery, Journalism and Realism, 6 52 Connery, Journalism and Realism, 24.

65 print that emerged in the decades after 1880, like American society more generally, was pushed and pulled by contradictory pressures that, on the one hand, led to greater centralization and intensified nationalism and, on the other, produced differentiation, specialization, and alternative forms of identification.”53 Newspapers became associated with centralized news, while alternate print forms and smaller newspapers came to be associated with different and special audiences. In other words, newspapers circulated among dominant publics that provided a normalized organization of information, and newsletters became a genre that alternative publics used to circulate alternative models of public knowledge.

Newspapers publicized issues according to an increasingly professionalized and corporatized viewpoint that served as the organizing principle for public knowledge. Moving into the mid- twentieth century, the consolidation and professionalization of newspapers and journalism continued. Ryan argues that because of the “exploding population, the volatility of rapid urban transportation, and the overcrowding of local spaces of assembly . . . the communication and opposition so essential to democracy were increasingly conducted not through public meetings but through publicity.”54 James Baughman notes that the high demand for newspapers in the postwar period of the late 1940s “rendered the newspaper industry very tradition bound.”55 He points to some of the constraints that newspaper editors negotiated: newspapers’ reliance on advertisers, editors’ and publishers’ inclusion in the powerful elite, and a demand for local news. These

53 Carl F. Kaestle and Janice A. Radway, “A Framework for the History of Publishing and Reading in the United States, 1880-1940,” in A History of the Book in America, vol. 4, Print in Motion: The Expansion of Publishing and Reading in the United States, 1880-1940, ed. Carl F. Kaestle and Janice Radway (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 17. 54 Ryan, Civic Wars, 309. 55 James L. Baughman, “Wounded but Not Slain: The Orderly Retreat of the American Newspaper,” in A History of the Book in America, vol. 5, The Enduring Book: Print Culture in Postwar America, eds. David Paul Nord, Joan Shelley Rubin, and Michael Schudson (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 119.

66 conditions led to the lack of critiques of powerful businesses or politicians and the exclusion of coverage of minority populations and opinions. Baughman is careful to note, however, that these changes were not wholly bad: “[H]ometown owners did not always best serve their readers,” because they might “be too tied to area business and political elites.”56 He also describes a shift from working-class journalists during the postwar period to more educated and professionalized journalists through the 1960s and 1970s.57 Continued consolidation of newspapers into major media companies throughout this time period changed the value system for editors and publishers.

Similarly, underground newspaper historian John McMillian notes that newspapers had become such valuable properties that by 1962 only twelve management organizations controlled one-third of the newspapers circulated in the United States. These corporations preferred well-educated and

“sophisticated” employees who produced “a ubiquity of increasingly bland, cautious, and professionally balanced journalism.”58 He laments that “[a]ngry and iconoclastic opinions, which flourished in a formerly diverse world of newspapers, were largely restricted from the news diets fed to most Americans.”59 The explosion of the underground press in the 1960s and 1970s offered those alternative views.

Newsletters as an Alternative to Mass Media

As more information and opinions were excluded from credible journalism, newsletters became one medium for news outside the consolidated mass media. Journalists and authors of newsletter-writing guides throughout the twentieth century celebrate newsletters as a new genre that

56 Baughman, “Wounded but Not Slain,” 123. 57 Baughman, “Wounded but Not Slain,” 125. 58 John McMillian, Smoking Typewriters: The Sixties Underground Press and the Rise of Alternative Media in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 8. 59 McMillian, Smoking Typewriters, 8.

67 has the potential to provide alternative and beneficial news to their readers. Praise for newsletters as a new development neglects to account for the long history of newsletters in modern journalism. A

Harper’s Magazine article written by Ferdinand Lundberg in 1939 claimed that newsletter circulation signaled “the greatest new departure in the newspaper business since the invention of the telegraph, the linotype, and the rotary press.”60 Lundberg sees newsletters as a supplement to and a challenge for the newspaper business. Lundberg says that Percival Huntington Whaley, the editor of the first major newsletter of the twentieth century, acknowledged that “the idea of the news-letter grew out of dissatisfaction with the newspaper editorial page, which had become increasingly timorous, unprecise, and unenlightening in the interpretation of news.”61 Before beginning the Whaley-Eaton

Letter in 1918, Whaley was the editor of Philadelphia’s Evening Ledger, and his coeditor Henry M.

Eaton was the editor of three different newspapers in Philadelphia. These two editors expressed dissatisfaction with the newspaper business as a rationalized and industrialized enterprise, and responded by founding a newsletter.62 Lundberg also notes that newsletters have a capability to get around censorship, which was heightened during World War I and remained a concern especially in

1940 as the United States debated involvement in World War II. Lundberg mentions direct censorship but focuses on what he calls indirect censorship. Indirect censorship includes the actions

60 Ferdinand Lundberg, “News-Letters: A Revolution in Journalism,” Harper’s Magazine 180 (December 1939): 463. 61 Lundberg, “News-Letters: A Revolution,” 464. 62 One journalist claims that Whaley and Eaton used the Fugger newsletters published in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries as a model. The collection of Fugger newsletters actually included not only handwritten newsletters from official newsletter writers, but also broadsheets sold on the street, and reports from agents of the Fugger financial institution in other parts of Europe. The newsletters from this earlier time period were in fact much different than the Whaley-Eaton Letter since they offered no commentary, but a list of news including rumors, trivial occurrences, and major events with no pattern of organization or editing. See Matthews, News and Rumor in Renaissance Europe.

68 of government officials who “discriminate socially and professionally against independent-minded journalists,” and he writes that “the consciousness of a unity of interest with advertisers must affect the vision of a newspaper publisher.”63 Here, Lundberg’s concern is the lack of diversity of opinion and commentary. According to Lundberg, newsletters can help widen and deepen public knowledge since they are used by “groups and individuals concerned neither with making a profit nor guiding business men, but rather with spreading information or views of certain kinds as a public service.”64

In other words, newsletters offered an alternative to mass media news and so were usually seen as outside standardized journalism.

One newsletter-writing guide by Virginia Burke published in 1958 points to the objectivity standard in newspaper journalism as the impetus for the revival of the newsletter in the early twentieth century.65 She mentions that, unlike newspapers, newsletters are “free from the pressures of large advertisers and government censorship,” and therefore newsletters garner the “respect and support of small groups of readers whose interests were not adequately served by mass circulation publications.”66 Another newsletter-writing guide by Nancy Brigham published in 1982 dedicated an entire chapter to a discussion of the role of newsletters within the larger news culture.67 In a chapter titled, “Why Your Newsletter or Paper Is Special,” Brigham spends two pages explaining the state of mass media in the early 1980s and characterizes it as driven by corporate interests, disproportionate coverage of “high society folks,” negligence of “collective social issues,” and misrepresentation of

63 Lundberg, “News-Letters: A Revolution,” 465. 64 Lundberg, “News-Letters: A Revolution,” 466. 65 Virginia M. Burke, Newsletter Writing and Publishing: A Practical Guide (New York: Bureau of Publications, Teachers College, Columbia University, 1958), 2. 66 Burke, Newsletter Writing and Publishing, 2. 67 Nancy Brigham, How to Do Leaflets, Newsletters, and Newspapers (New York: Hastings House Publishers, 1982).

“normal people.”68 She criticizes mass media journalism for the limited range of choices it offers the public and encourages her readers: “No matter how inexperienced you are as a newspaper or newsletter editor, you’re filling a vacuum.”69 She advises potential newsletter writers to publish articles that stick to the evidence, offer a range of views, and comply with the editorial policy of the newsletter. In her view, then, newsletters offer an alternative to mass media whose sole purpose is

“to make a profit.”70 These writing guides critique mass media news for being monolithic and for serving its own interests rather than the interests of the public, and they offer newsletters as a way to provide news that conforms to more specialized interests. In other words, the use of newsletters was to supplement and even to oppose the normalized ways of organizing information that mass media news provided.

The “oppositional press” in the 1960s and 1970s, as defined by James Danky, responded to these same critiques. A significant increase in alternative publications resulted from the increasing professionalization and conservative nature of the major newspapers beginning in the early twentieth century and continuing through the mid-twentieth century, which Baughman and

McMillian noted, as well as the marginalization of leftist thought during the Cold War, growing dissatisfaction with the political establishment, the civil rights movement, and the sexual revolution.71 The oppositional press was made up of “nonstandard, nonestablishment publications that advocate[d] social change.”72 The underground print culture of the 1960s and 1970s was characterized by a countercultural attitude, and in many ways the practice that individuals and

68 Brigham, How to Do Leaflets, 14. 69 Brigham, How to Do Leaflets, 17. 70 Brigham, How to Do Leaflets, 19. 71 James Danky notes the problem of the terms “underground” and “alternative” when he says, “Definition of terms like ‘underground’ vary considerably”; James Danky, “The Oppositional Press,” in History of the Book in America 5: 561n1. 72 Danky, “The Oppositional Press,” 269.

70 groups used to produce and distribute the newsletters reflected their countercultural commitments.

The publications of the oppositional press, Danky writes, “espoused radical politics, endorsed ‘youth culture,’ covered taboo subjects such as recreational drug use, employed wildly innovative layouts, and contained graphic sexual material.”73 The graphics challenged established artistic norms, the articles covered taboo subjects and expressed strident opinions, the papers often circulated for free, and the contributors and editors eschewed hierarchical organizational structures. In other words, these publications were created with literary practices deliberately opposed to the dominant norms of mass media news, and these literary practices correlated with the countercultural nature of the publics among which these texts circulated.

The newsletters examined in this study took advantage of the technological innovations that the underground press developed in the 1960s and 1970s. These underground newspapers paved the way for the efficient and cheap distribution of graphically sophisticated print material in the 1980s.74

Danky notes, “What was new about the alternative press of the 1960s were the ways in which a matrix of developments coalesced to produce the print explosion.”75 Photo-offset printing allowed anyone with a typewriter, scissors, and glue easily to photograph an original layout that could be reproduced by the thousands.76 Two of the newsletters examined in this study began during this print explosion, but all three used the technical innovations that the oppositional press developed.77

73 Danky, “Oppositional Press,” 272. 74 Danky, “Oppositional Press,” 271. 75 Danky, “Oppositional Press,” 272. 76 See McMillian, Smoking Typewriters, 6: “All one needed was a competent typist, a pair of scissors, and a jar of rubber cement with which to paste copy onto a backing sheet, which was then photographed and reproduced exactly as it was set.” See also Junko Onosaka, Feminist Revolution in Literacy: Women’s Bookstores in the United States (New York: Routledge, 2006), 15: “[W]ith a few dollars, a pot of glue, a typewriter, and a handful of volunteers to write and lay out stories, several thousand copies of an offset tabloid newspaper could be printed.” 77 NOW’s newsletter began in the late 1960s as Do It NOW, and The National NOW Times replaced it in 1977. Because of the lack of a focused collection, the official beginning date of the newsletter is

However, the organizations used countercultural practices of the oppositional press in conjunction with practices that conformed to more dominant norms. For example, the newsletters that Eagle

Forum, CWA, and NOW published simultaneously voiced strident opinions and encouraged conformity to the norms of political action.78 The organizations used technologies of production developed by the oppositional press, but they also required a subscription cost and edited the content to support a hierarchical organizational structure. More radical groups on the left encouraged anarchy, dissolution of the distinction of sex, and separatist colonies, while more radical groups on the right encouraged militarism, racial discrimination, and separatist colonies.79 In the

1980s, the production and circulation of the newsletters of Eagle Forum, CWA, and NOW show the contradictions of claims to oppose the dominant culture while also supporting it.

Women’s Organizations and Their Publications

Part of the reason for the explosion of print in the 1960s and 1970s was the increase of publications from women’s groups, and this explosion followed a historical precedent of women’s groups circulating original publications. Publications for and by women in the United States in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were not often political, but more often prepared for amusement and instruction.80 For example, The Lady’s Magazine; and Repository of Entertaining Knowledge

unknown. Most collections fix the date as 1968. The first edition of The Phyllis Schlafly Report is dated August 1967, and the first edition of Concerned Women of America’s newsletter, which announces the organization’s formation, is dated Spring 1979. 78 Jo Freeman, The Politics of Women’s Liberation (New York: David McKay Company, 1973), 6. 79 See Firestone, Dialectic of Sex; Juliet Mitchell, Women’s Estate (New York: Vintage Books, 1973); Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985); Alice Echols, Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 1967-1975 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989). 80 Bertha-Monica Stearns, “Reform Periodicals and Female Reformers,” American Historical Review 37.4 (July 1932): 678.

72 was published for two years beginning in 1792 in Philadelphia and included fiction, letters, poetry, marriage announcements, and obituaries. Eight editions of Toilet: A Weekly Collection of Literary Pieces

Principally Designed for the Amusement of the Ladies were published in 1801 in Charleston, South

Carolina, and included fiction, poetry, and humor.81 As late as the 1880s, if newspapers wanted to target women, they would increase “coverage of home, fashion, and etiquette rather than woman’s rights.”82

Like the women of the feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s, some women in the nineteenth century were dissatisfied with the lack of substance in women’s publications, and so they began publishing their own newspapers, journals, magazines, pamphlets, and newsletters. In 1828

Frances Wright began editing the Free Enquirer and worked to “regenerate erring humanity.”83 Other reformers followed her example and published texts covering a variety of issues, including intemperance, vice, prostitution, “masculine failings,” and slavery.84 Many of the publications were short-lived, and, E. Claire Jerry notes, “[Their editors] were not welcomed into the field of journalism as were their more restrained sisters who edited the accepted ‘ladies’ magazines.’”85 Some of these magazines were addressed to both men and women; Bertha-Monica Stearns observes that some editors and writers “expressed disapproval of distinct publications of any kind for women, believing that whatever was suited to educated man was equally suited to educated woman.”86 In the

81 James Danky, ed., Women’s Periodicals and Newspapers from the 18th Century to 1981 (Boston: G.K. Hall, 1982), 106, 206. 82 E. Claire Jerry, “The Role of Newspapers in the Nineteenth-Century Woman’s Movement,” in A Voice of Their Own: The Woman Suffrage Press, 1840-1910, ed. Martha M. Solomon (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1991), 19. 83 Stearns, “Reform Periodicals and Female Reformers,” 678. 84 Jerry, “Role of Newspapers,” 20. 85 Stearns, “Reform Periodicals and Female Reformers,” 679, 686. 86 Stearns, “Reform Periodicals and Female Reformers,” 686.

1840s, however, women began creating political publications specifically for women in order to unite and exercise feminine power.

Early advocates for woman suffrage faced a number of obstacles that original serial publications helped them to overcome. In the 1840s and 1850s, these advocates needed to persuade women of their common oppression in order to gain new supporters for woman suffrage while sustaining supporters with information and news. Martha Solomon notes that conventions, rallies, and public meetings were ways advocates communicated their message, but these events had significant constraints. These meetings were transitory with only limited—and usually unfavorable— accounts of their occurrence or content in the mainstream press, and “many women were unable or hesitant to attend.”87 One common strategy woman suffrage advocates used in their periodicals was to weave the issue of woman’s rights together with other appeals that already had popular support.

Following the passage of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments in the late 1860s, the leaders of the woman suffrage movement needed a way to circulate news and information that maintained members’ commitment to the cause and to a sense of community. Therefore, many texts published by advocates for woman suffrage addressed women directly, and publicized news and personal stories of women that gave women an alternative vision of what womanhood could be.88 These publications “were able to bridge the gaps of time and distance, educating and uniting women across the country. . . . In one sense, newspapers and journals became the ties that bound women together and made them into a social movement.”89 These serial publications for women advocated for change, educated women into political action, and helped create and maintain a community.

87 Martha M. Solomon, “The Role of the Suffrage Press in the Woman’s Rights Movement,” in A Voice of Their Own, ed. Solomon, 13. 88 Solomon, “Role of the Suffrage Press,” 13. 89 Solomon, “Role of the Suffrage Press,” 15.

A century later, the vibrant print culture of the women’s movement during the 1960s and

1970s worked for similar purposes. As we have already seen, this period in American history saw a significant increase in the alternative and underground press, and women’s publications were a major participant. First, women’s mass media magazines and other publications were unsuccessful at appealing to young women readers, but they continued to neglect to address the woman question.

Thus, the lucrative market of young women readers could sustain an alternative, feminist press. And second, the presence and success of the underground press proved that such alternative publications had a substantial readership. Through their participation in this underground press, many women had an opportunity to practice and develop what came to be called “personalized journalism.”90

More than simply imitating other radical groups, however, many feminist groups believed they would “create a space of freedom for women, but would also and ultimately change in the dominant world outside that space.”91 Trysh Travis notes that this led to a strict adherence to nonhierarchical organizational structures and limited editorial intervention. The distribution of these texts was meant to create social change and while some publications posted or requested a subscription fee, many also stated that the recipient could send whatever she could afford. This means that no one reimbursed the producers for the cost of some copies, contributing to lost profits. The women who published these texts saw the production and circulation of their work as political action, and their radical politics informed the processes of publication.

The three organizations examined in this study also informed their publication processes with their politics, and the production and circulation of their newsletters demonstrate that their

90 Anne Mather, “A History of Feminist Periodicals, Part II,” Journalism History 1.4 (Winter 1974/1975): 108. 91 Trysh Travis, “The Women in Print Movement: History and Implications,” Book History 11 (2008): 276.

75 politics were much less radical than their immediate ancestors. In other words, these organizations combined countercultural publication practices with more dominant publication processes that reflected and enacted the contradictions of counterpublicity and publicity. For example, in order to receive a newsletter from Eagle Forum, CWA, or NOW, a reader had to send in a small donation, with the amount specified. Even though these organizations were operated as non-profits and for political action rather as financial investments, they still required money for production. None of the editions of the newsletters during the 1980s from these organizations included qualifying statements about sending what one could. Again, this is not to say that circulation was limited to those who paid for it, but that someone paid for each copy.

Furthermore, each of these newsletters had an authoritative rather than a collaborative voice.

The editorial masthead of CWA’s and NOW’s newsletters included editors, assistant editors, and contributors. The Phyllis Schlafly Report, however, is different. There is no author, no editor, and no staff listed, but Schlafly confirms that she wrote the entirety of the newsletters’ content.92 Here, hierarchy is preserved by not allowing any voice but her own. All these practices of production signify a desire for a consistent, authoritative message. When letters from readers appear in the newsletters from CWA or NOW, they either affirm the organization’s work or frame dissent in ways that validate the leadership’s decisions rather than challenging them.

Owing to the women’s movement of the 1960s and 1970s, national political discourse was open to women in new ways, and the newsletters in this study are examples of what Schudson calls

“printed instructions on what the customs of the new land are and how to succeed in it.”93 Indeed,

92 Schlafly, discussion with author. The Phyllis Schlafly Report does contain reprints of court testimony or editorials from others, but Schlafly wrote the bulk of the content. She said that many times she used her weekly newspaper column to create the content for the monthly newsletter. 93 Michael Schudson, “General Introduction: The Enduring Book in a Multimedia Age,” in A History of the Book in America 5: 21.

76 as Kathryn Thoms Flannery argues, women “learned to use publishing as a form of political action, as a way to create a network of activist women, and most important . . . as a vehicle for education and the development of new ideas. . . . But, more than just ‘reflecting,’ the newsletters, newspapers and journals helped shape those ideologies and issues of the growing movement. . . . They wrestled with how to enact their feminist principles not only in the content and form of their periodicals but also in their organizational structure and their relationships with their readers.”94 In other words, these newsletters shaped the ideologies of the publics in which they circulated. The content offered arguments and organizing principles, but the production practices also contributed to the ideology of these publics. By using a countercultural genre, these organizations positioned themselves as opposed to dominant culture; by altering that countercultural genre to be more in line with the norms of dominant news media, these organizations positioned themselves as credible and legitimate sources of information. Furthermore, these newsletters offered a way for women to understand themselves as part of something larger. The readers could use these newsletters as proof that they had a place in national politics, and that a community of other women from across the country shared this place.

Religious Publishing

Scholars have noted that newsletters have commonly contributed to the creation and maintenance of communities and belonging. Religious denominations, missionaries, and parachurch organizations have used newsletters and other print forms to communicate with their members and

94 Kathryn Thoms Flannery, Feminist Literacies, 1968-75 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005), 29.

77 to create and maintain a sense of community.95 The newsletters published by CWA examined in this study are connected to the history of serial publications concerning religion because they addressed their audience as believers, assuming agreement with evangelical Christian theology, practice, and community. Eagle Forum’s newsletters mentioned Judeo-Christian morality and church membership, but as I will discuss further in chapter 2, they maintained a more ecumenical approach that places them within a more political than a religious print culture. Even though NOW newsletters engage religious audiences through reporting on partnerships with religious organizations, supporting religious women advocating feminist causes, and recommending religious reading, the newsletters do not share the same print history as the newsletters of CWA. The following chapters will explore the similarities among and differences between these groups, but here I present the history of religious publishing in the twentieth century as part of the context in which the 1980s newsletters were generated.

The need to create and maintain a community over space and time encouraged groups of all kinds to publish serials, but recent scholarship has highlighted the unique relationship that American

Protestants have with reading material that can be traced back to the Puritans. David Paul Nord argues that American Puritans’ theory of reading followed from their theological belief that the Bible is transparent and accessible to any reader. This belief carried over into the Puritans’ understanding of publishing texts: Nord notes the belief that “meaning flowed directly from text to reader; ordinary laypeople could get it. In a sense, this was the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers as literary

95 Parachurch organizations “are not part of the traditional, organized church, yet are engaged in churchlike activities.” The increase of parachurch organizations in the United States during the late twentieth century “is the advent of a new structure that allows Christians to organize as a nonprofit, to raise funds, and to tackle a highly specific problem or need in fulfillment of a Christian mission”; Welsey K. Willmer, J. David Schmidt, and Martyn Smith, The Prospering Parachurch: Enlarging the Boundaries of God’s Kingdom (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1998), 12, 27.

78 theory.”96 Nord traces this theory of reading to Martin Luther, who “proclaimed printing to be

‘God’s highest and extremest act of grace, whereby the business of the Gospel is driven forward.’”97

In Puritan America, the belief in God’s providence led to more effort to learn God’s ways, not less.

Nord explains, “For most of the founders of the New England way, preparation was possible, and a key element of it must be hearing and reading the word.”98 Tracy Fessenden notes a similar

Protestant approach to reading “as a means to spiritual maturity.”99 Furthermore, Protestants’ privileging of private and reflective reading encouraged the understanding of religion as “interior, spiritual, and subjective and not as social, embodied, and historical.”100

Given this attitude toward reading, publishing was an early endeavor of the American

Puritans. Nord notes that not all Puritan publications were religious in content, but he also argues that even the printing of the news had its justification in theology and that readers of those news reports interpreted news items according to dominant beliefs about God. Not only did readers need to be familiar with the Bible and religious materials, but they also needed to understand God as intervening and directing history. Consequently, the printing of news assumed a “proper interpretation [that] seemed self-evident.”101 Nord calls this teleological news. Colonial government control over news publications also contributed to the authoritative nature of news. For example, the General Court of Massachusetts enacted a ban on publishing outside of Cambridge until 1674.

Boston then became the center of printing with a more market-focused approach to the news, but

96 David Paul Nord, Faith in Reading: Religious Publishing and the Birth of Mass Media in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 23. 97 Nord, Faith in Reading, 13. 98 Nord, Faith in Reading, 15. 99 Tracy Fessenden, Culture and Redemption: Religion, the Secular, and American Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 37. 100 Fessenden, Culture and Redemption, 178. 101 Nord, Communities of Journalism, 46.

79 one still remaining within the official tradition of authoritative interpretation.102 This tradition, however, coincided with the belief in the priesthood of every believer that encouraged individuals to read and interpret any reading material. Nord concludes, “Thus the characteristics of news and news reporting that emerged in seventeenth-century New England—current-event orientation, supported by reportorial empiricism and authoritative interpretation—left a wonderfully ambiguous legacy, a legacy for both orthodoxy and heresy in modern American journalism.”103 Consequently, I argue here that early Puritan attitudes toward reading and printing shaped enduring cultural institutions in the

United States that continued to have an influence in the late twentieth century, such as the attribution of credibility and legitimacy of major news sources as well as alternative publications that challenge those sources.

Throughout the nineteenth century, the relationship between religion and news publishing shifted significantly. As the teleological view of news faded out of newspapers during the eighteenth century, newspapers still included religious as well as secular news, but newspaper editors valued political partisanship in order to sell more subscriptions. The number of newspapers increased dramatically in the early nineteenth century along with new technology that lowered printing and distribution costs. With the arrival of the penny press in the 1830s, religion became the focus of a section of the newspaper equal in importance to other subjects. The sensationalist writing and editing of penny press papers emphasized scandal and controversy, sometimes involving churches and religious figures. When Henry Jarvis Raymond launched the New York Times in 1851 and began

102 Nord places the first newspaper, John Campbell’s Boston News-Letter within this tradition; Nord, Communities of Journalism, 50-52. 103 Nord, Communities of Journalism, 50.

80 the era of more factual reporting, coverage of religion decreased, and this trend continued after the

Civil War.104

By the late nineteenth century, as religious news moved more and more to the periphery in major news sources, clergy began to criticize the press for its “lack of social responsibility and moral leadership.” Over the next few decades as journalists “aligned themselves with the forces of progress and reason as opposed to religion and superstition,” religious publications served more specific communities and purposes.105 Concurrent with journalism’s consolidating practices at the turn of the twentieth century, as Kaestle and Radway assert, was “the emergence of print forms targeting, among others, non-English speakers, African Americans, working-class readers, women, people with particular religious views and affiliations, socialists, imagists, and a range of others who had reason to question dominant cultural formations and the views and values that underwrote them.”106

Newsletters were one of these print forms, along with bulletins, monthlies, trade magazines, and smaller newspapers. With the advent of cheaper printing technology, more and smaller religious groups began printing their own publications in order to serve their specific communities. William

Trollinger explains that alternate publishing efforts within religious communities “were indispensable” to “creating and maintaining communities of believers” and to establishing “religious legitimacy.” Indeed, “religious groups with magazines were marked as worthy of respect and attention.”107 In other words, publications added credibility to religious groups. Therefore, Schlafly’s comment that began this chapter that paper and mail were the only things Eagle Forum had to

104 Stewart M. Hoover, Religion in the News: Faith and Journalism in American Public Discourse (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1998), 20. 105 Winston, “Mapping the Royal Road,” 8. 106 Kaestle and Radway, “Framework for the History of Publishing and Reading,” 17. 107 William Vance Trollinger Jr., “An Outpouring of ‘Faithful’ Words: Protestant Publishing in the United States,” in History of the Book in America 4: 362.

81 communicate with its members becomes a comment on credibility. Schlafly understood that a regularly printed text contributed to her group’s legitimacy, and therefore that medium took on greater significance within the organization than all the other rhetorical activity she and Eagle Forum produced.

The contentious relationship between established journalism and religion that both Eagle

Forum’s and CWA’s newsletters expound can be traced back to the major newspapers’ coverage of the Scopes trial in 1925. Before this trial, newspapers had followed the debate between fundamentalism and modernism, but the derision of fundamentalists’ anti-evolution position during the Scopes trial made religious conservatives skeptical of the media and secular elites skeptical of religious conservatives.108 Many Protestant denominations began to emphasize separation from the world and its secular concerns, and focused on evangelism rather than politics or world events.

Throughout the 1950s, the watchdog role of journalism moved to the forefront, and the differentiation between the religious press and mainstream journalism became more pronounced.109

In other words, the vilification of major news as a threat to religious communities in both Eagle

Forum’s and CWA’s newsletters of the 1980s had been present in American religious publications for at least sixty years.

CWA’s newsletters also participate in the shift within the Protestant press that occurred during the twentieth century. Opposition to dominant, “secular” culture characterized fundamentalist evangelical culture in the early and mid-twentieth century, but beginning in the

1960s, more evangelicals were dismayed by the lack of influence that evangelicals enjoyed in

American culture. These evangelicals, including Billy Graham, called for a more engaged approach

108 Winston, “Mapping the Royal Road,” 9. 109 Debra L. Mason, “Religion News Coverage between 1930 and 1960,” in The Oxford Handbook on Religion and the American News Media ed. Diane Winston (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 75.

82 to politics, society, and culture. In 1963, Martin Marty specifically called for the Protestant press to change not only the content of its publications but also its circulation practices. He said that

Protestant print culture was “in a paradoxical situation. To the public it is largely invisible. To

Protestantism it is furiously active and ever-present.”110 Here, he evaluates the effectiveness of the

Protestant press and its isolation from public life. Marty concluded his study with a call for a more engaged religious press:

The Protestant press, in the main, has [been] . . . unable to cope with pluralism and

secularity as arenas for witness, [and] for the most part it withdraws from the public

arena. . . . [T]he press largely engages in building morale, nurturing group loyalty, and

ministering to what Americans already instinctively engage in, at the expense of

understanding a revolutionary world and participating in its dynamisms in the name

of the Lordship of Jesus Christ.111

Martin, therefore, calls for Protestant publications that participate in secular discussions and have an impact on a wider public than merely religious life. As fundamentalists continued to shift toward a more politically engaged evangelical Protestantism throughout the 1960s and 1970s, the Protestant press reflected a greater concern with the “secular” world, especially politics. As I will show in chapter 3, Tim and Beverly LaHaye are an example of the shift of isolated fundamentalists to engaged evangelicals. The production and circulation of the CWA newsletters answers this call by providing evangelical women the information and the organizing principles by which they could engage with secular issues while remaining committed to a conservative evangelical religious culture.

110 Martin E. Marty, “The Protestant Press: Limitations and Possibilities,” in The Religious Press in America (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1963), 16. 111 Marty, “Protestant Press,” 32.

Furthermore, the organization addressed the newsletters to outsiders by participating in public discussions relevant to a wider public than an evangelical audience.

The history of religious publishing in the United States shows that the newsletters that both

Eagle Forum and CWA produced and published conformed to particular expectations of their religious audiences. First, these newsletters addressed religious groups as alternatives to the dominant culture. Second, these newsletters consistently criticized the mass media as a threat to religious belief and religious communities. Third, CWA was an evangelical organization that provided a more engaged approach to secular issues, and the newsletters invited readers to reconcile their conservative evangelical religion with the modern life of the nation. In these ways, the newsletters established a particular lifeworld for the publics in which they circulated. The next section will examine more closely the relationship between the newsletter as a genre and the implications for publics.

Newsletters and Publics

Even though the genre of the newsletter has existed for centuries, the types of publics that circulated them and the ideologies the newsletters reflected underwent a number of shifts. The newsletters in this study enacted distinct conceptions of publics through their specific production processes, the selection of content, and political arguments. In other words, what kind of information the newsletters include, to whom they are sent, and the content of their arguments projects and relies upon an understanding of who can participate in the public and what that participation should look like. A look back at the newsletters already mentioned will demonstrate my point here.

The merchants and diplomats of early modern Europe made up the client lists for the early newsletters, not only because their decisions required news but also because they could afford the subscription cost. The writers and agencies that produced and circulated newsletters charged a subscription. This restricted circulation led Habermas to claim that these newsletters lacked publicness since they were not accessible to the general public. In fact, the publicness of these newsletters cannot be judged. As Matthias Shaaber notes, “letters would be passed round through many hands for the sake of the news in them.”112 Regarding newsletters circulated to a client list, he acknowledges that “it is quite probable that each letter was read by dozens besides the client to whom it was addressed.”113 Because letters had an unknown number of recipients, Augustus Jessop argues that during the seventeenth century in England, “The letter-writers were writing for an outside public, and how large that public might grow to be no one could say.”114 Habermas’s judgment that newsletters lacked publicness is further complicated by Benjamin Lee’s critique of

Habermas’s ideology of print production and consumption that “explicitly represents the roles of authors and readers as the starting point for constructing a public whose boundaries are coterminous with the citizenry.”115 This ideology does not account for the reliance of written work on oral communication, and the impossibility of extracting one from the other. As Ian Atherton argues,

All forms of written news—newsbooks and newspapers, pamphlets, newsletters,

sermons, plays, and ballads—depended heavily upon spoken transmission, and the

last four lay across the permeable interface between the oral and the written. Too

112 Shaaber, Some Forerunners, 2. 113 Shaaber, Some Forerunners, 307. 114 Jessop, Studies by a Recluse, in Cloister, Town, and Country, 250. 115 Lee, “Textuality, Mediation, and Public Discourse,” 408.

clear a distinction should not be drawn between oral news and newsletters. . . .

Newsletters conveyed common rumour and, once received, their contents were

divulged to others by word of mouth and by further letters.116

This fluid interaction of oral and written communication means that while the processes of producing manuscript newsletters rely on literate recipients, the circulation of those newsletters beyond the subscriber list and beyond a literate audience means that the relationship of newsletters to the public might be more direct than Habermas recognizes.117 This analysis might also lend support for Nancy Fraser’s critique of Habermas that “the relationship between publicity and status is more complex than Habermas intimates,” since access to written texts could be gained through oral and aural transmission. The circulation of written texts was not limited to those who could buy and read them, and therefore the theorization of the publics that circulated these newsletters must account for a broader circulation.

Newspapers did replace newsletters as the primary medium of news, but the transition from one to the other also created a shift in readership. The first newspaper in the American colonies demonstrates this. John Campbell’s move to printing the newsletter in the American colonies was an effort to improve and sell the newsletter to more people, but Clark argues that the regularly printed

116 Ian Atherton, “The Itch Grown a Disease: Manuscript Transmission of News in the Seventeenth Century,” Prose Studies: History, Theory, Criticism 21.2 (1998): 39. 117 Göran Leth suggests that the common understanding that the rise of a liberal ideology led to a critical press is in fact backward. He argues instead, “A critical press paves the way for a liberal ideology.” Furthermore, he notes that since English newspapers in the 1620s and 1630s were critical of government authorities and that they “became a vehicle for generating and propelling public debate,” “we can actually locate the rise of a public sphere to a period predating the time suggested by Habermas by a century”; Leth, “A Protestant Public Sphere: The Early European Newspaper Press,” Studies in Newspaper and Periodical History, 1993 Annual, ed. Michael Harris and Tom O’Malley (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994), 67-90. See also Geoff Kemp and Jason McElligott, introduction to Censorship and the Press, 1580-1720, vol. 1, eds. Geoff Kemp and Jason McElligott (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2009): xxii.

86 editions put Campbell “into a rather different world of communications” because of the change of readership. Campbell had sent the manuscript newsletters to a known client list, whereas he sold the printed newspaper in Boston to an unknown audience. Michael Warner accounts for the distinction between known and unknown audiences when he claims that the formulation of a public includes the requirement of a relation among strangers. Writing for intended receivers “can go astray,” but

“[w]riting to a public . . . cannot go astray in the same way because reaching strangers is its primary orientation.”118 In the case of John Campbell’s newsletters, Clark argues that he produced them for a known audience; therefore, if subscribers circulated the newsletters beyond the client list, the newsletters would be going astray. In contrast, Campbell’s printed newspapers could not go astray in the same way. Furthermore, the circulation of texts through sales to an audience of strangers affects the processes of production. Clark argues that newsletter writing in general primarily served to inform readers, whereas the role of writing newspapers becomes one “who creates, produces, and markets a product.”119 The author of marketed newspapers has a different purpose than the author of newsletters: “Far from being the servant of his reader or in league with him, the propagandist tries to bring a largely anonymous and therefore impersonal audience into sympathy with his own view or compliance with his purposes.”120 In other words, as the transition from manuscript newsletters to printed newspapers occurred, the newsletter’s relationship to a public also changed.

In the United States during the mid-twentieth century, the newsletter became a genre for the oppositional press. The common features of underground publications, such as free circulation and lack of a hierarchical editorial board, enacted and reflected the lifeworld imagined by these alternative publics. In other words, by not requiring payment for their publications, they expanded

118 Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 74. 119 Clark, Public Prints, 79. 120 Clark, Public Prints, 23.

87 their readership beyond those with expendable income. And by intentionally publishing articles without editing them, publishers of these newsletters demonstrated a commitment to the voicing of any opinion in any fashion, without ensuring conformity to an editorial policy that might otherwise exclude it. Underground publication writers tried to “build an intellectual framework for the

Movement’s expansion,” but also “imbued their newspapers with an ethos that socialized people into the Movement, fostered a spirit of mutuality among them, and raised their democratic expectations.”121 Other common features, such as arresting graphics and provoking articles, enacted and reflected the subversive political commitments of the organizations and writers that published them. In other words, they established their public’s norms through the production and circulation processes they used for their texts.

Even though the newsletters in this study appeared during the countercultural print explosion of the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s and used the same technology, they worked to shore up the established political system rather than dismantle it. The differences between the common features of the underground publications and the newsletters that Eagle Forum, CWA, and NOW published reflect the differences between radical political commitments and the more conservative ones that the three organizations held. Instead of free circulation and the lack of an editorial board, the newsletters in this study enforced a subscription price that increased over the years and maintained an authoritative position toward their readers. In other words, these newsletters did not intentionally reach out to readers that mass media might exclude, and they consistently maintained an editorial policy that did not allow dissent. The newsletters conformed to mass media norms in appearance, in the topics they covered, and in the kinds of political action they encouraged. In other words, these newsletters did not offer the same challenge to the established

121 McMillian, Smoking Typewriters, 4.

88 political sphere that the more radical newspapers did. The major difference between the underground or oppositional press of the 1960s and 1970s and the newsletters in this study is the attitude toward the established public sphere. While the earlier publications railed against the establishment, Eagle Forum, CWA, and NOW used their newsletters to educate women into the established political system.

My argument here is that the production practices of newsletters implicate certain types of publics. In the case of these modern newsletters, the subscription lists, the need for literacy, and the temporality of their circulation all need to be accounted for, but so do the newsletters’ reliance on oral news and their circulation of content through oral recitation. The type of public that the newsletters circulate among depends on these processes. In the same way, the processes by which the organizations in this study produced and circulated their newsletters implicated the lifeworlds of the publics within which their newsletters circulated.

Chapter 2: Eagle Forum and the Grassroots Antifeminist Public Imagine Feminism as a

Betrayal of Womanhood

Phyllis Schlafly officially began a political activist group called STOP ERA in 1972, four years after NOW was formed, but she had been involved in politics for many years and was well known in conservative circles. Born in St. Louis in 1924, Phyllis Stewart earned a political science degree from Washington University in St. Louis in 1944 and a master’s degree in government from

Radcliffe College in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1945; she then worked for the American

Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C. In 1949 she married Fred Schlafly, a well-connected conservative Republican who kept up regular correspondence with high-profile anti-Communists and conservatives, including Senator Everett Dirksen and President Richard Nixon (although his correspondence with Nixon seems to have lessened after Nixon became vice president of the United

States in 1953).1

Schlafly’s first congressional campaign in 1952 began because Fred Schlafly turned down the local Republican Committee’s request for him to run.2 Her campaign was unsuccessful, but it gained the attention of the local Republican Party. In 1967 she ran for president of the National Federation of Republican Women (NFRW) and was defeated by Gladys O’Donnell. This campaign represents a divergence among Republican women—those who supported the Republican Party and moderate feminist goals (including the Equal Rights Amendment), and those who supported Schlafly’s more conservative and populist faction. The loss prompted her to begin her monthly newsletter, and the first issue circulated in August 1967. The following year she organized a leadership conference for

Republican women called the Eagle Conference of Leaders. The March 1968 newsletter claimed that

1 Critchlow, Phyllis Schlafly, 34. 2 Critchlow, Phyllis Schlafly, 37.

Republican leaders from thirty-two states attended.3 When Schlafly decided to fight against the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment in 1972, she organized a meeting of her supporters from her NFRW campaign, where they decided to form a new organization. Consequently, they founded STOP ERA, followed three years later by Eagle Forum.4

Schlafly was an excellent speaker and organizer. In her account of the battle over the ERA,

Jane Mansbridge claims, “Many people who followed the struggle over the ERA believed—rightly in my view—that the Amendment would have been ratified by 1975 or 1976 had it not been for Phyllis

Schlafly’s early and effective effort to organize potential opponents.”5 In fact, the ERA debate was the first social issue in which Schlafly became involved. Until then, she had focused her political agenda on national defense and anticommunism. However, once the debate over the ERA began, her newsletters and speeches focused more and more on social issues; even after the ERA was defeated in 1982, she continued to address issues such as school prayer, abortion, same-sex marriage, and pornography.

During her reign as the so-called Sweetheart of the Silent Majority, Phyllis Schlafly’s opponents found her harsh, arrogant, and radical.6 Schlafly has often told the story of when Betty

3 “Eagle Conference of Republicans Draws Leaders from 32 States,” The Phyllis Schlafly Report 1, no. 8, sec. 1 (March 1968): 1. The publication is hereafter cited as PSR; authors’ names are omitted unless the author is someone other than Schlafly. 4 Critchlow, Phyllis Schlafly, 219. 5 Mansbridge, Why We Lost the ERA, 110. 6 The nickname “Sweetheart of the Silent Majority” comes from a biography of that title written by Carol Felsenthal, published in 1981. Schlafly enjoyed this portrayal of herself and called herself by this title throughout the newsletters. NOW also used a version of this nickname when the organization awarded her the “the Sweetheart of the Gosh-We-Wish-They-Were-Silent-Majority medal” at their annual conference in 1982. See Felsenthal, The Sweetheart of the Silent Majority: A Biography of Phyllis Schlafly (New York: Doubleday, 1981); Ellen Goodman, “ERA Awards,” National NOW Times 15.7 (September 1982): 7.

Friedan declared that she would like to burn Schlafly at the stake.7 While Schlafly’s tone was often forceful and her positions were inflexible throughout the 1980s, Eagle Forum was far from a radically conservative organization. In this chapter, I examine the newsletters of Eagle Forum from

1979 through 1991 to argue that they offered a way for the grassroots antifeminist public to engage politics, distinct from the New Christian Right. Eagle Forum newsletters, written exclusively by

Schlafly, identified the media and the American political system as centers of power and articulated a lifeworld for the grassroots antifeminist public that emphasized the separation of politics and religion, the sanctity of the individual in society, and the natural roles of men and women.

In his conception of publics and counterpublics, Warner notes that “dominant publics . . . can take their discourse pragmatics and their lifeworlds for granted, misrecognizing the indefinite scope of their expansive address as universality or normalcy. Counterpublics are spaces of circulation in which it is hoped that the poesis of scene making will be transformative, not replicative merely.”8 However, I argue that the publics in this study act both publicly and counterpublicly. Each of these publics assumed universality around particular ideas or ways of being in the world, and they also acted with urgency around those ideas that countered dominant publics in order to transform society. To show how the Eagle Forum newsletters invited the grassroots antifeminist public to understand its relationship to structures of power, this chapter examines how they located centers of power in the media and the American political system.

Eagle Forum presented a challenge to feminists through effective organization and urgent rhetoric. The organization’s newsletters, called the Phyllis Schlafly Report, provided the grassroots antifeminist public with an articulation of its lifeworld. This articulation was substantively different

7 Critchlow, Phyllis Schlafly, 12. 8 Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 122.

92 from the lifeworld that CWA articulated for the evangelical women’s public. These publics were not empirical entities in the world, but a participation among its members within a discourse that identifies a distinctive character, voice, and worldview.9 The grassroots antifeminist public and the evangelical women’s public participate within discourses that see the world in two different ways.

These differences, then, complicated the efforts of the liberal feminist public to respond. Part of the problem was that the lifeworlds of these two conservative publics overlapped in ways that made them sound more similar than they actually were. The two publics had distinguishing features, and the liberal feminist public collapsed those distinctions in an effort to combat conservative women’s political influence. Likewise, the conservative women’s publics also collapsed distinctions between the wide range of feminist publics and activists. By collapsing distinctions between all conservative and liberal publics, each public reduced the other’s arguments to its most simplistic and outrageous terms. The political necessity to defeat opponents in order to effect change can lead to a combative public sphere that calls into question appeals for inclusion. Even if marginalized publics are granted access to discursive spaces occupied by dominant publics, the discursive practices needed to succeed can be used at the expense of other publics. In other words, any inclusion has the potential to create an exclusion. In order to clarify the interactions of these three publics, this chapter outlines the specific lifeworld that the Phyllis Schlafly Report articulates for the grassroots antifeminist public.

Publicity and Counterpublicity

As I argued in the introduction, a public can act publicly by moving toward power or act counterpublicly by moving away from it. With this conception of publicity and counterpublicity, it is important to distinguish between, on one hand, the centers of power that exert themselves through

9 Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 114.

93 the state, economy, and society and, on the other, how a public rhetorically creates the centers of power. A public cannot escape the relations of power that create and maintain its context of existence, but a public’s discourse does not thoroughly engage or articulate those relations of power.

A public’s discourse is always partial, but it does organize power in certain meaningful ways. Where a public locates power and how it responds to these centers of power help to provide the content of the public’s lifeworld. A public’s discourse, then, shapes the understanding of power and orients the public to these locations of power—by opposing them or aligning with them. And, most important, a public uses both of these strategies—opposition or alignment—for specific purposes and can often contradict itself. A public needs to align itself with power in order to gain support for its transformative agenda. It needs to demonstrate its legibility and validity to those in power to effect change. It also needs to prove to its members that those places of power need transformation, which requires the public to oppose the centers of power. In this section, I outline the ways in which the

Eagle Forum newsletters that Schlafly wrote used publicity and counterpublicity throughout the

1980s to contribute to the lifeworld of the grassroots antifeminist public.

Schlafly situated power in two main places: the media and the American political system. She characterized both of these places as occupied and organized by a cadre of insiders who wield influence through conspiracy and deception. The Eagle Forum newsletters decried these occupiers and placed the grassroots antifeminist public as an opposing force to their power. For example, the newsletters portrayed the media as biased toward a liberal political agenda, primarily controlled by elite white males, and negligent toward its moral obligation to the American people. The newsletters never defined exactly what counted as the media, but in discussions regarding the media, the newsletters usually referred to major urban daily newspapers and national news broadcasts.

According to Schlafly, because powerful elite white males controlled the media and limited media

94 coverage to bolster a liberal political agenda, conservative ideas were given less airtime and credibility. Similarly, Schlafly upheld the American political system as uniquely beneficial to its citizens and exceptional as a model to the world. However, she also claimed that government institutions were needlessly bureaucratic and ineffective, and that “the establishment politicians” did not care about the American people and did not act according to moral principles. According to

Schlafly, they act only in their own self-interest for the maintenance of their status and power. The newsletters invited the grassroots antifeminist public to move away from these centers of power by accusing those who occupy the media and the American political system of being unfit, unreasonable, and wrong. The newsletters at other times upheld the value of the media and the

American political system. Schlafly used major media broadcasts and publications as credible sources and outlets for her arguments, and she used the organization’s success within the media and the

American political system as a demonstration of the antifeminist grassroots public’s credibility.

The Media

According to Schlafly, the media had the power to control American public discourse. She claimed that media elite control “[t]he ability to set the agenda for discussions about social policy.”10

The problem, for her, was that a left-leaning media set this agenda, and there were two main reasons for the liberal bias in media. First, liberal organizations and media industry businesses had cooperating relationships. In fact, in the February 1982 newsletter, Schlafly stated that radio and TV stations had made contractual agreements with liberal organizations. She explained that there had been an increase in sales of radio and TV stations and that “liberal groups that want to exert hidden

10 “What’s Wrong With U.S. Opinion-Makers?” PSR 15.11.1 (June 1982): 2. See also “The Key to Peace: U.S. Superiority,” PSR 15.6.1 (January 1982): 2; “U.S. Stakes in Central America,” PSR 19.1.1 (August 1985): 3; “Media Bias about SALT II,” PSR 20.6.1 (January 1987): 4.

95 influence on the media watch the trade journals for announcements of such impending transfers.”

Then, the liberal groups formed a coalition that threatened the new station owner with “a petition to deny the granting of a license”; in order for the coalition to withdraw this petition, the owner signed a contract guaranteeing high-level jobs to minorities, airtime to programs addressing issues of women and minorities, and continued partnership with the coalition to ensure compliance. Schlafly protested, “In the post-Watergate era of full disclosure, it is very difficult to understand why the

Federal Communications Commission has allowed television and radio stations to continue to sign and fulfill secret agreements with coalitions of special-interest groups organized for the sole purpose of exercising hidden editorial and management control over the stations. But it has.”11 The link between liberal organizations and big corporations that Schlafly creates here is one example of her anti-establishment rhetoric that blames big corporations for being hostile toward the majority of

Americans’ values.12 But the claim also portrays liberal organizations as manipulating the media outlets such that the content of the media is neither objective nor accurate, but instead biased toward the liberal political agenda. Furthermore, according to the newsletters, even when the relationships between liberal organizations and the media are not as formal, they can be just as dangerous. During her fight against the ratification of the federal ERA, Schlafly claimed that “federal employees, biased media, and show biz personalities” had conspired together to pass the amendment.13 Similarly, during the 1988 presidential election, she commented that conservatives must capitalize on the reputation that President Ronald Reagan built for them for fear that “[l]iberals could regain power by using their established mechanisms of control in the media, the bureaucracy,

11 “Secret TV Station Contracts with Liberal Coalitions,” PSR 15.7.1 (February 1982): 1. 12 See also “Will the Taxpayers Bail Out the Big Banks?” 1; “Parental Leave—A Windfall for Yuppies,” 2; “Federal Day Care—Sovietizing the American Family,” 2. 13 “Women’s Magazines Promote ERA—But Deny Equal Rights,” PSR 13.5.2 (December 1979): 1.

96 the courts, and the election process.”14 These alliances create a behemoth liberal monster whose clandestine behaviors twist the content of the media to serve their own liberal political agenda, and these behaviors must be uncovered by tenacious and principled conservatives.

Second, the Eagle Forum newsletters claim that media producers are out of touch with the majority of the American people and have liberal agendas because of their socioeconomic backgrounds. The June 1982 newsletter examined a summary of a study of 240 journalists and broadcasters from major media news outlets, which Schlafly summarized as follows: “The Lichter-

Rothman survey took a searching look at the social and personal backgrounds of the media elite.

What comes through loud and clear is that they are a socially privileged class from upper-middle- income homes. Not only are they well educated, well paid and well-to-do, their parents were also well educated and well-to-do.”15 She quotes the study’s statistics on religious affiliation and service attendance of the media elite; their opinions on abortion, adultery, and homosexuality; their ethnicity and level of education; and their presidential voting record. By “outing” media producers as members of the upper middle class, Schlafly associated class with the kinds of liberal political agendas that her readers would not share. She perpetuated the assumption that “well educated, well paid, and well-to-do” people operated in service of their own progressive interests, which were in direct opposition to the interests of the majority of Americans.

The problem of left-leaning media producers was so urgent, according to Schlafly, because

“[t]he media elite take their power seriously.”16 By attributing intentionality to the media elite, she strengthened the idea that liberals’ control of the media was a conspiracy to manipulate the public.

Not only were the media elite out of touch and self-serving, but they also wielded their power

14 “America’s Future Is Conservative,” PSR 21.12.1 (July 1988): 1. 15 “What’s Wrong with U.S. Opinion-Makers?” 1. 16 “What’s Wrong with U.S. Opinion-Makers?” 2.

97 deliberately—even to the point of creating “phony news.”17 Therefore, the news media could not be trusted. The newsletters also criticized the entertainment media that helped shape American public discourse about political and social issues.18 In the August 1986 newsletter, Schlafly cited another

Lichter-Rothman study of “decision-making groups in the movie industry” that “reveals extreme liberal attitudes far out of touch with mainstream America.” The study reported that very few among those polled attended church services regularly, and they had a high acceptance of homosexuality and abortion. Schlafly understood these attitudes to be a symptom of their racial, gender, and socioeconomic status, since “[t]he movie elite are a 99% white, male, and wealthy group.”19 Both the news and entertainment media are out of touch with mainstream America, she said, and they determined which issues get covered and how those issues get treated, even though these issues are not the same ones that the majority of Americans care about. Schlafly constructed the media—and its liberal opinions—to be a powerful force that damaged conservatives and the quality of the nation’s democratic discourse.

According to the Eagle Forum newsletters, the liberal media’s dominance had various and significant effects. First, there existed fewer places to find conservative ideas than liberal ones.

During the fight for the ratification for the federal ERA, Schlafly claimed that the media “don’t have to give fair treatment to both sides” and that the media even censored out conservative arguments.20

17 “How to Negotiate a Good Treaty,” PSR 17.2.2 (September 1983): 3. 18 Schlafly reviews movies thoughout the 1980s in the Eagle Forum newsletters. The films she reviews include Kramer v. Kramer (“Feminism Has Become Passé,” PSR 16.5.1 [December 1982]: 2); the Star Wars trilogy (“Star Wars and Broken Treaties,” PSR 18.4.1 [November 1984]: 1); the Rambo and Rocky series (“Who Shapes U.S. Foreign Policy,” PSR 19.10.1 [May 1986]: 1-2); Hanoi Hilton (“The Hanoi Hilton,” PSR 21.1.2 [August 1987]: 3); and Working Girl (“Working Girl Explodes a Feminist Myth,” PSR 23.9.2 [April 1990]: 4). 19 “Essays on Ideology in Entertainment,” PSR 20.1.2 (August 1986): 1. 20 “Women’s Magazines Promote ERA—But Deny Equal Rights,” 1; “Censorship—Real and Phony,” PSR 16.7.1 (February 1983): 1.

The November 1981 newsletter explained the effect that this censorship had on libraries. Public libraries, it claimed, were primarily filled with liberal books because of the cycle of ideological exclusion in the publishing industry and because of the liberal bias of librarians. Indeed, Schlafly explained that the alliance between the librarians’ union, the American Library Association, and

NOW is “[o]ne reason for the ruthless book-banning of The Power of the Positive Woman [written by

Schlafly] and The Sweetheart of the Silent Majority [a biography of Schlafly].”21 Furthermore, the Eagle

Forum newsletters explained that there were important events that the liberal media would not cover because they challenged the notion that liberal values were universal. The media misrepresented conservatives in order to make them look bad, she said.22 For example, the March

1984 newsletter detailed the story of seven fathers who were jailed in Nebraska because they refused to answer questions about their role in an unlicensed Christian school. Schlafly called this story “the most underreported news story of our era” that is only being reported by conservative or religious publications.23 Similarly, in the March 1986 newsletter she insisted that “[t]he Americans who share .

. . traditional commitments have almost no voice in the channels of communication today.”24 In other words, either media producers and distributers were liberal themselves and used their positions to promote their political agendas or they had connections with liberal organizations that influenced their output. If the media controlled the content and shape of American public discourse and it did not give voice to conservative ideas, then the grassroots antifeminist public could not trust the media.

21 “How to Improve Fairness in Your Library,” PSR 15.4.1 (November 1981): 1. 22 “The Republican Party Platform,” PSR 14.1.2 (August 1980): 1; “Star Wars and Broken Treaties,” 1. 23 “Religious Freedom in Nebraska?” PSR 17.8.1 (March 1984): 2. 24 “The Two-Class Society,” PSR 19.8.1 (March 1986): 1.

The Eagle Forum newsletters encouraged the grassroots antifeminist public to believe that the liberal media persuaded Americans against their own ideas and their own interests.

Consequently, the grassroots antifeminist public acted counterpublicly when it opposed the media’s power in an effort to transform American public discourse by publishing its own news and by offering an alternative model for politics. Schlafly set the Eagle Forum newsletter against the liberal media and aligned her newsletter with the majority of Americans’ more conservative, but unheard, views. In the August 1987 newsletter that celebrated twenty years of continuous publishing of the

Phyllis Schlafly Report, Schlafly claimed, “The P.S. Report is far more than a unique and successful publication. It is the lifeline and communications channel of a movement which has grown through

Eagle Forum to be one of the most formidable forces in American politics today. It is a tool for political action.” She characterized the Eagle Forum newsletter as “a significant trail-blazer, providing original, readable, and timely reports.”25 This description of the newsletter’s role in conservative politics provided a transformative—and counterpublic—model of media production.

The newsletters contradicted this opposition to the media, though, by reporting on how

Eagle Forum used the media to further its own goals. Schlafly modeled a sophisticated media presence and taught her strategies to Eagle Forum leaders so they could use media to circulate their message. During one of the Eagle Councils, annual conferences for the leaders of Eagle Forum, she commented that she had done so many radio interviews, she could perform them in her sleep. Over the years, each conference program announced several workshops and skills-building seminars on developing a media presence—including hair, wardrobe, and make-up tips.26 The lessons included

25 “1967-1987: The Phyllis Schlafly Report Celebrates Twenty Years of Continuous Monthly Publication,” PSR 21.1.1 (August 1987): 1. 26 Eagle Council Agendas, 1972-2012, Phyllis Schlafly Collection, Eagle Forum Archives, St. Louis, MO.

100 advice to “answer the question you want them to ask,” “to act naïve,” and “to know what you’re talking about.”27 The implication is that women should perform a particular feminine persona that is capable while at the same time non-threatening. One successful strategy that leaders discussed was to go to newspaper editors and promote Schlafly’s own prolific writing. Schlafly commented, “If I had to give the major technique that put Jimmy Carter in the White House, it was that he spent a couple of years going around and meeting with the editorial boards of newspapers all over this country.”28 Even though she positioned Eagle Forum and its newsletter as opposed to the powerful force of the liberal media, she also positioned Eagle Forum and its newsletter as moving toward that power by adopting successful media strategies. By taking advantage of the media and its role in politics, the grassroots antifeminist public complied with the center of power in order to demonstrate credibility and to validate the American public’s reception of its continuously circulating message.

Schlafly pointed to the liberal bias of the media to discredit the information and opinions that major news outlets published or broadcast. However, she also used these same news outlets as support for her own agenda when she could.29 For example, the entirety of the second section of the

27 “Child Care Panel,” September 15, 1984, at Eagle Council XIII, Eagle Council CDs, Phyllis Schlafly Collection, Eagle Forum Archives. 28 “The Constitution Issues of 1984,” speech delivered September 15, 1984, at Eagle Council XIII, Eagle Council CDs, Phyllis Schlafly Collection, Eagle Forum Archives. 29 See “The Eisenhower and Nixon Mistake,” PSR 14.4.1 (November 1980): 2; “Ford, the Media, and the Delegates,” PSR 14.1.1 (August 1980): 2; “The War Has Already Started,” PSR 13.9.1 (April 1980): 2; “Feminism Has Become Passé,” 1; “What Sex Classes Concealed from Teenagers,” PSR 16.2.1 (September 1982): 4; “Eagle Forum Launches Headstart Reading Project,” PSR 14.11.2 (June 1981): 3; “The Bishops and Nuclear Freeze,” PSR 16.6.1 (January 1983): 1; “What Did We Get for Our Money?” PSR 19.4.1 (November 1985): 2; “What Does Sex Education Mean?” PSR 18.11.1 (June 1985): 2; “’After the Sexual Revolution,’” PSR 20.3.2 (October 1986): 2; “Pill Goes to School,” PSR 19.11.1 (June 1986): 3; “Full Day Kindergarten,” PSR 19.7.1 (February 1986): 2; “Condom- Mania Con Job,” PSR 21.4.1 (November 1987): 2; “The High Costs of Free Sex,” PSR 20.7.1 (February 1987): 1; “Death Education in the Classroom,” PSR 21.10.1 (May 1988): 1; “Signs of the Post-Feminist Era,” PSR 23.5.1 (December 1989): 3.

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September 1979 newsletter consisted of reprints of newspaper columns from major newspapers, including the New York Times, the San Diego Union, and London’s Daily Telegraph. All the columns expressed a negative opinion about women in the military. The implication was that even these liberal news outlets agreed with Eagle Forum’s opposition to women being drafted, and the quantity of the reports added to the strength of the opposition. Similarly, in the June 1979 newsletter Schlafly reveled in the fact that “[a] sensational news scoop by the New York Times indicates that the Carter

Administration simply cannot be believed.” She continued to celebrate: “Thanks to the great

American institution of freedom of the press, that newspaper uncovered and published a vital piece of information that had been suppressed for two years by the Carter administration.”30 This declaration of triumph by a major news outlet contradicted her condemnation of the media elite that appeared frequently in the newsletters throughout the 1980s.31 Similarly, in the September 1987 newsletter, she quoted an article written by Fred M. Hechinger and published in the New York Times about a partnership between American and Soviet educators to develop curricula for public schools in the United States. She explained, “Mr. Hechinger’s credibility cannot be disputed since he is the chief education reporter for the New York Times.”32 Here, her critique relied on news that she deemed credible because of the author’s association with a major news outlet. Therefore, in both of these cases, and in numerous others in which she quoted major news outlets as credible sources, she reversed her opposition to the liberal media in favor of aligning her political agenda with information provided by those in places of power. Her alignment with major news outlets becomes

30 “Verification and Credibility,” PSR 12.11.1 (June 1979): 2. 31 See also “An Unusual Alliance against the Draft,” PSR 14.4.2 (November 1980): 4; “Faulty Teaching Fails Children,” PSR 14.11.2 (June 1981): 2; “The Issue Is Sponsorship, Not Censorship,” PSR 23.10.2 (May 1990): 3. 32 “Will We Let the Soviets Teach Our Schoolchildren?” PSR 21.2.2 (September 1987): 1.

102 a warrant for her political agenda. In other words, she justified and bolstered her arguments through the use of sources that she, in other instances, condemned for having a liberal bias.

Schlafly characterized the media as a unified and homogenous group with a consistent political agenda that excluded the values and principles of the majority of the American people. This characterization was a contradictory move toward power because while she set the newsletter against the established force of power, she aligned herself with the majority of the American people. This double move simultaneously set up the grassroots antifeminist public as an underdog opposing a powerful but deceptive group and as a champion of the more powerful majority.

The American Political System

Just as the newsletters aligned with and opposed the media, so the Eagle Forum newsletters presented the grassroots antifeminist public’s contradictory relationship with the American political system. On the one hand, the newsletters celebrated the grassroots antifeminist public’s faith in and dedication to American political institutions and processes. By claiming that American political institutions are uniquely benevolent and democratic and by demonstrating proficiency at navigating those institutions, the grassroots antifeminist public used publicity to align itself with the status quo and with those in power. This faith in and dedication to political action cannot be taken for granted, however. As demonstrated in the introduction, more radical groups on both the left and the right insisted that agitation through established political institutions was not an effective method for change. In contrast, Eagle Forum’s dedicated political efforts through letter-writing campaigns, lobbying, testimonies to Congress, and education of the newsletter’s readership about political processes demonstrated a commitment to political agitation that made use of and supported established political institutions. On the other hand, the newsletters also consistently complained

103 that politicians were corrupt, political institutions were not working, and the government was overreaching its boundaries into the lives of individuals by such means as education and tax legislation. The newsletters used counterpublicity to decry politicians as corrupt and government institutions as failing the American people, and thus positioned the grassroots antifeminist public against those in power and urged readers to help change government policies and laws to conform to a conservative agenda.

One way that the Eagle Forum newsletters signified the importance of political power is that they educated readers about participating in the political process. Schlafly included articles laying out in detail various laws and court cases, in some cases printing them without providing editorial commentary.33 She also gave detailed lessons on the machinations of political work, including the constitutional relationships of the different branches of government, definitions of political jargon, and the implications of various political strategies.34 In the October 1980 newsletter, Schlafly wrote an article titled “Ten Steps to Citizen Participation in Politics” that gave advice for working for a candidate’s election. The advice included choosing the most important issues, researching the

33 See “The Family Protection Act,” PSR 13.14.2 (November 1979): 1-4; “The SALT II Treaty Text Translated,” PSR 13.1.1 (August 1979): 1-4; “Congress’ Power over the Federal Courts,” PSR 14.6.1 (January 1981): 2-3; “The Law Is on Your Side: Parents’ and Pupils’ Rights in Education,” PSR 15.3.1 (October 1981): 1; “Federal Court Voids ERA Extension, Upholds Rescission,” PSR 15.6.2 (January 1982): 1-4; “The Laws of the State of Virginia,” PSR 15.8.2 (March 1982): 2-4; “U.S. Should Sink the Law of the Sea Treaty,” PSR 16.1.1 (August 1982): 1; “New Weapons in the Battle against Pornography,” PSR 17.11.1 (June 1984): 1; “The New Pornography Commission Report,” PSR 19.12.1 (July 1986): 1; and “What’s Wrong with Federal Baby-Sitting,” PSR 21.8.1 (March 1988): 1. 34 See “Glossary of SALT Terms,” PSR 12.7.1 (February 1979): 4; “President Reagan’s Blunt Warning,” PSR 15.10.1 (May 1982): 1; “Freeze Campaign in Flim-Flam, Not Grassroots,” PSR 16.9.1 (April 1983): 1; “The Game Plan to Sell ‘Comparable Worth,’” PSR 18.1.1 (August 1984): 1; “The U.N. Genocide Convention Is Dangerous to Americans,” PSR 18.6.1 (January 1985): 1; “The Science and Strategy of High Frontier,” PSR 18.8.1 (March 1985): 1; “How to Wage a Successful Summit,” PSR 19.6.1 (January 1986): 1; “Statehood for the District of Columbia?” PSR 21.8.2 (March 1988): 3; “Just Say NO to Tax Increases,” PSR 22.6.1 (January 1989): 1; “Double Standards about the First Amendment,” PSR 23.12.1 (July 1990): 1; and “The Follies of the U.N. Treaty on Women,” PSR 24.2.1 (September 1990): 1.

104 candidates, and deciding where effort would be most effective.35 In the same newsletter, she gave

“Political Pointers to Remember” that included not assuming that a candidate is ideologically motivated, and a reminder that “[w]e actually have government only by the people who vote, and our representatives often represent only the people who voted for them.”36 In other words, the government only works for those who participate in politics. This claim attempts to motivate her readers to get involved, but it also provides a way to focus their efforts. Readers could focus on persuading those who agree with them to participate in an effort to control the elected politicians.

Throughout the 1980s the newsletters made political activism more accessible to the grassroots antifeminist public by providing sample letters to send to congressional leaders.37 Sometimes a reader could cut them out, add her signature, and place them directly in envelopes; sometimes the newsletter offered sample language that the reader could use while composing her own letter. The newsletters also simplified political decision-making by including information on the platforms of the two political parties during national elections, often reprinting parts of the platforms edited for length.38 These strategies of educating readers demonstrated an investment in the political processes and strategies that would be likely to lead to a more powerful conservative voice in the U.S. government. In other words, the newsletters helped guide the readers toward participation in one of the main centers of power for the grassroots antifeminist public.

35 “Ten Steps to Citizen Participation in Politics,” PSR 14.3.1 (October 1980): 2. 36 “Political Pointers to Remember,” PSR 14.3.1 (October 1980): 3. 37 See “The Roll-Call Vote on Draft Registration of Women,” PSR 13.12.1 (July 1980): 4; and “Sample Letter to Schools,” PSR 19.11.1 (June 1986): 4; “What You Can Do,” PSR 21.2.2 (September 1987): 4; “Can the Religious Daycare Issue Be ‘Fixed’?” PSR 23.6.1 (January 1990): 4. 38 See “The Republican Party Platform,” 1-4; “Party Platform Comparisons, 1980,” PSR 14.3.1 (October 1980): 1; “Party Platform Comparisons,” PSR 18.3.1 (October 1984): 1; “1988 Party Platform Comparisons,” PSR 22.2.1 (September 1988): 1; “The Challenge of Child Care Costs,” PSR 22.7.1 (February 1989): 1.

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In these newsletters, being able to operate within the political processes with decorum signified political viability for the grassroots antifeminist public. For example, while commenting on pro-ERA agitation in the Illinois State Capitol rotunda, the April 1983 newsletter berated “the radicals who promote ERA” for their “violent and disruptive tactics designed to ride roughshod over the constitutional amending process.” Schlafly then recommended that her readers write to their congressional leaders to complain: “How could you possibly send ERA back to the States so that these radicals can disrupt the State legislative process again? Doesn’t respect for the United

States Constitution demand a ‘cooling off’ period?”39 In contrast to these “radicals,” she gleefully told the attendees at the Eagle Council in 1984 that they lobbied Illinois General Assembly leaders with home-baked bread. She reported that the group succeeded in getting a pro-ERA legislator to support a lawsuit that Eagle Forum was bringing. Schlafly says, “Now I won’t say that we bought him with a piece of banana bread, but it certainly helped!”40 This story demonstrated to her listeners that she could effectively maneuver in the political arena using conventionally feminized strategies.

Further, the Eagle Forum newsletters contained multiple reprints of Schlafly’s testimonies given before Congress, which implied that those in power solicited her input.41 The newsletters characterized Schlafly as someone who understood the American political system and used her knowledge to the advantage of the grassroots antifeminist public’s political agenda.

39 “Ten Years of ERA Is Enough!” PSR 16.9.2 (April 1983): 1. 40 “The Social and Education Issues of 1984,” speech delivered on September 14, 1984, at Eagle Council XIII, Eagle Councils CDs, Phyllis Schlafly Collection, Eagle Forum Archives. 41 “Eagle Forum Defends Wives and Mothers,” PSR 14.9.1 (April 1981): 1; “Do Women Get Equal Pay for Equal Work?” PSR 14.10.1 (May 1981): 1; “How and Why I Taught My Children to Read,” PSR 14.11.2 (June 1981): 1; “Why Congress Must Amend the ERA,” PSR 17.4.1 (November 1983): 1; “Comparable Worth: Unfair to Men and Women,” PSR 18.12.1 (July 1985): 1; “The Discrimination of Parental Leave,” PSR 20.8.1 (March 1987): 1; “It’s Obscene to Call Such Stuff ‘Art,’” PSR 23.10.2 (May 1990): 1.

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Schlafly further demonstrated her influence and credibility by associating with those in power. For example, in the July 1984 newsletter that celebrated eighteen years of Eagle Forum, the full-color picture on the front page showed Schlafly in the Oval Office with President Reagan.

Throughout the newsletter, there were photographs of various conferences and events hosted by

Eagle Forum with congressional leaders, scholars, writers, ambassadors, and donors. The fourth page included a full-color photograph of Eagle Forum’s Rainbow Celebration in 1982 that celebrated the defeat of the ERA. The caption said, “Held at the Shoreham Hotel in Washington,

D.C., it featured a star-studded cast of 50 V.I.P.s, including Senators Jesse Helms, Jeremiah Denton,

Congressman Philip Crane, Under Secretary of State James Buckley, Dr. Jerry Falwell, and a dozen fearless journalists.”42 The presence of these powerful political figures placed Schlafly and Eagle

Forum into the space of power that she simultaneously criticized. These associations exhibited her success at getting support from those in power, and this support confirmed the grassroots antifeminist public’s sense of its own credibility.

While moving toward power by educating the organization’s members into political processes and demonstrating Schlafly’s and Eagle Forum’s success at maneuvering within those processes, the newsletters simultaneously moved away from power by decrying the corruption rampant among politicians and the ways in which government institutions failed the American people. For example, the September 1981 newsletter demanded that the federal courts be reformed.

Schlafly argued that judges did not answer to the people since they were appointed instead of elected, their arguments were not reasonable, and they did not make principled decisions. The complaint here was not only that those who occupied federal judgeships needed to be replaced, but also that the institution of federal courts went against democratic principles. Similarly, the September

42 “The Eagles Come of Age,” PSR 17.12.1 (July 1984): 4.

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1983 newsletter enumerated the ways in which Congress created legislation that could not be enforced, specifically regarding the Protection of Pupil Rights Act first enacted in 1974. Schlafly explained that the bureaucracy effectively vetoed legislation by not doing anything with it or not including regulations, which made the implementation of legislation impossible, and she claimed that congressional leaders “know full well that, without regulations, the statute isn’t worth the paper it is written on.”43 The Eagle Forum newsletters also proclaimed that informal political structures contributed negatively to American society. Produced nearly two years after Reagan took office, the

October 1983 newsletter claimed that “our nation’s capital remains dominated by a liberal welfare state elite composed of lobbyists, intellectuals, members of the news media, and a clear majority in

Congress. These power bases put the President under constant pressure to accommodate the forces of the left.”44 Here, the informal political structures present in Washington, D.C., threatened the integrity of formal government institutions. These calls for reformation communicated to the readers of the newsletters that the status quo was not sound, and they signaled counterpublicity because they intended to transform those political structures.

The newsletters encouraged the grassroots antifeminist public of the 1970s and ’80s to believe that government institutions needed reformation, and they also claimed that those who occupied positions within those institutions needed replacing. In her discussion of Schlafly’s rhetoric, Martha Solomon notes, “Although the feminists are the primary enemies, the conspiracy also includes governmental bureaucrats and ‘dead-beat’ men.”45 Indeed, in comparison with the writers and signers of the Constitution, Schlafly said, “No one has detected men of that stature in

43 “Regulations for the ‘Pupil’s Act,’” PSR 16.12.1 (July 1983): 1. 44 “The Conservative Opportunity Society,” PSR 17.3.1 (October 1983): 1. 45 Martha Solomon, “The ‘Positive Woman’s’ Journey: A Mythic Analysis of the Rhetoric of STOP ERA,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 65.3 (October 1979): 270.

108 our country now.”46 In fact, this comparison both celebrated the unique greatness of the American political system since it lauded the founders, while at the same time this statement criticized the active politicians of the 1980s. This contradiction encouraged readers to transform the American political system by working toward the election of politicians who would return the nation to its traditional greatness.47 According to the Eagle Forum newsletters, politicians were responsible for the major problems in American society, specifically the public schools. The federal government funded the public schools curricula that “deliberately attempted to change the religious, moral, and political attitudes of public schoolchildren.”48 The federal government passed tax laws that discriminated against the traditional family, overturned “centuries of law, custom, tradition, and educational practice,” and was overly influenced by big business.49 Schlafly called legislators

“foolish” for passing environmental protections, “irrational” for supporting a Constitutional

Convention, and “illogical” for opposing President Reagan’s defense plan.50 She characterized current politicians as part of the “liberal welfare state” that was responsible for “attitudes that keep the poor unproductive and thus shackled in poverty; the ignorant uneducated and thus shackled in illiteracy; and the disadvantaged dependent on government bureaucracy and thus unable to learn the habits and skills of independence.”51 Therefore, Schlafly designated the American political system

46 “CON CON: Playing Russian Roulette with the Constitution,” PSR 18.5.1 (December 1984): 2. 47 See also “Eagle Forum Defends Women from Draft,” PSR 15.1.1 (August 1981): 2. 48 “Child Abuse in the Classroom,” PSR 18.2.1 (September 1984): 1. 49 “Defending the Economic Life of the Family,” PSR 15.9.1 (April 1982): 1; “Prayer in Public Schools,” PSR 15.12.1 (July 1982): 1; “Will the Taxpayers Bail Out the Big Banks,” PSR 16.8.1 (March 1983): 1. 50 “The Resource War,” PSR 16.1.1 (August 1982): 4; “CON CON: Playing Russian Roulette with the Constitution,” 1; “SDI: The Only Way to Achieve Arms Control,” PSR 19.3.1 (October 1985): 1. 51 “The Conservative Opportunity Society,” 1.

109 and government institutions as central places of power, and she criticized both the structure of these institutions and those who occupied positions within them.

Not only did she discredit those who occupied positions of power within the state, but also she set Eagle Forum outside this cadre of powerful forces. Schlafly moved Eagle Forum and the grassroots antifeminist public outside these centers of power most effectively when she recounted the history of the ERA in the September 1986 newsletter. She said, “During the ratification period,

ERA was enthusiastically supported by 99 percent of the media, the Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter administrations, most public officials at every level of government, and many wealthy national organizations. ERA enjoyed the political momentum of what appeared to be inevitable victory. A small group of women in 1972, under the name ‘Stop ERA,’ took on what seemed to be an impossible task. The 1975, they founded ‘Eagle Forum’—the genesis of the pro-family movement, a coming together of believers of all faiths who, for the first time, worked together toward a shared political goal. Eagle Forum volunteers persevered through the years and led the movement to final victory over ERA.”52 This story placed Eagle Forum and “the pro-family movement” as an opponent to power—located both in the media and the American political system. This rhetorical use of counterpublicity urged readers to understand the strength of the liberal forces to which they must respond. Schlafly galvanized them to action by creating a maleficent and powerful opponent and by demonstrating the power of the grassroots antifeminist public to defeat it.

In contrast, part of Schlafly’s diatribe against feminists was that they acted against the established political system and institutions. While some feminists in the 1980s were continuing to work for social transformation outside the established political system (by moving inside academia, for example), Schlafly specifically mentioned the leadership and membership of NOW. In critiquing

52 “A Short History of the ERA,” PSR 20.2.1 (September 1986): 1.

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NOW’s support for Anita Hill during Clarence Thomas’s judicial hearings, she construed NOW’s opposition to Thomas’s nomination as “a savage eleventh-hour ambush by feminists in special- interest groups and in the media.” She continued to call it a “trick,” a “rant,” an “ordeal,” a

“conspiracy,” and a “contemptible ploy” that “didn’t work because of the innate fairness of the

American people and their rejection of the feminist ideology of gender guilt.” In other words, those who opposed Thomas’s nomination did not use the established political system to voice their opinion because “the feminists and the liberals couldn’t defeat Thomas fairly.” After Thomas received the nomination, she concluded, “Feminism is thus not compatible with freedom or with constitutional, democratic government.”53 Even though the newsletters invited the grassroots antifeminist public to oppose the American political system, they also claimed that feminism was not a viable position because it opposed the American political system. The newsletters offered the grassroots antifeminist public a contradictory way to organize structures of power and its relationship to other publics, but they did so in order to justify the public’s own positions and power while invalidating the arguments and power of its opponents. These contradictions in the newsletters contain rhetorical features of both publics and counterpublics, and therefore provide a challenge to rhetorical scholars to account for a public that acted both publicly and counterpublicly.

If publicity and counterpublicity are rhetorical features of publics, then public sphere theory can expand to account for these contradictions and can offer a more nuanced understanding of the discursive space created among various publics.

The Lifeworld of the Grassroots Antifeminist Public

53 “Feminism Falls on Its Face,” PSR 25.4.1 (November 1991): 2.

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The newsletters of Eagle Forum written by Schlafly formed a significant part of the body of texts that circulated among the grassroots antifeminist public in the late 1970s through the 1980s. In fact, Martha Solomon claims that this newsletter “knit the community together.”54 Warner describes the role that such texts have for a public: “[A]ll discourse or performance addressed to a public must characterize the world in which it attempts to circulate and it must attempt to realize that world through address.” He calls this world the “lifeworld of [a public’s] circulation,” which is not merely

“its discursive claims—of the kind that can be said to be oriented to understanding—but through the pragmatics of its speech genres, idioms, stylistic markers, address, temporality, mise-en-scène, citational field, interlocutory protocols, lexicon, and so on. Its circulatory fate is the realization of that world.”55 Here, Warner emphasizes that a public’s discourse does not only contain logical reasons for persuasion, but it also reflects and articulates a lifeworld: a set of operational norms and values, a range of options for identities, and a poetic expression of beliefs that have pragmatic and concrete consequences. Similarly, Solomon notes that Schlafly provides her readers with “a metaphysical answer, a cosmology, a societal reaffirmation, and psychological succor.”56 Each public’s discourse articulates a lifeworld, and when people recognize it, they turn their attention toward that public and participate in the continued circulation of that lifeworld. Similarly, Solomon notes this interactive dimension of recognition and membership when she claims that Schlafly’s rhetoric “reaffirms the image which many women have of themselves.”57 The articulation of a lifeworld provides the possibility for the public to exist; it also provides the limits to that existence.

If people do not recognize the articulation of the lifeworld, they do not continue its circulation.

54 Martha Solomon, “Stopping ERA: A Pyrrhic Victory,” Communication Quarterly 31.2 (Spring 1983): 114. 55 Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 114. 56 Solomon, “‘Positive Woman’s’ Journey,” 274. 57 Solomon, “‘Positive Woman’s’ Journey,” 272.

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These processes are co-constitutive and do not require empirical publics and subjectivities to exist before one another. As Warner says, “Public speech lies under the necessity of addressing its public as already existing real persons. It cannot work by frankly declaring its subjunctive-creative project.

Its success depends on the recognition of participants and their further circulatory activity, and people do not commonly recognize themselves as virtual projections.”58 What this means for this case study is that the Eagle Forum newsletters articulated a lifeworld that is unique to the grassroots antifeminist public. This lifeworld becomes the limit of its circulation and the content to which the other two publics respond.

Rhetorical scholars who examined the debate about the ERA noted that the supporters and opponents of the amendment created two worldviews through the discourse generated during the debate.59 Solomon says that the particular worldview Schlafly created drew “from a reservoir of myth, a complex of psychic and cultural associations of enormous nonrational persuasiveness.”60

Solomon’s interpretation focuses on Schlafly’s forceful tone and the construction of a world that is threatened. I agree with Solomon that Schlafly drew on myths and nonrational ideas. In addition to these, the distinctive concepts that the newsletters articulated for the grassroots antifeminist public were that religion and politics occupied two exclusive spheres, individuals were the basic unit of society, men and women had natural characteristics, and personal attacks are valid arguments.

Examining these characteristics will provide an understanding of the lifeworld that the grassroots antifeminist public employed, which contrasts to the representation of Phyllis Schlafly and Eagle

Forum by the liberal feminist public as represented by NOW.

58 Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 114. 59 Sonja K. Foss, “Equal Rights Amendment Controversy: Two Worlds in Conflict,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 65.3 (October 1979): 275-288. 60 Solomon, “‘Positive Woman’s’ Journey,” 263.

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Schlafly’s Catholicism

A significant component in the grassroots antifeminist public’s lifeworld is the understanding of the relationship between religion and public life. Commenters on Schlafly and

Eagle Forum usually place her and her organization within the rise of the New Christian Right of the late 1970s and 1980s, but this mischaracterization obscures significant aspects of her political and religious context. In fact, throughout her years of activism, she has stated that she is different from the New Christian Right, which is typically associated with evangelical Protestantism. In a speech to the New York School Board on June 26, 1987, for example, Schlafly declared, “I am not a part of the religious right.”61 Schlafly participated in a political and religious context shaped by her

Catholicism and the historical place of Catholics in America. For the grassroots antifeminist public, religion occupies a sacred and inviolable place distinct from the public space where political strategizing happens. This separation allows this public to be ecumenical and characterized more by a political agenda then a particular religious creed, in contrast to the evangelical women’s public.

Schlafly’s Catholicism has mostly gone unexplored or unmentioned in studies of her influence.

Alliances with conservative evangelical Protestants that began in the 1980s and continue today belie differences between her and figures of the New Christian Right.

The historical tension between Catholics and Protestants in the United States is an essential part of Phyllis Schlafly’s story, and her alliances with evangelical conservatives represent a major shift in Catholic and Protestant relations that can be traced back to colonial America. The founding of American republicanism included a separation of church and state that Catholics in America

61 Phyllis Schlafly, “Child Abuse in the Classroom,” in Landmark Speeches of the American Conservative Movement, ed. Peter Schweizer and Wynton C. Hall (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2007), 96.

114 supported since it was their best chance for a state that legislated religious toleration.62 Rome, the ecclesiastical center of the Catholic Church, would not support this tenet of American democracy until the Second Vatican Council in 1962-1965, but after the American colonies won independence from Britain, English-speaking Catholics for the first time since Henry VIII could freely worship according to Catholic practice, set up parochial schools, and, in some states, participate equally in public affairs. Catholics in America found themselves in a new position, as David O’Brien notes,

“living in a republican regime on an equal basis with other religious groups.”63 But this new arrangement did not resolve Protestants’ suspicion of Catholics, whom they saw as subservient to the pope who led a Church that had fought against Protestants throughout Europe.64 Tracy

Fessenden explains that the separation of church and state, “far from consigning all religions equally to the silent margins of the political, instead created the conditions for the dominance of an increasingly nonspecific Protestantism over nearly all aspects of American life, a dominance as pervasive as it is invisible for exceeding the domains we conventionally figure as religious.”65 She argues that as early as America’s founding, Catholicism was a particularly conspicuous foil against which American democracy was imagined. Furthermore, “religious freedom as freedom from rather than for Catholics had been a staple of American republicanism’s founding documents.”66

Furthermore, because the founders of the United States formed the American political system with principles that were anti-Catholic, Catholics in America related to the public sphere in significantly different ways. Robert Orsi argues, “Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries

Catholics in the United States understood that they would have to find a way into American public

62 David O’Brien, Public Catholicism (New York: Macmillan, 1989), 14. 63 O’Brien, Public Catholicism, 9. 64 O’Brien, Public Catholicism, 16. 65 Fessenden, Culture and Redemption, 61. 66 Fessenden, Culture and Redemption, 64.

115 memory and civic culture that were imagined against them.”67 He claims that while this perception does not negate Catholics’ participation in the American public sphere, it “does not mean that they have been the same as other Americans, even when they used identical words, such as ‘freedom,’

‘justice,’ or ‘fairness.’”68 That is, even though much of Schlafly’s rhetoric sounds similar to that of the New Christian Right, the context, and therefore the meanings, are different.

In response to the formation of an anti-Catholic public sphere, the leadership of the

American Catholic Church attempted to maintain an identifiable faith community while simultaneously accommodating the distinctly American institutionalized principles of private, individual religious faith.69 The tension between Catholicism and Americanism did not appear only in the United States between Protestants and Catholics, but also in Rome between Catholic leaders and American Catholics, although Rome was more involved with European, Canadian, and Cuban dioceses than American ones.70 Rome rejected the separation of church and state and insisted on

“intellectual isolation” for American Catholics and placed restrictions on ecumenical collaboration.71

Consequently, the way to being a good Catholic and a good American was fraught with competing allegiances.

U.S. Catholics employed a number of strategies to negotiate between these two loyalties.

Some played down papal authority, some isolated themselves from public affairs by creating ethnic

67 Robert Orsi, “U.S. Catholics between Memory and Modernity: How Catholics Are American,” in Catholics in the American Century: Recasting Narratives of U.S. History, ed. R. Scott Appleby and Kathleen Sprows Cummings (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012), 15. 68 Orsi, “U.S. Catholics,” 41. 69 O’Brien, Public Catholicism, 4. 70 Jay P. Dolan, The American Catholic Experience: A History from Colonial Times to the Present (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1985), 160; Gerald P. Fogarty, S.J., The Vatican and the Americanist Crisis: Denis J. O’Connell, American Agent in Rome, 1885-1903 (Pontificia Universitas Gregoriana, Miscellanea Historiae Pontificiae, 36, Roma 1974), 142; Joseph P. Chinnici, O.F.M., Living Stones: The History and Structure of Catholic Spiritual Life in the United States (New York: Macmillan, 1989), 122. 71 O’Brien, Public Catholicism, 196.

116 enclaves and emphasizing good citizenship, and others based activism on what they saw as compatibility between American and Catholic principles.72 O’Brien explains that by the 1930s,

Catholics had become a significant voting bloc, but “there was still a problem for the Catholic who would be American; . . . the faith was not a public faith and his church was not a public church.”73 In other words, because many of their compatriots did not accept papal authority, Catholics had to make their political claims based on reason, rather than their religious beliefs, practices, and traditions.74 The separation of religion and public life facilitated the political participation of

Catholics since they could make political claims on grounds besides religion.

These approaches did not save Catholics from discrimination by Protestants, however.

While interfaith partnerships were functional up until the 1930s, Catholics, for the most part, understood themselves as having a dual allegiance: to the United States and to Rome. And

Protestants, for the most part, remained suspicious of this dual allegiance. Donald Crosby describes how Protestants viewed Catholics up until the mid-twentieth century, as “a foreign-born people who fought for three centuries to shed their immigrant status but never seemed fully Americanized. For nearly three hundred years their critics accused them of owing allegiance to a foreign power (the pope), of speaking strange languages, of practicing exotic religious rituals, of maintaining their own peculiar system of morals, and worst of all, of supporting their own private schools at the expense of the public school system. They always appeared to be a people apart and seemed to resist becoming a part of the great American melting pot.”75

72 Christopher J. Kauffman, preface to O’Brien, Public Catholicism, xi. 73 O’Brien, Public Catholicism, 197. 74 O’Brien, Public Catholicism, 33. 75 Donald F. Crosby, S.J., God, Church, and Flag: Senator Joseph R. McCarthy and the Catholic Church, 1950- 1957 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978), 244. See also James O’Toole, The

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This, then, is the political and religious history out of which Phyllis Schlafly developed her politics in the suburbs of St. Louis in the 1950s and 1960s. Her political agenda can be seen to address these distinct characteristics of Protestants’ view of Catholics. In regard to allegiance to a foreign power, Schlafly consistently proclaims America’s exceptional status and nature while using

American patriotism as a justification for many of her arguments. Her emphasis on teaching reading in public schools and her frequent mention of the methods she used to teach her own children to read English can be seen as a response to the Protestant accusation that Catholics speak foreign languages (such as in the Latin Mass). Her ecumenism shifted Catholicism from a place of exoticism to a place of familiarity for political conservatives and emphasized the moral traditions that Judeo-

Christian religions shared. Finally, her defense of private schools encompassed the increasingly prevalent Protestant and non-religiously affiliated private schools such that the argument against government interference became relevant to more than parochial schools. The extent of the historical and political context of American Catholicism that affected Eagle Forum has yet to be fully explored, but it clearly distinguishes Eagle Forum from the New Christian Right in general and

CWA specifically, which drew on evangelical Protestant language and culture.

Political alliances with Protestants began slowly. In 1958, Phyllis Schlafly and her husband began an anti-Communist organization named after the imprisoned Hungarian prelate József

Cardinal Mindszenty, and they proposed a cooperation with the Christian Anti-Communism

Crusade, a Protestant organization headed by Dr. Fred Schwartz. After a conference in St. Louis where Schwartz gave the keynote address, he turned down the offer of a formal Catholic-Protestant

Faithful: A History of Catholics in America (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008), 291.

118 alliance because he predicted that it might “be suspect in certain circles.”76 By the 1980s, however,

Schlafly was aligning with Protestants across the country, such as those involved in Moral Majority and Concerned Women for America. Schlafly frequently spoke at the same events as Tim and

Beverly LaHaye, Jerry Falwell, and Pat Robertson. This sea change in relations between Catholics and Protestants came about because, in the mid-twentieth century, Catholics began to be a part of

American civic life in new ways. For example, Catholics had strongly supported the war effort during World War II, served in the armed forces, leveraged the GI bill to gain substantial socioeconomic benefits, and were among the earliest opponents of communism. John F. Kennedy was the first Catholic to be elected as U.S. president in 1960.

Anticommunism offered a way to be both authentically American and authentically Catholic.

By the 1960s, the Catholic Church had been articulating an anti-Communist stance for over a hundred years. In the papal encyclicals Nostis et Nobiscum (1848), Quanta Cura (1864), and Diuturnum

Illud (1881) the popes had instructed the Church that communism was opposed to religion, and they objected to the position of communism on private property, since, they claimed, property was one of the necessary elements for an orderly society. They also taught that the focus on material practices and processes was mutually exclusive with a focus on the spirit of God. Throughout the nineteenth century, the Catholic Church had made little effort to distinguish between a number of forms of secularism, such as socialism, communism, Marxism, and anarchism. The popes condemned all radical-leftist movements as “destructive of religion and degrading to human nature.”77 As Communists instantiated themselves in Russia in the early twentieth century and began persecuting Catholics, the Catholic Church criticized communism with new vehemence even while

76 Quoted in Critchlow, Phyllis Schlafly, 80. 77 Crosby, God, Church, and Flag, 4.

119 proposing its own leftist social philosophies. For conservative American Catholics, the strident anticommunism of the Catholic Church and the rhetorical blending of all left-leaning ideologies— reinforced by the support that many American liberals gave to the Loyalists during the Spanish Civil

War—meant that American liberalism received the same strength of opposition as communism. As

Crosby explains, “Anticommunism had become a common denominator, the bulwark of both true

Americanism and authentic Catholicism.”78 Furthermore, by the late 1950s many Catholics had moved into the middle class, as evidenced by their moving to the suburbs, increasing their participation in the professions, and seeking the “good life,” as opposed to blue-collar jobs. Many non-Catholics began to see Catholics as more integrated into the American social fabric.79

Between Schlafly’s two political campaigns, a major change took place in the Catholic

Church that facilitated non-Catholic Americans’ increasing acceptance of Catholics into American civic life. In 1959, Pope John XXIII called for the Second Vatican Council, which ended in 1965 and resulted in the Church accepting the separation of church and state, allowing priests to administer Mass in vernacular languages, and placing a greater “emphasis on personal freedom, on religious toleration, and on the right of the individual.”80 While these changes seemed to modernize the Catholic Church in many Americans’ eyes, it also brought about greater diversity in the

American church that was already afflicted by tensions over the race crisis, the Vietnam War, birth control, and the threat of nuclear war.81 As historian Philip Gleason remembers this time period, he calls it a time of “disintegration.” He says that “the strongest sense I had was of a church, a religious tradition, that was coming undone, breaking apart, losing its coherence.”82 As a devout Catholic and

78 Crosby, God, Church, and Flag, 8. 79 Crosby, God, Church, and Flag, 244. 80 Crosby, God, Church, and Flag, 251. See also O’Brien, Public Catholicism, 235. 81 O’Brien, Public Catholicism, 7, 234. 82 Quoted in O’Brien, Public Catholicism, 234.

120 a conservative who valued tradition, much of Phyllis Schlafly responded not only to the social movements in America, but also to the ways that those movements affected her Church.83

The evacuation of religion from the public sphere through the separation of church and state as legislated by the First Amendment actually facilitated Catholic participation in politics (even though it did not allow Catholics full access to the public sphere, as Fessenden explains). Schlafly’s understanding of the American political system depends on the separation of religion and politics and her view that politics are a matter that we discuss collectively while religion is a private matter.

Her idea of the role of religion in politics is most clearly demonstrated in the January 1983 Eagle

Forum newsletter in which she discussed the letter from the United States Conference of Catholics

Bishops on nuclear freeze, published in 1983.84 The Bishops’ Letter, titled The Challenge to Peace, used

Catholic theology on peace to address specific American policies on nuclear weapons. The Bishops denounced the use of nuclear weapons on civilians, the first use of nuclear weapons, limited nuclear warfare, and, finally, the “testing, production, and deployment of new nuclear weapons systems.”85

83 Todd Scribner argues that the political conservativism of Catholics after the Second Vatican Council contains a critique of the Church leadership. For example, he writes, “Discussions about the neoconservative Catholics often focus on the level of policy, particularly in light of debates that raged over such issues as the U.S. bishops’ pastoral letters, the Soviet Union and communism more generally, and the political struggles taking place in parts of Latin America. While this is an important element in their thought, the neoconservative Catholics also provided a critique of the bishops and church leadership that extended beyond the purely political. Their criticism of post-Vatican II American Catholicism is multilayered, with the political level being the most visible stratum for critique and discussion, albeit not the only one and perhaps not even the most important”; Scribner, “The Neoconservative Catholic Thought of Richard John Neuhaus, Michael Novak and George Weigel as a Form of Public Catholicism during the Ronald Reagan Era, 1980-1988” (PhD diss., The Catholic University of America, 2011), ii. 84 The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops consists of every U.S. bishop. As a body, they discuss issues relevant to the Church and make pronoucements that apply to the nation as a whole, in contrast to an individual Bishop’s pronouncements that apply to his jurisdiction only. 85 Timothy A. Byrnes, Catholic Bishops in American Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 100-103.

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Schlafly disagreed with the content of the Bishops’ Letter because she believed that the only way to protect the United States from Soviet nuclear weapons was to build up a larger arsenal. Her disagreement with the Bishops did not stop there, however. She also disagreed with the understanding of religious authority and politics behind the letter. The newsletter explains, “The interaction between the U.S. Catholic Bishops, American Catholics, and Catholic Church doctrine is a religious matter—but the interaction between the U.S. Catholic Bishops, U.S. national defense, and the Reagan defense budget is clearly a political matter.” The separation of these two spheres is different from the views of the New Christian Right, which, as I show in chapter 3, became involved in politics with the understanding that political activism was a working out of religious belief. In contrast, Schlafly complained that the Bishops’ Letter, “[w]hile couched in the language of religion, .

. . is plainly a political document.”86 The blurring of these categories distorts the weight these arguments have in the political sphere. She continued:

The authors of the Nuclear Letter have confused the religious and political realms.

They say, “We believe religious leaders have a task in concert with public officials,

analysts, private organizations and the media to set the limits beyond which our

military policy should not move in word or action.” On the contrary, religious

leaders do not have that “task,” nor do the media or other private groups. The “task”

of making our military policy is assigned by our Constitution to the Congress and the

President, one of the principal purposes for which they are elected. . . . A preacher

has the same rights as any other American citizen to be involved in politics,

legislation, and candidates. There is just one caveat. When a preacher is involved in

politics, he must be willing to accept the criticism and face the confrontations that

86 “The Bishops and the Nuclear Freeze,” 1.

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are indigenous to the political process. He cannot expect his political opinions to be

shielded by clerical robes and accepted as though he had just brought them on stone

tablets down from the mountain.87

In this explanation of the “political process,” religion was left outside the boundaries, and the political process was one of confrontation and criticism without regard for a person’s religious authority or credibility. In other words, religion should be left in the private sphere. Schlafly, then, put into place what Warner calls “a hierarchy of faculties that allows some activities to count as public or general and others to be merely personal, private, or particular.”88 The hierarchy that the grassroots antifeminist public used is one that places politics in the public sphere and religion in the private sphere.

In Schlafly’s formulation of the political sphere, access was available to individuals and was guaranteed through the Constitution of the United States. In the December 1980 newsletter, she addressed the fear of the political involvement of fundamentalist preachers, and she explained,

“Preachers have the same First Amendment rights that every American enjoys—freedom of speech and press, the right to vote and to participate in the political process, and the right to try to persuade others to accept their leadership and advice.” Here, the preachers could participate in politics because, as individuals, they had the same political rights as everyone else. She acknowledged that religion plays an important part in determining an individual’s political agenda, but ultimately, she claimed, religion remains irrelevant to the political process. For example, she continued, “The real reason the liberals are so upset is because they have made secular humanism our de facto state religion in government and education, and they realize that those who believe in the external verities

87 “The Bishops and the Nuclear Freeze,” 2. 88 Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 117.

123 and the Ten Commandments of the Judeo-Christian culture are starting to exercise their inalienable political rights.”89 Here, religion served as an impetus for political action, but the political process depended on individuals’ making use of their political rights.

Since religion could not validate political claims, Schlafly’s political alliances depended not on a common faith, but on agreement over issues. In a speech at the annual Eagle Council in

September 1984, Schlafly said, “I always say I’m the most tolerant person in the whole world.” Her idea of toleration was that she “let[s] people be against the Equal Rights Amendment for the reason of their choice. And [she] let[s] them work for [her] candidate for the reason of their choice.”90 She listed the various groups that she had worked with, including Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and liberals. In fact, Schlafly was much more ecumenical than the evangelical women’s public. At the Eagle Councils, the programs noted the scheduled time on Sunday morning for religious services, and the first Eagle Council in 1973 provided information for both Protestant and

Catholic services. In 1976 the list expanded to include Church of Christ services, and in 1977 the list included Mormon services. In a personal interview with Schlafly in 2013, she mentioned her work with Mormons and claimed that she “has done more to bring the Mormons in than anybody in the country.” She noted that other organizations that she worked with had very few Mormons or

Catholics, and she described the shift in the relationship between Protestants and Catholics in

America. When she first started out, she said, Protestants were preaching against Catholics, and since Catholics began the fight against abortion, it took a few years for the Protestants to engage the issue. Recently, however, she had received a letter from Tim LaHaye thanking her for helping him to realize that Catholics and Protestants “worship the same Jesus.”

89 “Does Reagan Know Who Elected Him,” PSR 14.5.1 (December 1980): 4. 90 Schlafly, “The Social and Education Issues of 1984.”

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Even though she had worked with many of the organizations of the New Christian Right, she distinguished herself and her organization from that movement since she was “completely focused on politics,” and she didn’t “overlay it with a heavy dose of religion.” When asked about the use of Bible verses, the mention of Judeo-Christian values, and God’s design for humanity in her organization’s literature, she answered that it was a matter of emphasis; it matters “how much time you spend talking about it.”91 And certainly compared to CWA, Eagle Forum spent very little time talking about religion, and the organization’s records regularly claimed that a person’s politics and religion are unconnected. During an Eagle Council conference in 1984, a panel discussed the upcoming presidential election, and someone mentioned that Walter Mondale was a humanist.

Schlafly interrupted the speaker to state that Geraldine Ferraro had initiated the discussion on religion by claiming that President Reagan was a bad Christian. Schlafly retorted, “I just didn’t think that what bills you support in Congress decides whether you’re a Christian or not.”92 This ecumenism also accomplished a particular kind of rhetorical work that, as Solomon notes, “broadens its audience appeal” and “strikes a deep emotional chord in many listeners.”93 My argument is that the rhetorical work that allowed for a broader ecumenicalism than groups such as CWA was effective for the grassroots antifeminist public to build strategic political alliances across religious differences, and it came from a distinctive history of Catholic participation in the U.S. political sphere.

Because religion occupies a separate place from politics, in Schlafly’s view, she can rebut a call for equal rights by separating equal rights into the religious sphere and government legislation into the political sphere. For example, in the July 1982 newsletter, she provided commentary on the

91 Phyllis Schlafly, in discussion with the author, January 2013. 92 “Panel on Child Care.” 93 Solomon, “‘Positive Woman’s’ Journey,” 267.

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Declaration of Independence, which she called “America’s greatest religious document.”94

According to her, equal rights were already granted by God and affirmed by this religious document.

This move is important because, in this formulation, rights are stable and invariable. They are not the subject of politics; they occupy the sacred and private space of religion. It is the state’s role to protect these rights, but when NOW complained that women did not have the same rights as men, she pointed out that the Constitution is grammatically gender neutral.95 It does not talk about men or women, but senators, representatives, the president, and citizens. Therefore, any argument that depends on inequality is fallacious. According to Schlafly, since rights are granted by God, they cannot be changed or varied in any way.

Therefore, in the world that Schlafly articulated in the Eagle Forum newsletters, political action was strategic, contingent, and concrete. Religion was sacred, invariable, and incorporeal.

Religion remained a private and individual matter. Religion was not germane to politics or to matters of public discourse. Because Schlafly came out of a Catholic tradition that needed the public sphere to be areligious in order to justify Catholics’ participation, Schlafly’s political world could not have a strong relationship to religion.

Individualism

The Eagle Forum newsletters consistently relied on the notion that the individual is the foundational unit of society (as opposed to the family, socioeconomic class, gender, or race).

Throughout the newsletters, individuals bore the responsibility for their own actions and for the health of society. Individual actions either supported or threatened social order. Schlafly said it most

94 “Prayer in Public Schools,” PSR 15.12.1 (July 1982): 4. 95 She neglects to mention the use of the word “male” in the Fourteenth Amendment.

126 clearly when she commented that, “in the final analysis, the kind of people we are—the kind of nation we will be for generations hence—is the sum of what millions of Americans do in their otherwise private lives.”96 In particular, Schlafly believed that all the larger social problems in the world were merely an amalgamation of individual sin. Regarding poverty, she argued that

The major causes of the feminization of poverty are divorce and out-of-wedlock

births. According to a Census Bureau report, if family composition in 1980 had been

the same as in 1970 (and other variables were held constant), the figures on poverty

would have been dramatically different. Whites would have had a three percent rise

in median family income (instead of only a one percent rise). Blacks would have had

an eleven percent rise in median family income (instead of a five percent decline).97

Here she argued that if individuals would conform to her standard of family life—which included prohibitions on premarital sex, homosexuality, abortion, women working outside the home, and divorce—then these individuals would be lifted out of poverty. The moving parts of society were not structures or systems or ideologies, but individuals who operated either according to or in opposition to personal responsibility and morality. Furthermore, reform in individual action would result in a reformed society. Indeed, as the sociologist Susan Marshall notes, the political actions that the newsletter recommended for its readers “were frequently individualistic rather than collective, consisting of activities which could be done within the home.”98 After seeing the damage a riot had done after a blizzard in Baltimore in February 1979, Schlafly argued that even though “liberals insist on blaming criminal conduct on the economic and social environment,” it was not the snow that

96 “The Family: Preserving America’s Future,” PSR 21.7.2 (February 1988): 1. 97 “Motherhood in the Eighties,” PSR 18.10.1 (May 1985): 3. 98 Susan E. Marshall, “Ladies against Women: Mobilization Dilemmas of Antifeminist Movements,” Social Problems 32.4 (April 1985): 357.

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“[broke] the store windows or carr[ied] off merchandise. It was people—mostly young people whose years in school came after the U.S. Supreme Court banished prayers and moral training from public schools. Probably nobody ever taught them that it is morally and legally wrong to take property that belongs to someone else.”99 The individuals responsible for the crime during the riot had been trained by other individuals who failed to do their social duty and teach them correct morality, she said. Consequently, in order to fix social problems, individuals had to change their personal behavior.

This commitment to the individual invited the grassroots antifeminist public to be especially suspicious of identity politics, whether based on gender, class, or race. Indeed, Schlafly complained in the May 1985 newsletter that feminists assume “that women should be dealt with as a group and not as individuals.”100 To Schlafly, however, women had the power and the agency to choose how to live. Solomon says that in Schlafly’s discourse “women are defined by the group, and are encouraged to define themselves, in terms of these roles rather than in terms of their individual personalities.”101

I agree that Schlafly attributed a distinct role to women, but I argue that Schlafly emphasized a woman’s agency to accept that role or not. Whether a woman complied with her essential nature was a choice that she could make without interference. In an interview in 1983, Schlafly said, “I never talk of women as a monolithic block who think ‘A’ or ‘B’ or do ‘C.’ It just isn’t that way. People are individuals and I note that the women’s lib movement has tried very hard to force upon this country a senseless sameness of treatment between men and women. . . . [B]ut as far as what some individual woman wants, she can do whatever she likes.”102 Schlafly emphasized the difference between men

99 “Snow and Crime,” PSR 12.8.1 (March 1979): 3. 100 “The Game Plan to Sell ‘Comparable Worth,’” 1. 101 Solomon, “‘Positive Woman’s’ Journey,” 269. 102 Phyllis Schlafly on the Richard Shanks Show, airdate: January 1, 1983, WTMV V-32, Lakeland, FL, DVD, Phyllis Schlafly Collection, Eagle Forum Archives.

128 and women as a fact, but she also remained committed to the idea that a woman could choose to fulfill her feminine role.

This commitment to the individual and her agency was a cornerstone of the lifeworld that the newsletters articulated for the grassroots antifeminist public, and any assertion of identity politics threatened this commitment. For example, the March 1986 newsletter began, “America has become a two-class society. The class division has nothing whatsoever to do with level of income or education or job status or talent or sex or race or color or advantage/disadvantage of birth. It has everything to do with whether or not you have a commitment (1) to moral values (i.e., respect for

God, church/synagogue, and the Ten Commandments), (2) to family values (i.e., marital fidelity, mothercare of children, and parental rights in education), (3) to the work ethic (i.e., hard work, thrift, savings, and the right to enjoy the fruits of one’s labor and improve one’s economic lot in life).”103

This explanation of class evacuated the category of any kind of collective, and it also made class status determined by personal choice. Classes were now merely groups of individuals rather than coherent entities that had a role in public life. Similarly, the newsletters rarely talked about race and racial discrimination because of the intractable commitment to the individual. In the August 1990 newsletter, Schlafly critiqued an effort by educators to develop more racially diverse curricula. She said, “If some magician could remedy overnight all the injustices of discrimination against minorities in education, employment, housing, and voting, all those leap-forwards combined could not add up to what could have been done for minorities by teaching their children to read.”104 Here, the solution to systemic injustice was individual education. In these examples, Schlafly challenged the collectives of gender, class, and race in order to privilege the role of the individual.

103 “The Two-Class American Society,” 1. 104 “The Shame of Illiteracy,” PSR 16.12.1 (July 1983): 4.

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It is not surprising that one of Eagle Forum’s primary commitments was to individual rights.

As David Harvey explains in A Brief History of Neoliberalism, the rhetoric of individual rights in the late 1960s and 1970s emerged in response to individual and social injustice perpetrated by powerful corporations and interventionist states. By the 1980s, however, this rhetoric excoriated the interventionist state but had also been incorporated into a call for a free market economy that bolstered individual choice. Because the grassroots antifeminist public emphasized a moral order, it is better described by Harvey’s explanation of neoconservatives who have a “concern for order as an answer to the chaos of individual interests, and . . . for an overweening morality as the necessary social glue to keep the body politic secure in the face of external and internal dangers.”105 As a case in point, the Eagle Forum newsletters claimed that the real problem of society was that “the whole concept of sin has faded out of American public life.” Furthermore, Schlafly explained, “Society is necessary for human survival. Mutual consent and consensus on a system of thought and code of conduct are necessary to keep conflict to a manageable level and to develop a legal system which promotes the efficient functioning of a sophisticated society. Force, represented by the police, can only protect us from a tiny percentage of criminals. In order for a society to function effectively, the overwhelming majority of its members must agree on fundamental rules of conduct. Among these rules, in the American system, is a respect for private property.”106 This admonition demonstrated that Schlafly’s commitment to individual rights was balanced by—and contradicted by—a need for a commitment to society and social order.

Even though in many ways the grassroots antifeminist public, as represented in the Eagle

Forum newsletters, followed Harvey’s explanation of the neoconservative alternative to

105 David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 82. 106 “The Seven Deadly Sins,” PSR 12.8.1 (March 1979): 4.

130 neoliberalism, it does diverge from Harvey’s description in that it did not support the rule of the elite. Schlafly’s political campaigns and her campaign for president of the NFRW made significant use of anti-elitist and anti-establishment rhetoric.107 She claimed that liberals “want a society in which their intellectual elite can do the planning and the managing in order to bring about the results that

THEY want, instead of letting people plan their own lives and spend their own money.”108 The newsletters used this construction of the “elite” as an opponent to be fought against, and anti- establishment sentiments became a rhetorical strategy to indicate opponents and to urge calls to action. The lifeworld articulated by the Eagle Forum newsletters included a fierce commitment to the individual that rendered any claims based on identity politics suspicious, that explained the evils of society through personal choice and responsibility, and that supported the rule of the people rather than the elite.

Schlafly’s Model for Argumentation and Affect

Parts of the lifeworld for any public are the designation of legible or acceptable subjectivities and rules for interactions with other publics. Each public normalizes argumentation strategies, judgments, and rules of conduct regarding interaction with interlocutors. For the grassroots antifeminist public, the Eagle Forum newsletters model a style of argumentation that relies on judging others’ credibility and the validity of their arguments based on their affect. For example, the newsletters configured feminists, establishment politicians, and liberals as people who whine, deceive, and disregard the American public. Conservatives have strength, integrity, and charm. In

107 See “Keeping-Your-Sense-of-Humor Department,” PSR 1.2.1 (September 1967): 3; and “Is Your Congressman in the Republican Mainstream,” PSR 1.3.1 (October 1967): 1. 108 “Seizing the Moral High Ground of Politics,” PSR 22.4.1 (November 1988): 1.

131 other words, the newsletters offered readers not only a coherent system of classification but also a way of feeling and being in the world.

Schlafly presented the readers of the Eagle Forum newsletters with two ways of being a woman in the world: a feminist woman or a conservative woman. She constructed these two identities in order to create an affective opposition to feminism and an affective attachment to conservativism. Her readers could participate in the grassroots antifeminist public by sharing a conservative woman identity and joining other conservative women in disapproving of feminist women. Schlafly characterized feminists as reprehensible people whose political issues were just complaints, whose political success relied on manipulative tactics, and who abandoned or abused woman’s true nature.

Schlafly was thoroughly dismissive of feminist women’s issues. In fact, feminist women’s issues, according to Schlafly, were a symptom of their negative attitudes and their negative outlook on life. Schlafly called an amicus brief that NOW filed regarding the exemption of women from the draft “one of the most ridiculous briefs ever presented to the Supreme Court.”109 She called claims of racial inequality from the left “collective breast-beating and finger point[ing].”110 Progressive social policy was labeled “paternalism” that would lead to Americans living “the life of a plantation slave.”111 Support for foreign aid was a symptom of a “guilt complex.”112 A 1985 newsletter declared that in all of Schlafly’s debates with feminists, she encountered a “rhetoric of envy.”113 The danger of these attitudes was not just the feminist political agenda, but that children might learn these attitudes in the public education system. She warned parents to read their children’s textbooks for any signs

109 “Battle Moves to the Courts,” PSR 15.1.1 (August 1981): 3. 110 “Shame of Illiteracy,” 3. 111 “The Family’s Stake in Economic Policies,” PSR 18.9.1 (April 1985): 1. 112 “How Did We Get in This Noose?” PSR 16.1.1 (August 1982): 2. 113 “Comparable Worth: Unfair to Men and Women,” 1.

132 of “a negative attitude, emotional isolation, fear of the future, an obsessive preoccupation with tragedy and death, or despair in coping with life.” Furthermore, she asked, does the textbook

“describe America as an unjust society, unfair to economic or racial groups or to women, rather than telling the truth that America has given more freedom and opportunity to more people than any nation in the history of the world; and that is why millions of people want to immigrate here, whereas Communist countries have to build barbed-wire fences to keep people from fleeing?”114

Here, Schlafly characterized the complaints of discrimination expressed by the left as lies; liberals ignored the extraordinary success of American politics in order to cultivate ingratitude and dissent.

Anything that sounds like whining, fear, or dejection can be categorized as politically and morally suspect.115

Schlafly also portrayed all feminist women as radicals who disingenuously claimed to speak for all women and hid their real agenda from the public.116 In the November 1982 newsletter that includes an edited list of NOW’s 1982 Convention Resolutions, Schlafly warns her readers that

NOW has “cultivated the false impression that NOW is principally concerned with women’s rights and discrimination against women.” Instead, NOW’s resolutions “spell out its radical agenda,” which was primarily focused on “lesbian rights and abortion rights.”117 By equating radicalism with

114 “How Parents Can Evaluate Textbooks,” PSR 17.7.1 (February 1984): 1. 115 Other scholars have drawn out Schlafly’s characterization of feminists as whining. See Marshall, “Ladies against Women,” 356; Eric C. Miller, “Phyllis Schlafly’s ‘Positive’ Freedom: Liberty, Liberation, and the Equal Rights Amendment,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 18.2 (Summer 2015): 289; and Foss, “Equal Rights Amendment Controversy,” 284. 116 See “How ERA Would Change Federal Laws,” PSR 15.4.2 (November 1981): 1; “Ten Years of ERA Is Enough!” 1; “School-Based Sex Clinics vs. Sex Respect,” PSR 19.11.1 (June 1986): 1; “How the Left Wing Is Funded by Big Business,” PSR 21.6.1 (January 1988): 1; “The 1988 Party Platform Comparisons,” PSR 22.2.1 (September 1988): 1; and “The Radical Goals of the Feminists: NOW’s 1991 Resolutions,” PSR 25.5.1 (December 1991): 1. See also Miller, “Schlafly’s ‘Positive’ Freedom,” 287; Foss, “Equal Rights Amendment Controversy,” 285. 117 “What Are N.O.W.’s Policies and Goals?” PSR 16.4.2 (November 1982): 1.

133 lesbian and abortion rights, the Eagle Forum newsletters placed these political issues on the extreme end of a political spectrum. This claim of radicalism also created a clear line of demarcation between conservative women and feminist women, and the two groups of women were characterized as mutually exclusive. In order to prove this division, Schlafly recounted feminist issues and arguments in their simplest terms and what were at the time their most outrageous terms. So, while feminist women claimed to be concerned with women’s rights and discrimination, in fact, Schlafly claimed, these two concerns hid the more nefarious goals of feminist women “who falsely pretend to speak for ‘women’ while hiding from the general public the fact that they really define ‘women’s rights’ as a woman’s right (1) to kill her unborn baby and (2) to enjoy public respect for lesbian sex and lifestyles.”118 Furthermore, “Feminism is not about achievement for women; it is about taking power away from men and giving it—not to women, but—to their own little coterie of doctrinaire feminists who are trying to restructure society and change human nature.”119 Restructuring society and changing human nature were radical goals, and some self-identifying feminist women claimed them as their goals. However, by labeling NOW’s more moderate political campaigns for better access to abortion and an end to discrimination against women as radical feminist goals, Schlafly accomplished three things: she shortened the range of possible political goals, she intensified her readers’ opposition to moderate feminist goals, and she further separated the grassroots antifeminist public from the liberal feminist public when these two publics actually shared a number of commitments and political understandings.

The Eagle Forum newsletters distinguished the grassroots antifeminist public from the liberal feminist public by declaring that the political tactics feminist women used were deceitful and

118 “The Real Goals of Women’s Lib,” PSR 19.5.1 (December 1985): 1. 119 “Time to Tell the Feminists Bye-Bye,” PSR 24.5.1 (December 1990): 2.

134 manipulative.120 For example, during the Clarence Thomas hearings, the November 1991 newsletter reported that “feminists want . . . the destruction of any man who does not conform to the feminist ideology and agenda. They are quite willing to use any tool, including false charges, media leaks and media bias, to destroy a man who might vote conservative and pro-family on the Supreme Court instead of liberal and pro-feminist.”121 Here, feminist women could not succeed on the merit of their arguments but must resort to deceit and manipulation to gain support. The June 1986 newsletter reported that school-based sex clinics were a result of “health service professionals who want to co- opt the schools as rent-free offices for their expanding bureaucracy.” The reason these health professionals do not support abstinence-only sex education was because students who are “virgins . .

. are not customers for contraceptives or abortion clinics. They will not be clients for the ever- expanding bureaucracy of social service and health care ‘providers’ and ‘counselors.’”122 In other words, the issues that feminist women supported were self-serving, whereas the issues conservative women supported conformed to higher principles above the self.123 Not only did feminist women deceive, but also they lacked the skills and the strength to present a coherent case supporting their political agenda. During the fight about the ratification of the ERA, Schlafly wrote many newsletters explaining that the ERA would mean that women would be drafted. In the August 1981 newsletter, for instance, she generalized the debate tactics of ERA supporters. Schlafly wrote, “When anti-

ERAers would point out the legal consequences of ERA on the draft, the pro-ERAers often

120 See “Women’s Magazines Promote ERA—But Deny Equal Rights,” 1; “Eagle Forum Defends Wives and Mothers,” PSR 14.9.1 (April 1981): 1; “The Game Plan to Sell Comparable Worth,” PSR 18.1.1 (August 1984): 1; “America’s Future Is Conservative,” 4; and “Same Day Voter Registration Invites Fraud,” PSR 22.3.1 (October 1988): 4. 121 “Feminism Falls on Its Face,” 2. 122 “School-Based Sex Clinics vs. Sex Respect,” 3. 123 See also “Parental Leave—A Windfall for Yuppies,” PSR 20.4.1 (November 1986): 1; “Federal Day Care—Sovietizing the American Family,” PSR 21.7.1 (February 1988): 3; and “What’s Wrong with Federal Baby-Sitting,” PSR 21.8.1 (March 1988): 1.

135 ridiculed the argument, evaded the issue, giggled in a feminine way to avoid answering questions, or accused anti-ERAers of ‘raising an emotional issue.’”124 She deemed the evidence they provided to be “tear-jerking sob stories.”125 In contrast, she consistently enumerated the logical arguments for her own political positions, thereby modeling the kind of political engagement characteristic of the grassroots antifeminist public.126 Eric Miller summarized Schlafly’s proposal to her readers: “[B]e a rational woman and adopt my views; or be a deviant, irrational, and think for yourself.”127 While I agree with Miller’s assessment that Schlafly associated her own views with rationality and her opponents’ views with deviance and irrationality, I argue that in Schlafly’s formulation, anyone who thought for herself would be led to agree with Schalfy’s views. Therefore, she constructed forceful arguments in favor of her own position and firmly believed women should decide their own positions for themselves.

According to Schlafly and Eagle Forum, feminist women either abandoned or abused women’s true nature. On the one hand, the Eagle Forum newsletters denigrated feminist women because they were too masculine. For example, Schlafly said, “Feminism has nothing to do with

124 “Eagle Forum Defends Women from Draft,” 1. 125 “Women’s Magazines Promote ERA—But Deny Equal Rights,” 1. 126 “Declining SAT Scores,” PSR 13.6.1 (January 1980): 3; “Don’t Let the Courts Draft Women,” PSR 14.6.1 (January 1981): 2-3; “The Rightness of Reaganomics,” PSR 14.12.1 (July 1981): 1; “How the ERA Would Change Federal Laws,” PSR 15.4.2 (November 1981): 1; “The Tremendous Powers of ERA’s Section 2,” PSR 15.5.2 (December 1981): 1; “Federal Court Voids ERA Extension, Upholds Rescission,” PSR 15.6.2 (January 1982): 1; “Schools Should Teach Students to Obey the Law,” PSR 15.8.2 (March 1982): 1; “Defending the Economic Life of the Family,” PSR 15.9.1 (April 1982): 1; “Classroom Courses in Nuclear War,” PSR 17.1.1 (August 1983): 1; “Child Abuse in the Classroom,” PSR 18.2.1 (September 1984): 1; “The Science and Strategy of High Frontier,” 1; “U.S. Stakes in Central America,” 2; “PACs Protect Personal Political Participation,” PSR 20.1.1 (August 1986): 1; “The High Costs of Free Sex,” PSR 20.7.1 (February 1987): 1; “Statehood for the District of Columbia?” PSR 21.8.2 (March 1988): 3; “The Challenge of Child Care Costs,” PSR 22.7.1 (February 1989): 1; “How to Spend the Peace Dividend,” PSR 23.8.2 (March 1990): 1. 127 Miller, “Schlafly’s ‘Positive’ Freedom,” 293.

136 being ‘feminine.’”128 She repeated this contrast when she said, “Feminist is an antonym for feminine, not a synonym. . . . A feminist will hiss and boo you if you use the terms ‘girl’ or ‘lady’; a lady will not. In fact, a lady probably will never hiss or boo at all.”129 Susan Marshall also notes that Schlafly characterized feminist women as “anti-female,” “unladylike,” and women who “demonstrated their dissatisfaction with the feminine role and their rejection of all womanhood.”130 Indeed, at one point,

Schlafly called feminist women “macho.”131 Sonja Foss writes that the Phyllis Schlafly Report viewed supporters of the ERA as “deviates from the traditional feminine woman.”132 In other words,

Schlafly claimed that feminist women abandoned their womanhood. On the other hand, the Eagle

Forum newsletters contradicted that characterization when they condemned feminist women for being too feminine, specifically by showing emotion in public. For example, when feminist women challenged a law that exempted private schools from the same regulations as public schools, the newsletters reported that they were “hysterical.”133 Likewise, after Congresswoman Pat Schroeder’s announcement in 1987 that she would leave the U.S. presidential race, Schlafly wrote, “The feminists were acutely embarrassed because Schroeder’s emotional performance confirmed the fears that many people have about a woman being President, namely, that she isn’t ‘man’ enough for the job.”134 Schlafly used a shifting identity of womanhood to disparage feminist women no matter what they did.

While Schlafly consistently condemned feminists for either mimicking masculine traits or behaving like immature women, she claimed that her supporters, on the other hand, belonged to a

128 “Essays on Feminism versus Feminine,” PSR 16.5.1 (December 1982): 1. 129 “An Intelligent Candidate’s Guide to the Women’s Vote,” PSR 20.3.2 (October 1986): 1. 130 Marshall, “Ladies against Women,” 350, 351, 356. 131 “Defending the Economic Life of the Family,” PSR 15.9.1 (April 1982): 4. 132 Foss, “Equal Rights Amendment Controversy,” 285. 133 “Academic Freedom Victory,” PSR 13.6.1 (January 1980): 3. 134 “What’s Happened to Feminist Role-Models?” PSR 21.5.1 (December 1987): 3.

137 group of ladies who had positive attitudes, worked hard, and complied with traditional social manners. Solomon notes that Schlafly encouraged her reader to be a “positive woman”: one who is

“the central figure in the emotional life of the family . . . the source of warmth and humanness in striking contrast to the destructive and self-centered feminist.”135 British Prime Minister Margaret

Thatcher symbolized the paragon of conservative womanhood in the newsletters because she understood that “the route to success for a woman is not the clenched fist, the whimper of one who thinks she is a victim, or even affirmative action. It is the same route as for a man: hard work, perseverance, and sticking to sound, conservative principles.”136 This construction also offered newsletter readers model traits to develop for themselves: a way to be a member of the grassroots antifeminist public. When defending your rights, the February 1981 newsletter advised readers,

“Don’t be belligerent. Tread carefully until you are absolutely sure of your facts.”137 This advice directly contradicted the portrayal of feminist women in the newsletters as disruptive and obnoxious.

Furthermore, Schlafly characterized conservative women as members of traditional families who served the emotional needs of all family members by “providing a base from which to face life’s challenges, a safe haven to care for our young, a nest where love and companionship can grow, and an encouragement to nurture each other through life’s many stages of aging.”138 Again, this picture contrasted with the characterization of feminist women as mean-spirited and selfish. In fact, Schlafly implied that mutual care and affection could only be cultivated in a traditional heteronormative family structure: “The family which is tied together with love and longterm commitment is the source of all productivity, wealth, and economic growth.”139 A 1982 newsletter claimed, “The

135 Solomon, “‘Positive Woman’s’ Journey,” 266. 136 “Ms. Thatcher Exposes Feminism,” PSR 21.5.1 (December 1987): 4. 137 “Stop Textbook Censorship,” PSR 14.7.1 (February 1981): 3. 138 “Facing the Future: Family vs. Feminism,” PSR 23.9.2 (April 1990): 1. 139 “White House Report on the Family,” PSR 20.5.1 (December 1986): 4.

138 feminine woman enjoys being a woman. She has a positive outlook on life. She knows she can seek her fulfillment in the career of her choice, including that of traditional wife and mother.”140 As opposed to feminist women, whom Schlafly characterized as abandoning or abusing the role of woman, Schlafly claimed that conservative women celebrated being different from men. Here,

Schlafly dismissed any feminist argument that traditional gender roles were socially constructed and inordinately benefited men. She upheld women’s traditional role as one option among many that women could freely choose. Consequently, Schlafly articulated an identity for conservative women with rhetoric that empowered and encouraged women to understand their current world through a conservative lens.

Schlafly created a clear distinction between conservative women and feminist women based on an assumption that women have—and should abide by—natural characteristics, such as good judgment, a desire to nurture children, and sexual modesty.141 For example, after Schlafly’s defeat in the campaign for president of NFRW, she claimed that the men of the Republican Party influenced the campaign. She wrote that “women should elect their own leaders without interference, and that is because the judgment of the women is better.” Here, women as a sex have good judgment, and furthermore, men should “have the good grace to accept [it].”142 The newsletters consistently argued that a woman’s strongest desire and talent was nurturing children, and anything that hindered women from nurturing children had disastrous effects. Schlafly claimed, “The liberated lifestyles which encourage wives and mothers to do their own things have left children to bear burdens of

140 “Essays on Feminism versus Feminine,” 1. 141 When she characterizes men, she creates a portrait of a licentious and irresponsible sex. Indeed, legislation is the way to keep men in line, including guaranteeing that men will provide for their wives and children and give women fair compensation during a divorce. See Solomon, “Stopping ERA,” 115. 142 “Conservatives Win in California Federation of Republican Women: The Role of Men,” PSR 1.4.1 (November 1967): 2.

139 loneliness, depression, and the empty home.”143 According to Schlafly, the sex education programs in public schools threatened women’s natural modesty. Schlafly said that the psychologists and teachers intended sexual education in public schools to change girls’ attitudes and behaviors from their natural state to an unnatural approach to sex, including “sex without guilt,” “unnatural sex acts,” and “shedding girls of their natural modesty.”144 Feminism, especially, threatened women’s natures. Feminism, she said, “is not compatible with freedom because free men and women will not voluntarily submit to social engineering to restructure society according to an ideology that runs counter to common sense and all historical experience.”145 Here, she doomed feminism from the start while at the same time warning her readers against it, and she articulated the threat of feminism while upholding conservative social norms. In each of these cases, Schlafly constructed a female identity for her readers that was stable, essential, and threatened. She identified characteristics in women that benefited themselves, their families, and their societies, and therefore she aligned traditional gender roles with women’s capacity and responsibility to improve their own lives and modern society.

In her accusations against feminism and feminist women, Schlafly consistently used what argumentation scholar Douglas Walton calls the “poisoning the well” ad hominem attack. Walton characterizes this argumentation strategy as one of three fallacious ad hominem strategies that “is

143 “Motherhood in the Eighties,” 1. 144 “What’s Wrong With Sex Education?” PSR 14.7.1 (February 1981): 1. See also “Textbook and Curriculum Mistakes,” PSR 15.8.1 (March 1982): 3. 145 “Exposes of Feminist Foolishness,” PSR 23.9.2 (April 1990): 4. See also “Facing the Future: Family vs. Feminism,” 1; “The Feminist Mistake,” PSR 23.5.1 (December 1989): 4; “Motherhood in the Eighties,” 1; “Big Brother Wants to Be Big Mama,” PSR 19.7.1 (February 1986): 4; “Blurring Gender Identity,” PSR 19.8.1 (March 1986): 2; “Marriage: Traditional vs. Non-Traditional,” PSR 20.5.1 (December 1986): 1; “Yes, Virginia, There Is a Difference,” PSR 21.5.1 (December 1987): 1; and “The Feminization of the U.S. Military,” PSR 23.2.1 (September 1989): 1.

140 inherently dangerous and emotional in argument.”146 This type of argument classifies an arguer’s opponent as “inherently unreliable and unreasonable,” and consequently, “there is no room left for argument, because reasoned argument presupposes an arguer who is, at least to some degree, open- minded, serious, and trustworthy in collaborating in joint dialogue.”147 Essentially, by leveling personal attacks against all feminists, Schlafly significantly inhibited reasoned debate. Her personal attacks focused on how all feminists abandoned or abused the natural characteristics of women, how all feminists were selfish and belligerent, and how all feminists’ arguments were irrational and destructive.

Solomon and Foss have noted Schlafly’s use of ad hominem attacks as well and have described how her rhetoric was deleterious to cooperation and problem solving. Solomon avers that these “ad hominem fallacies . . . stifle reasoned discussions of issues by inflaming prejudices,” and argues that they “deepened social cleavages and denigrated the actions of many people of good will and good sense.”148 Indeed, Foss argues, the debate over the ERA became about the legitimation of ERA supporters as women rather than the issues of the amendment. Foss observes that “when ERA proponents are labeled weird or abnormal, the focus of the conflict shifts so that the supporters must defend themselves as legitimate persons rather than concentrate on issues directly relevant to the battle over the ERA.”149

As Eagle Forum’s visibility and influence increased from the late 1970s and into the 1980s and its rhetoric circulated more widely and with more credibility, the newsletters offered the grassroots antifeminist public a model for political argumentation that did not foster deliberation

146 Douglas N. Walton, Informal Logic: A Handbook for Critical Argumentation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 134. 147 Walton, Informal Logic, 153. 148 Solomon, “Stopping ERA,” 116. 149 Foss, “Equal Rights Amendment Controversy,” 286.

141 among competing publics. This case study reveals an example of a public (the grassroots antifeminist public) increasing its participation in a discursive space occupied by other publics (specifically, the liberal feminist public). However, the addition of the grassroots antifeminist public did not result in healthier democratic discourse, as defined by rhetorical scholars in the introduction. Instead of more political ideas and arguments being debated in the discursive space, the rhetoric in the Eagle Forum newsletters hindered reasoned debate in favor of effectively motivating readers to support a conservative political agenda and oppose a liberal one. In other words, throughout the 1980s Eagle

Forum’s newsletters established and maintained an active membership in the grassroots antifeminist public by using rhetorical methods that were politically effective but had a damaging effect on democratic discourse, as public sphere scholars characterize it. This rhetoric demanded a response from the liberal feminist public, and I will discuss that response in chapter 4. First, however, I will examine another conservative public, the evangelical women’s political public, and the rhetoric that it contributed to the national debates on women’s issues in the 1980s.

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Chapter 3: Concerned Women for America and the Evangelical Women’s Political Public

Imagine Feminism as an Enemy of Womanhood

In the main lobby of Concerned Women for America’s offices in Washington, D.C., a poster with a larger-than-life-sized photograph hangs on the wall. The picture, from 1987, shows U.S.

President Ronald Reagan being greeted by the founder and president of Concerned Women for

America, Beverly LaHaye, at CWA’s national conference. The poster includes the text of Reagan’s opening remarks at the conference, “It’s wonderful to see you all here. It makes me feel as if the reinforcements have arrived.”1 Beverly LaHaye founded CWA in 1979 for the purpose of defeating the Equal Rights Amendment, and within the first year of its founding, the organization claimed

100,000 members.2 Other pictures, posters, and plaques decorate the wall, but this picture from nearly thirty years ago is most prominent. The picture is a testament to an earlier time when the organization enjoyed strong ties to leaders in power and when it had a large, engaged membership.

The prominence of this poster points also to the importance of the 1980s in the life of the organization, which is still “the nation’s largest public policy women’s organization” according to its website.3

CWA’s leaders presented the organization as the alternative to the feminist movement, specifically Betty Friedan and the National Organization for Women, not only because of different

1 “Convention Attendees Challenged to Be the Difference,” Concerned Women for America 9, no. 11 (November 1987): 5. The poster was hanging in the lobby as of June 2011. The newsletter’s title changed throughout the 1980s. The first title was Concerned Women for America; then the title changed to Concerned Women for America News with the November 1984 edition. The title reverted to its original with the May 1986 edition until the newsletter format changed to a magazine format with the October 1991 edition, when it was titled Family Voice. The volume numbers were continuous throughout the title changes, and in subsequent footnotes, the newsletter is abbreviated as CWA, CWA News, or FV as appropriate. Since not all articles have authors listed, the citations will only note authors as available. 2 “CWA Press Conference,” CWA 1.6 (June/July 1980): 2. 3 “New to CWA?,” www.cwfa.org, March 1, 2012.

143 political agendas but also because of warring religious perspectives and worldviews. Political debates about the ERA, abortion, school prayer, custody laws, and domestic violence became battlegrounds for the maintenance of Christianity, the United States, and even civilization. The newsletters of the organization throughout the 1980s consistently portrayed CWA as the mortal enemy of “feminists,” whom the CWA newsletters characterized as a pitiable, monolithic group of women who were opposed to religion, family, marriage, motherhood, and men. However, scholars have noted the common values and material conditions between feminists and conservative women. For example, as Sara Evans explains, “The defensiveness of not only traditional women, especially housewives whose role was rapidly losing status, but also many working-class women who would have chosen that role if given a chance, revealed a deep sense of vulnerability rooted in precisely the same cultural and economic changes that motivated feminist activism. Where one side sought political equality with which to defend their own interests better, the other feared an almost total loss of self and female identity.”4 In other words, while the two groups of women responded in different ways, they were responding to a shared set of material conditions. Furthermore, in 1991, Susan Faludi published Backlash, in which she noted the shared values that feminists and conservative women held, even while they disagreed about how those values should best be enacted and protected. Faludi states that conservative women, particularly Beverly LaHaye and Concerned Women for America, were “voicing antifeminist views—while internalizing the message of the women’s movement and quietly incorporating its tenets of self-determination, equality, and freedom of choice into their private behavior.”5 Instead of interpreting LaHaye’s and other CWA members’ values as mutually exclusive of feminists’ values, this chapter examines how the CWA newsletters used evangelical

4 Sara Evans, Born for Liberty: A History of Women in America (New York: Free Press, 1989), 304. 5 Faludi, Backlash, 256.

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Christian discourse to create an opportunity for evangelical women to defend and advocate for traditional gender norms while engaging with the liberal feminist public.

In this chapter, I first position CWA within American evangelical Christian culture and describe the relationships that CWA cultivated with Eagle Forum and NOW. Next, I argue that

CWA acted publicly through aligning with God and history. It also acted counterpublicly by restricting the power of God through attributing political failures to CWA members, Christian voters, or political opponents and by resisting history through claims of uniqueness. Last, I lay out the lifeworld articulated in the CWA newsletters in order to argue that the growing visibility and influence of the evangelical women’s political public presented a rhetorical challenge to NOW and the liberal feminist public. In fact, the CWA newsletters established political discourse that focused not on deliberation or debate but on catastrophe. Consequently, the increasingly significant role that the evangelical women’s political public played in the discursive space occupied by the three publics in this study required a forceful response from the liberal feminist public, which led to a reification of ideological differences and political disagreements instead of, as Hauser understands it, a site of deliberative discourse with a goal to resolve differences. Public sphere theory, as taken up by rhetorical scholars, needs to be expanded in order to account for the contentious interaction between these three publics and the changes to the discursive space they shared.

CWA’s Position within American Evangelicalism

LaHaye’s founding of CWA in 1979 and the organization’s exponential growth in membership and political influence throughout the 1980s reflect changes in American evangelical

Protestant culture of the late twentieth century. These changes, however, follow a historical pattern of evangelical Christians participating in American public life. Historian Mark Noll argues, “The

145 religious-political agitations of the [late twentieth century] are, in fact, far from novel. . . . From arguments over religious freedom during the Constitutional Convention . . . religion was an ever- present if also constantly evolving fixture in American politics.”6 The specifics of evangelical participation in American politics throughout history remain contested, partly because the term

“evangelical” has a contested meaning and origin. There are two definitions of “evangelical” that help to identify the trends relevant to CWA’s history: one prioritizes theology, and the other prioritizes social movements. Many historians use David Beddington’s theologically oriented definition of “evangelical,” which consists of four components: “1) conversion, or ‘the belief that lives need to be changed’; 2) the Bible, or the ‘belief that all spiritual truth is to be found in its pages’; 3) activism, or the dedication of all believers, including laypeople, to lives of service for God, especially as manifested in evangelicalism (spreading the good news) and mission (taking the gospel to other societies); and 4) crucicentrism, or the conviction that Christ’s death was the crucial matter in providing atonement for sin (i.e., providing reconciliation between a holy God and sinful humans).”7 This definition defines “evangelical” by theology. Any person or organization or denomination or local church that could ascribe to these four beliefs can be categorized as

“evangelical.” Other scholars employ a more sociological approach to defining evangelical

Christians. Mark Lindsey in Faith in the Halls of Power uses three of these four aspects of evangelicalism and concludes that “[e]vangelicalism is not just a set of beliefs; it is also a social movement and all-encompassing identity.”8 Pamela Cochran in Evangelical Feminism defines two

6 Mark Noll and Luke Harlow, eds., Religion and American Politics: From the Colonial Period to the Present, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 6. 7 Quoted in Mark Noll, The Rise of Evangelicalism: The Age of Edwards, Whitefield, and the Wesleys (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2003), 19. 8 Michael Lindsay, Faith in the Halls of Power: How Evangelicals Joined the American Elite (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 4.

146 different aspects of evangelicalism, one historical and the other sociological. The historical category locates evangelicalism in the history of Protestant religious thought (here she follows the four aspects of Beddington’s definition), and the social category determines “who is inside and who is outside the evangelical fold.”9

One of the main ways this tension between a theological and a social definition of evangelicalism reveals itself is in how scholars determine the origins of evangelicalism. Those who emphasize it as a set of beliefs tend to trace its origins back to the Great Awakening of the 1740s, as

Grant Wacker does in Heaven Below.10 Those who emphasize evangelicalism as a social movement tend to see its emergence in the 1940s and 1950s as a redefining of fundamentalism, as Cochran does in Evangelical Feminism. In this chapter, I insist that evangelicalism needs to retain both inflections, but as separate although not discrete identities. Susan Harding in The Book of Jerry Falwell models this route. She explains, “‘Evangelicalism’ also has two inflections in popular and academic discourse. One usage refers to evangelizing Protestants in general, including fundamentalists, and the other refers to a subset of those Protestants who fashioned a conscious fellowship in opposition to militant fundamentalism in the 1940s and 1950s.”11 In this chapter, I follow Harding’s definition because I understand evangelicals as Protestants opposed to the militancy of an earlier generation’s fundamentalism and because my argument focuses less on evangelicals as religious believers or practitioners and more on evangelicals as a social force within U.S. national politics during the

1980s.

9 Pamela Cochran, Evangelical Feminism: A History (New York: New York University Press, 2005), 27. 10 Grant Wacker, Heaven Below: Early Pentecostals and American Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 2. 11 Susan Harding, The Book of Jerry Falwell: Fundamentalist Language and Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), xvi.

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Throughout the nineteenth century evangelical Protestantism enjoyed a normative status within American society. As Christian Smith writes, “for most of the nineteenth century, American public culture was dominated by the concerns and assumptions of evangelical Protestantism.”12

Indeed, evangelical Protestants enjoyed a prominent place within politics and society, and many conflicting political arguments relied on Protestant Christian language. However, changes in theological issues of eschatology and biblical hermeneutics during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries helped to shape the group of evangelicals that the CWA would draw upon most heavily. First, most nineteenth-century evangelicals in the United States ascribed to postmillennial theology, which means that they believed Jesus would return after a period of time when righteousness prevailed on earth. This theology encouraged evangelicals to take an active role in reforming the world before the Lord’s return. However, most evangelicals of the early twentieth century ascribed to premillennial dispensationalism, which is a belief that the world would follow an increasingly catastrophic path before Jesus returned to claim his followers. According to this view of the end times, believers were encouraged to cultivate piety and patience rather than social activism.13

Second, during the late nineteenth century the Scottish Common Sense approach to biblical hermeneutics gave way to more modern linguistic trends influenced by scientific investigation.

Conservative evangelicals who insisted on theological purity and biblical inerrancy—what they called the fundamentals of the faith in a series of pamphlets, Fundamentals: A Testimony to the Truth, published from 1910 to 1915—began to separate themselves from the modernists and liberals who

12 Christian Smith, American Evangelicalism: Embattled and Thriving (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 4. 13 See Sydney E. Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People, 2nd ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press: 2004), 808-812; Edward J. Larson, Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America’s Continuing Debate over Science and Religion (New York: Basic Books, 1997): 32-35; George M. Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture, new ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 80-85.

148 embraced the newer historical biblical criticism and refocused their religious practices on social activism. For fundamentalists of the early twentieth century, social activism symbolized impure theology. As Sydney Ahlstrom describes, however, these shifts happened during massive social and cultural shifts, including urbanization, immigration, and the Great Depression. Protestant churches could no longer attend to the resulting humanitarian needs because of decreasing church attendance and funds. As the state took on more social responsibilities, the religious developments in belief about the evangelical’s role in the world were responses to—and justifications for—the church’s helplessness in the face of increasing social problems.14 Consequently, as Christian Smith notes, “By the end of the 1930’s, much of conservative Protestantism—under the banner of fundamentalism— had evolved into a somewhat reclusive and defensive version of its nineteenth-century self.”15

A new generation of evangelical Christians in the mid-twentieth century, however, became frustrated with the isolationism of fundamentalists. They began to call themselves “neo-evangelicals” to emphasize orthodox religion combined with an engaged approach to society and culture. The group, which included Billy Graham, met in 1942 to form the National Association of Evangelicals

(NAE), founded and staffed Fuller Theological Seminary in 1947, launched Christianity Today in 1954 as a rival to the liberal and independently published Christian Century, and then continued to create ministries and missions, colleges and universities, publishing companies, and music labels. Given the myriad organizations, denominations, regions, and missions of these cultural productions, the term

“evangelicalism” became a catch-all designation for what Smith calls the “space between fundamentalism and liberalism in the field of religious collective identity.”16

14 See Ahlstrom, Religious History, 763-824. 15 Smith, American Evangelicalism, 9. 16 Smith, American Evangelicalism, 14.

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By 1979, this space had evolved to include a wide range of religious beliefs and practices, political commitments, and ideological histories. CWA took advantage of this heterogeneous overarching collective identity. CWA’s rhetoric connected the organization’s political agenda to religious identity, and the audience constituted by that rhetoric could support CWA without agreeing with one another about religious beliefs and practices, such as eschatology, biblical hermeneutics, predestination and free will, church hierarchies, and worship styles.

Tim and Beverly LaHaye occupy a central position between more conservative and more liberal poles of contemporary evangelicalism. Both LaHayes attended the fundamentalist college

Bob Jones University in Greenville, South Carolina. Tim LaHaye received his B.A. degree in 1950, but Beverly Ratcliffe LaHaye never completed her degree (the couple met at Bob Jones and married in 1947). The university archives maintain files on both of them, and these files mostly consist of fundamentalist publications criticizing the LaHayes for their activism. One 1978 article reports that

Beverly LaHaye conducted seminars at a conference center in northern California that “[a]t the best

. . . could be designated New Evangelical and surely is completely inclusivist in its affiliations, appealing largely to N[ational] C[ouncil] of C[hurches]- related denominational groupings.” The

NCC was founded in 1908 by denominations with commitments to the Social Gospel (a progressive approach to Protestantism) and was an ecumenical organization of mainline Protestant churches that the article uses as representative of Protestants who had abandoned the fundamentals of

Christianity. Regarding LaHaye, the article reports that she “is the wife of the distinguished

SanDiego [sic] pastor, is a good woman, and we are sorry to see that she is placing her talents at the disposal of these more liberal elements.”17 These criticisms position the LaHayes and CWA during

17 Interchurch News for Conservatives, 1978, LaHaye Folder, Fundamentalism File, Bob Jones University Archives, Greenville, SC.

150 the 1970s and 1980s between, on the one hand, more conservative fundamentalists and, on the other, more liberal mainline Protestants.

The newsletters of CWA demonstrate that the organization capitalized on this position in order to use the rhetoric of conservative evangelicalism while also drawing on a wide variety of denominational and religious traditions. The organization’s language is specific to evangelicalism but remains broad enough to invite the participation of women who might have disagreements about the meaning of the language used to bring them together. As Rebecca Klatch notes, “women of the

New Right are not a homogenous entity. . . . While the two worlds converge through shared symbols, in reality the New Right speaks a common language devoid of any common meaning.”18 CWA could create and maintain wide appeal by employing the shared symbols of evangelicals, such as prayer, salvation, church membership, and worship of Jesus, while avoiding the conflicting meanings that various women would bring to these symbols, as I will demonstrate below.

CWA’s Relationship to Eagle Forum and NOW

The newsletters provide evidence of the relationship between CWA and the other two organizations examined in this study. The newsletters published event programs and speaker schedules that described events at which the LaHayes or other CWA staff shared a stage with Phyllis

Schlafly.19 The June 1981 newsletter even reprinted an article from the Eagle Forum newsletter.20

18 Rebecca Klatch, Women of the New Right (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987), 6. 19 “CWA’s Answer to WHCF,” CWA 2.4 (April 1980): 1; “Pro-Family Alternative to WHCF,” CWA 1.6 (June/July 1980): 3; “Clean Up TV Report,” CWA 3.3 (June 1981): 1; Beverly LaHaye, “History- Making in Geneva,” CWA 8.1 (January 1986): 2; Beverly LaHaye, “Remember They’re Still Communists,” CWA 8.2 (February 1986): 2; “Convention ’86,” CWA 8.6 (June 1986): 9; “Activities on the Field,” CWA 12.5 (May 1990): 13. 20 Phyllis Schlafly, “Women Demanding ‘Rights’ Unwilling to Give Rights,” CWA 3.3 (June 1981): 3. See also Michael Jameson, “Update on News,” CWA 4.2 (June/July 1982): 6-7; Phyllis Schlafly, “Incomparable Methodology,” CWA 8.11 (November 1986): 7; Barrie Lyons, “Are School ‘Health

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Phyllis Schlafly’s book The Power of the Positive Woman was featured on CWA’s first recommended reading list in the November 1979 newsletter, and it remained on the reading lists for every newsletter through the August 1981 edition.21 Schlafly and her writings were less frequently referenced after 1981, most likely because as CWA grew and increased its operations, material for newsletters became more abundant. However, Schlafly spoke at CWA’s third annual convention in

1986, and she remained a political ally throughout the 1980s.

The CWA newsletters often referenced the National Organization for Women but only rarely referred to any other feminist organization or feminist activists. NOW became a primary rhetorical enemy of CWA. In 1984 the newsletters begin to pay attention to People for the

American Way, which had been founded in 1981, and this organization became another consistent focal point of CWA’s opposition. However, throughout the 1980s, NOW remained the liberal organization that CWA most frequently named. The newsletters characterized NOW as a group of

“radical feminists” and supporters of “abortion and lesbian rights.”22 Feminism was treated as a

Clinics’ Being Effective,” CWA (December/January 1987): 6; Phyllis Schlafly, “Don’t Play Games with Our Great Constitution,” CWA 9.8 (August 1987): 4. 21 “Suggested Reading List,” CWA 1.4 (November 1979): 6. 22 “A Word from Beverly,” CWA 1.4 (November 1979): 1; “CWA Press Conference,” CWA 1.6 (June/July 1980): 1; “NOW Collects Again,” CWA 4.1 (February 1982): 3; “Defund the Left,” CWA 4.3 (June/July 1982): 7; “Radical Feminists Attack the President,” CWA 5.5 (October 1983): 2; Michael Jameson, “Update on the News,” CWA 6.1 (February 1984): 5; “NOW Plans Lesbians’ Strategy for 1984,” CWA 6.2 (March 1984): 1; “Homosexual Rights Case to Be Heard by Supreme Court,” CWA 7.2 (February 1985): 8; Michael Jameson, “Update on the News,” CWA 8.1 (December/January 1986): 11; Gene Tarne, “‘Censorship’ – Or Religious Freedom?” CWA 9.6 (June 1987): unpaginated insert; “NOW and Women in Combat,” CWA 12.5 (May 1990): 11; “Lesbian Clout Felt at NOW Convention,” CWA 13.9 (September 1991): 1; “All Women Not Created Equal,” CWA 12.1 (January 1990): 2; “Extremist Position Supported by Freedom of Choice Act,” CWA 12.3 (March 1990): 11.

152 philosophy—and sometimes a religion in the same way that humanism was characterized as a religion—rather than a political affiliation.23

The Newsletters’ Portrait of CWA

The CWA newsletters, first published in the spring of 1979 and continuing today, are examples of the official rhetoric of the organization instead of readers’ reactions or questions that might provide alternative viewpoints. The newsletters provide members with updates on CWA’s activities and news about political trends. The early newsletters primarily focused on reports of current events, editorial writing provided by Tim LaHaye or other prominent evangelical leaders, and inspirational articles. These inspirational articles were written almost exclusively by Beverly

LaHaye and urged readers to recruit new members. As the newsletter expanded from four pages to six, then again to twelve, then to twenty-four, the general purpose of all of the articles become more instructional and inspirational.24 The design also became more sophisticated, and photographs and graphics consumed more space. When CWA introduced the Family Voice in October 1991, the newsletter had become a magazine with glossy pages. In this section, I elucidate the characterization of CWA offered in the newsletters, including the organization’s influence, its socially conservative political agenda, and its grassroots structure.

23 Beverly LaHaye, “Ex-Feminists Are Finding Truth,” CWA 5.7 (December/January 1984): 4; “Network of Prayer and Praise,” CWA 6.1 (February 1984): 3; Michael Jameson, “Update on the News,” CWA News 6.10 (November 1984): 7; “Convention ’85 Workshop Schedule,” CWA News 7.8 (August 1985): 4; Michael Farris, “Ted Kennedy Is a Fundamentalist,” CWA News 7.10 (October 1985): 6; “Powerful Video Exposes the Roots of Abortion,” CWA 10.2 (February 1988): 24; “Goddess Worship: Created in the Image of Feminism,” FV 13.10 (October 1991): 24. 24 The newsletters began in Spring 1979 as four pages; it was expanded to eight pages for the June 1981 edition; it expanded again to twelve pages beginning with the March 1985 edition; it then expanded to sixteen pages with the October 1985 edition; and finally it expanded to twenty-four pages with the September 1987 edition.

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The newsletters offer evidence of CWA’s increasing membership throughout the 1980s by providing membership data and a recurring list of new Prayer Chapters. The November 1979 newsletter included the first report of Prayer Chapters in twenty-four states.25 The next newsletter published in January 1980, included an article written by Shirley Peters, the Director of Prayer

Chapters, that explained the process of beginning a Prayer Chapter. She encouraged each reader to invite women to a coffee at her home during which she should play a cassette tape presentation on

CWA and distribute CWA packets. Women interested in joining CWA after this presentation were instructed to send money to CWA’s office in order to receive a newsletter. The groups were expected to meet at least once a month to pray about the politicians, issues, court cases, and legislation discussed in the newsletter. Peters stated that the goal was to have ten thousand Prayer

Chapters by the end of the year.26 The February 1982 newsletter included an announcement that a slide presentation had been added to the cassette and encouraged women to “promote both membership in CWA, as well as the forming and building of new prayer [chapters].”27 The

April/May 1983 newsletter included the first list of new Prayer Chapters and the names and telephone numbers of the leaders.28 This list recurred in every newsletter until the June 1988 edition.

In 1988 lists of regional representatives replaced the lists of new Prayer Chapters.29 Every June edition thereafter contained a similar list.30 The newsletters also printed the numbers of organizational members. In June 1980, an article claimed that CWA had 100,000 members.31 The

25 “CWA Prayer Chapters,” CWA 1.4 (November 1979): 4. 26 Shirley Peters, “CWA Prayer Chapters,” CWA 2.1 (January 1980): 3. 27 “New Presentation Available,” CWA 4.1 (February 1982): 5. 28 Carol Hummer, “Prayer/Action Chapters: News from Carol,” CWA 5.2 (April/May 1983): 8. 29 “CWA Area Representatives,” CWA 10.6 (June 1988): 8. 30 “CWA Area Representatives,” CWA 11.6 (June 1989): 24; “CWA Area Representatives,” CWA 12.6 (June 1990): 18; “CWA Area Representatives,” CWA 13.6 (June 1991): 13. 31 “CWA Press Conference,” CWA 1.6 (June/July 1980): 2. See also Beverly LaHaye, “CWA Joins Cleanup TV Campaign,” CWA 3.1 (February 1981): 1; masthead, CWA 4.5 (December/January

154 most commonly stated number of members throughout the 1980s is 500,000, and the first mention of that number is in the January 1985 newsletter.32 The number increased to 600,000 in November

1986, but the number 500,000 also recurred throughout the rest of the newsletters printed in the

1980s.33

The newsletters of the 1980s give a full picture of CWA’s socially conservative political agenda. CWA’s political agenda focused on social issues, such as opposing abortion, the ERA, pornography, and homosexual rights as well as promotion of censorship of television and rock music, prayer in public schools, and the assessment of political candidates’ religious beliefs. The organization’s activism centered on court cases and lobbying efforts, while the stated mission of

CWA was to “inform concerned women in America of the erosion of our historical Judeo-Christian moral standards and to expose the dangerous and often insidious movements that are seeking to destroy the family.”34 The organization’s national headquarters moved from San Diego, California, to Washington, D.C., during the summer of 1983, and even though the newsletters presented CWA as directed by its members, the examples of grassroots efforts show CWA members acting in accordance with requests from the national office.35 The national office provided the most content for the newsletters and the most direction for the organization’s activities. In other words, the

1983): 1; masthead, CWA 5.1 (February/March 1983): 1; “CWA Arrival on Capitol Hill Blacked Out by Most Major Media,” CWA 5.6 (November 1983): 2; “CWA in the News!” CWA News 6.10 (November 1984): 5; “A Word from Beverly,” CWA News 7.10 (October 1985): 2; “CWA Members Challenged,” CWA News 7.11 (November 1985): 3 32 “Meet CWA’s Area/State Representatives,” CWA News 7.1 (December/January 1985): 4. 33 Beverly LaHaye, “How Long Can They Cry?” CWA 8.11 (November 1986): 1; “CWA Fulfills Responsibility in Supporting Bork,” CWA 10.1 (December/January 1988): 21. See also “Communications Department: Keeping CWA in the News,” CWA 11.7 (July 1989): 15; “Magazine’s Publisher and CWA Face Off on Sassy,” CWA 11.8 (August 1989): 22; Beverly LaHaye, “A Word from Beverly,” CWA 12.5 (May 1990): 3. 34 “Goals,” CWA 1.1 (Spring 1979): 1. 35 “CWA’s Grassroots: Ten Years of Affecting Change for America’s Families,” CWA 11.5 (May 1989): 20.

155 newsletters presented a well-crafted message from the leadership of the organization that articulated the view of the world that readers could recognize and circulate among the evangelical women’s political public.

Publicity and Counterpublicity

CWA consistently portrayed its agenda as a continuation of timeless values dictated by God, and it portrayed American history as a continuous enactment of these values. Mid-twentieth-century

American culture, however, began to threaten these values, according to CWA. Given this narrative, the newsletters identify two primary centers of power, God and history. The newsletters align the organization and its political agenda with these centers of power in order to create publicity and against which to create counterpublicity. When they align the organization with God and history,

CWA newsletters validate CWA’s agenda and created opportunities for its members to connect their personal understandings of God, the nation, and a Christian woman’s duty with CWA’s organizational identity. When the newsletters move against God and history, they urged readers to action and reinforce members’ feeling of uniqueness and being needed.

God

The primary center of power that CWA identifies is God. Because CWA is an organization for evangelical Protestant women, this designation is unsurprising. However, my argument here differentiates the rhetorical purpose and function of God from the religious beliefs and practices of individual members or staff of CWA. Other studies have analyzed the theology of the New Right in order to argue that “any attempt to comprehend the movement without reference to its theological

156 perspective is bound to fail,” as John Kater Jr. puts it.36 While CWA, along with other groups affiliated with the New Christian Right, did connect theology and politics, I follow Leslie Smith’s approach to the religious discourse of CWA when she notes that the connection between religious discourse and religious belief breaks down. She says, “[C]ertain conservative groups famous for their dichotomous worldviews constantly renegotiate almost all of their concepts or practices, particularly those previously marked as eternal and absolute.” For Smith, this constant renegotiation means that

CWA’s theological discourse does not depict the world accurately, but it functions rhetorically to

“create persuasive value in [CWA’s] public speech.”37 Smith’s approach to the analysis of CWA’s religious rhetoric separates the way evangelicals see themselves and the rhetorical impact of their discourse in the public sphere. In this section, I will draw on Smith’s analysis of CWA’s religious discourse to argue that in the CWA newsletters, “God” becomes not an ontological assertion but a center of power that justifies and bolsters CWA’s political agenda.

Smith’s study of CWA’s website focuses on the use of “chaos rhetoric,” a description of the emotionally charged language CWA used to urge its members—and persuade outsiders—to action.

This type of discourse tended to deteriorate the argument, due to the insistence of an imminent and catastrophic threat, such as equating the success of a conservative political agenda with the protection of Christianity for all future generations around the world. Smith argues that CWA’s use of chaos rhetoric worked “to transform public religious talk about sex, gender, and reproductive issues into a powerful political engine that portrays conservative Christian norms as mainstream

American values.”38 Her argument hinges on an understanding of CWA’s conservatism not as static

36 John L. Kater Jr., Christians on the Right: The Moral Majority Perspective (New York: Seabury Press, 1982), xii. See also Gabriel Fackre, The Religious Right and Christian Faith (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1982). 37 Smith, Righteous Rhetoric, 7. 38 Smith, Righteous Rhetoric, 5.

157 or limited by absolute theological tenets, but as “negotiating its own identity by casting (and recasting) its portrayal of its opponents in light of the present political circumstances, thereby maintaining its cultural relevance at any given moment.”39 This contrasts with other scholars who understand conservative Protestants of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries to be tied to unchanging, and anti-modern, religious beliefs. For example, Christian Smith in American

Evangelicalism acknowledges the need for evangelicals as a religious group in a pluralistic society to continue to engage modern society in order to retain their distinctive identity, and he notes that

“[r]eligious traditions have always strategically renegotiated their collective identities by continually reformulating the ways their constructed orthodoxies engage the changing sociocultural environments they confront.”40 However, he stops short of noting that those “constructed orthodoxies” become flexible in order to be functional in the group’s public discourse. Leslie

Smith’s analysis, on the other hand, focuses not on the core elements of Christian belief but on the uses of those labels of orthodox belief that get employed in public discourse.

Leslie Smith notes that CWA regularly reminds its members that feminism, liberalism, and many other forms of modernity threaten “biblical principles” and “eternal values.” She points out that “CWA does emphasize moral absolutes, of course, but like any other group that claims eternal and unchanging platforms, it must deflect attention from the ways that it is forced to alter those

‘absolutes’ in order to maintain its political relevance, thus preserving the appearance of an eternal vision.”41 Consequently, the content of those eternal values shift according to exigencies relevant to the specific piece of political action CWA is currently advocating. The role of chaos rhetoric is to evoke a strong emotional response such that these shifts go unnoticed. Smith marks the changing

39 Smith, Righteous Rhetoric, 6. 40 Smith, American Evangelicalism, 97. 41 Smith, Righteous Rhetoric, 13.

158 beliefs about the Bible (“a literal reading,” “document filled with nuance,” and “scientific document”) and even God (“cosmic judge, friend, or father”) in order to argue that “it seems difficult to assert that even the most enduring notions have survived the years unchanged. Rather, it seems more appropriate to consider ‘Bible,’ ‘God,’ and other such presumably stable conservative

Christian entities not as hegemonic, unwavering theological positions, but as labels that are used fixedly over time to unify otherwise disparate political aims and viewpoints. The goal of groups like

CWA thus becomes manipulating the meaning and symbolic value of those labels in such a way to generate a continual stream of ideological loyalty.”42 Indeed, CWA takes advantage of a shared set of symbols, such as “biblical principles,” “eternal values,” and “prayer,” whose meaning remains undisclosed, unexamined, and inconsistent. The reader, then, can provide the meaning of those symbols and does the work of connecting CWA’s political agenda to her own religious convictions.

Smith’s argument here parallels Susan Harding’s claims about the rhetoric of Jerry Falwell.

Harding conducted a study of Falwell’s rhetorical production and reception, and she concludes,

“Tuning in to Bible-believing interpretive practices, we see not simple, static rote but a complex medley of literary devices, moods, and genres. Nostalgia, mimesis, parody, pastiche, double-voicing, intertextuality, and deconstruction were all at work in the cultural texts of Bible believers. Even absolutism, the attribute that most famously distinguishes the true Bible believer from others, was not quite what it appeared to be. … In short, what we are looking at is a kind of ‘flexible absolutism,’ or, more precisely, a rhetorical capacity and will to frame new and internally diverse cultural positions as ‘eternal absolutes.’”43 These conclusions encourage more complex interpretations of evangelicals’ language. For the purposes of my study, even though CWA uses

42 Smith, Righteous Rhetoric, 14. 43 Harding, Book of Jerry Falwell, 274.

159 religious language in service of a political agenda, the words and phrases that correspond to theological beliefs and lived religious practices (such as “God,” “prayer,” and “Truth”) do not only function to make those connections. Instead, these labels are rhetorically flexible in order to garner widespread public appeal. Furthermore, as Smith notes, the public’s persuasion to CWA’s position did not require theological agreement but occurred “anytime the public sympathizes with [CWA’s] chaos-laden claims about the imminent ruin of families, children, nation, and faith through the volatile imagery of sex and gender.”44

One of the ways that CWA demonstrated this “flexible absolutism” was by designating God as a center of power in a way that validated the organization’s political agenda. Throughout the newsletters of the 1980s, the most common explanation of a successful campaign is God’s intervention. This pattern showed up less frequently in the early years of CWA’s existence, but in the

September 1983 newsletter, a new column appeared called “Network of Prayer and Action,” and it continued to appear in every newsletter thereafter, even though the title changed. This column contained three sections: “Praise,” “Prayer,” and “Action.” Listed under “Praise” were the recent successes for which readers could praise God. Sometimes the list merely included the news itself, such as, “1. For the 14 women who came and the benefits that were gained in the Leadership

Training Conference.”45 Most of the time, however, the item reiterated instructions to the reader to praise God, such as, “1. Thank God for His victory. Although it is not the kind WE planned on in the NEA v. Suzanne Clark case, we believe God has answered the many prayers on her behalf. NEA has chosen to withdraw their lawsuit against her, and the Clark family is now free from the pressure and harassment. We thank God for this family’s fine Christian attitude and patriotic example.”46

44 Smith, Righteous Rhetoric, 14. 45 “Network of Prayer and Action,” CWA 6.5 (June 1984): 3. 46 “Network of Prayer and Action,” CWA 5.7 (December/January 1984): 3.

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These examples show how CWA attributes any organizational success to God’s intervention. The reader could interpret this claim in one of two ways (or both): CWA’s agenda reflected the ways in which God is already working in the world, or God supported CWA’s work and therefore intervened to make it succeed. Either way, CWA newsletters assumed a readership that understood that to be aligned with CWA was to be aligned with God. Any success that CWA achieved proved

God’s support.

Other keywords in the newsletters, such as “Bible-believing,” “morals,” and “family values,” also imply God’s support for CWA’s political agenda. “Bible-believing” is a taken-for-granted adjective used to describe evangelical Protestant churches, pastors, and the American majority.

Because CWA newsletters do not provide an explicit explanation of what it means for a person to believe the Bible, the reader can assume a shared understanding of God and biblical interpretation with the writer.47 In fact, the newsletters treat the meaning of Scripture as transparent and repeatable. Throughout the newsletters, contributors use Scripture to explain a point, urge readers to action, and warn readers of threats to civilization.48 Similarly, “morals” and “family values” are explicitly connected to the Bible and to God. When a piece of legislation or a court case concerns

“morals,” newsletter reports signal to readers that God supports the side that supports “morals” and

“family values.” LaHaye states this explicitly when warning newsletter readers that liberals will rally

47 Tim LaHaye, “America Still Has Patriots,” CWA 5.1 (February/March 1983): 1; Tim LaHaye, “New Prayer Chapters to Be Launched in Local Churches,” CWA (December/January 1984): 4; Beverly LaHaye, “CWA Announces Plans for a Hispanic Division,” CWA News 6.10 (November 1984): 2; Farris, “Ted Kennedy Is a Fundamentalist,” 6; Beverly LaHaye, “A Word from Beverly,” CWA 10.1 (December/January 1988): 23; Tim LaHaye, “Christians to Blame for Defeat of Bork’s Nomination,” CWA 10.1 (December/January 1988): 21. 48 “November 4 –Vote Morality,” CWA 2.8 (October 1980): 1; Tim LaHaye, “Christians and Government Service,” CWA 4.3 (June/July 1982): 5; Sharon Metcalfe, “Political Insights,” CWA 5.2 (April/May 1983): 7; Carol Poulos, “CWA’s Prison Ministry in Maryland,” CWA 6.6 (July 1984): 4; Michael Farris, “Why Should Christians Go on the Offense in Court?” CWA News 7.6 (June 1985): 4; “Legislation in Congress,” CWA News 8.2 (February 1986): 11.

161 in Washington, D.C., for family values, an action that she characterizes as “an attempt by liberal forces to steal the language of the conservative movement.” The groups involved in the planned rally—Planned Parenthood, the National Gay and Lesbian Taskforce, the National Organization for

Women, and the Democratic Socialists of America—“are mocking God by redefining the family to include legal homosexual marriages and couples who ‘live together.’” According to CWA newsletters, God only supports “family values” that uphold the heterosexual married family that conforms to complementarian gender roles. LaHaye continued her warning: “God’s Word warns us in Ephesians 5:6, ‘Let no one deceive you with empty words . . .’”49 Here, the liberals’ definition of family is posited as empty and deceptive, in contrast to the way CWA uses these terms. The CWA newsletters suggest that the evangelical women’s political public uses these terms authoritatively because it has access to God’s definition of these terms. According to CWA, any alternate definition of these terms challenges God, his authority, and the validity of a person’s religion; and true

Christianity will always lead to a commitment to a conservative political agenda.

The newsletters claim, however, that a conservative political agenda can only be achieved through accessing God’s power. CWA connects itself to God as a center of power by urging its members to pray for CWA’s political agenda. In the third newsletter, LaHaye explained the reasons for beginning the organization, and she says, “The news is depressive; morals are at an all-time low—but prayer is the one source of power to change the trends, and the time is now! ‘The effectual, fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much,’ James 5:15. . . . It is our belief that God will hear our intercessory prayer on behalf of those governing our country.”50 According to LaHaye, women ought to act by praying to God who will hear them and act in the world to achieve CWA’s political

49 Beverly LaHaye, “Liberal’s[sic] Redefine the Family,” CWA 10.5 (May 1988): 17. See also Albert Veldhuyzen, “Planned Parenthood’s Teenage Contraceptive Media,” CWA 9.3 (March 1987): 6-7. 50 Beverly LaHaye, “A Word from Beverly,” CWA 1.3 (September 1979): 1.

162 agenda. Prayer is “the one source” of change because prayer draws on God’s willingness to listen to his followers and to intervene in the world. Consequently, local chapters of CWA are called Prayer

Chapters, days of prayer are scheduled to affect national attitudes and sway politicians, and organizational successes are attributed to the many prayers of CWA members.51 The newsletters assure readers that God will act in the world, that God can judge between true and false Christians, that God is all powerful, that God works only to his advantage, and that God is right. The characterization of prayer as a call to action fits with CWA’s commitment to conservative gender norms and the expectation of what the newsletters’ audience would be willing to do. In fact, early in the organization’s efforts to increase membership, Beverly LaHaye assured readers that membership in CWA would not take time away from their homes and families. She wrote, “This is not a day for women to be silent; silence is interpreted as agreement. CWA was organized to help women have a united voice against these forces of darkness. . . . Regular prayer alerts are sent to each prayer chapter, focusing on specific prayer requests; no meetings are required, as members pray individually at home.”52 She reiterates that prayer is political action because “prayer does change things.”53 The woman’s action, then, is—privately and individually—to ask God to act in the world. The newsletters used God as a center of power partly in order to validate traditionally feminized political action; the reader does not need to leave her home in order to effect political change.

51 “CWA Prayer Chapters,” CWA 1.4 (November 1979): 4; “Items in the News,” CWA 1.4 (November 1979): 5; “CWA Prayer Requests,” CWA 4.3 (June/July 1982): 7; “CWA Prayer Reminder,” CWA 5.2 (April/May 1983): 7; “Network of Prayer and Action,” CWA 6.2 (May 1984): 3; “National Rally for Life,” CWA News 8.3 (March 1986): 5; “Pray and Fast for Colorado Bible Censorship Case,” CWA 11.7 (July 1989): 18; “Prayer: A Spiritual Golden Thread,” CWA 12.3 (March 1990): 19. 52 Beverly LaHaye, “The Decline of Morality,” CWA 3.2 (April 1981): 2. See also Beverly LaHaye, “CWA Growing through Prayer/Action Chapters,” CWA 3.5 (October 1981): 2. 53 B. LaHaye, “CWA Growing through Prayer/Action Chapters,” 2.

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While the newsletters consistently claim that God is the one source of power and that prayer accesses that power, the newsletters contradict this claim when they blame any failures on the actions of people. The newsletters give dire warnings to its readers that if they do not act—by more than just praying—catastrophe will happen. Here, CWA placed agency and control onto its readers, rather than on God, whereby CWA placed limits on God as the center of power. For example, Tim

LaHaye blamed the “five million Christians who did not bother to vote in 1986” for the defeat of

Judge Robert Bork as President Reagan’s nominee for the Supreme Court in 1987. He admonished readers, “The 1986 election may go down in history as the greatest failure on the part of evangelical

Christians in our nation’s history.” The consequences of this failure were lost Senate seats, a liberal senator chaired the Judiciary Committee, and the “lifetime dream of a good man” was destroyed.54

In a more catastrophic tone, James Kennedy promoted nuclear weapons to protect the United States and also Christianity because “if America falls the Church of Jesus will be greatly set back—since seventy-five percent of all the money and manpower for the world mission cause of Jesus Christ originates from North America.”55 Throughout the entirety of his 1986 article, however, Kennedy does not encourage his readers by reiterating a belief in God’s sovereignty in the face of challenges, but instead urges them to gather facts about the Soviet Union’s nuclear weapons and to persuade others to support President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). If the readers neglect to participate in the campaign for SDI, he writes, “not only the country but the Church of Christ could be close to being obliterated.”56 Kennedy expresses no confidence in God’s intervention, but only a demand for Christians to be responsible for the outcome of nuclear war.

54 T. LaHaye, “Christians to Blame,” 21. 55 D. James Kennedy, “Surviving the Nuclear Age,” CWA 8.11 (November 1986): 12. 56 Kennedy, “Surviving the Nuclear Age,” 14.

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Throughout the newsletters, the readers are described as responsible for the outcomes of elections, continued peace and prosperity that God has bestowed on America, the performance of attorney Michael Farris at a Supreme Court hearing, and even Beverly LaHaye’s emotional and mental health.57 The rhetoric of the newsletter placed the burden on the reader to prevent catastrophe in the United States and, increasingly throughout the 1980s, the world. The June 1985 newsletter provides the first article on any foreign affairs issue and presents the case of refugees in

Nicaragua as victims of an oppressive regime whom readers can assist through prayer and material donations.58 Throughout the decade, international catastrophes expanded the vision of CWA and the responsibilities of CWA members and increased the urgency of readers’ actions. As Leslie Smith notes, one of the functions of chaos rhetoric is to “incite activist behavior” since it evokes fear through predictions of exaggerated consequences of inaction.59 By making newsletter readers responsible for these events and any negative consequences, CWA moved away from God as a center of power and implied instead that power and agency lie with CWA members.

When the newsletters align CWA with God as a center of power in order to validate its claims and prove its legitimacy, they articulate a position of power and universality. The newsletters offer the evangelical women’s political public an understanding of itself as infinitely replicable. The shared symbols of evangelical Protestantism went underexplained in order to allow for a variety of religious meanings and practices for the readers. This is an example of the behavior that Warner ascribes to dominant publics when they assume a shared or universal understanding of their

57 “Election Aftermath,” CWA News 7.1 (December/January 1984): 1; “Porn Picket Saturday,” CWA News 7.1 (December/January 1984): 2; Beverly LaHaye, “A Word from Beverly,” CWA News 7.4 (April 1985): 2; “CWA Attorney Will Argue Case,” CWA News 7.5 (May 1985): 12; Beverly LaHaye, “A Word from Beverly,” CWA 12.2 (February 1990): 3. 58 “No to the Contras—Yes to Communism?” CWA News. 7.6 (August 1985): 1. 59 Smith, Righteous Rhetoric, 13.

165 discourse while counterpublics’ discourse is transformative.60 When the CWA newsletters place limits on God’s power in order to urge its members to action, they encourage readers to transform the discursive space and to remake the scene of national politics with the understanding of God as a center of power.

History

CWA identifies American history as a center of power. The newsletters align the organization with that center of power by connecting CWA’s values and political agenda with respected historical leaders, using historical precedents as a warrant for supporting or opposing legislation and policies, and creating a belief in the timelessness and continuity of CWA’s principles.

Each of these strategies bolsters CWA’s arguments and political agenda, while also offering the readers of the newsletters a way to understand supporting CWA as stabilizing American society and culture in response to the significant (and negative, from CWA’s perspective) changes during the late twentieth century.

CWA took great pride in aligning its own political agenda and ideas about government with historical figures and movements. As the 1980s progressed, the newsletters increasingly focused on articulating the continuity between CWA and American leaders, such as Thomas Jefferson, George

Washington, and the founders in general.61 For example, the March 1984 newsletter announced that

President Reagan declared May 3, 1984, as a National Day of Prayer, noting, “This observance in

60 Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 122. 61 James J. Fenlason, “The Bottom Line,” CWA News 8.3 (March 1986): 11; “George Washington’s Prayer for His Country,” CWA 11.7 (July 1989): 2; Tim LaHaye, “Is God Important to the Supreme Court?” CWA 3.5 (October 1981): 7; “Dr. LaHaye Debates Humanist Dr. John Kurtz,” CWA 8.6 (June 1986): 11; John Eidsmoe, “The Framers of the Constitution: Christians or Deists?” 9.7 (July 1987): 3; “The Bondage of Absolute Freedom,” CWA 11.8 (August 1989): 18.

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America is not new.” The article included an excerpt from President Abraham Lincoln’s declaration of a National Day of Prayer for March 30, 1863, that said, “[I]t is the duty of nations as well as of men to own their dependence upon the overruling power of God, to confess their sins and transgressions in humble sorrow, yet with assured hope that genuine repentance will lead to mercy and pardon, and to recognize the sublime truth, announced in the Holy Scriptures and proven by all history, that those nations only are blessed whose God is the Lord.”62 The language in Lincoln’s declaration is consistent with language used in the CWA newsletters, and the association with

Lincoln accomplishes two things. First, it aligns CWA with a respected figure in U.S. history. The implication is that because CWA members believe the same things as Lincoln, those beliefs have validity and credibility. Second, the association with Lincoln erases any shifts or changes within

Protestant Christian belief over time. The newsletters do not comment on Lincoln’s belief in the

“overruling power of God,” “sublime truth,” and “Holy Scriptures,” implying that the meaning of these categories has remained stable over the previous one hundred and twenty years. This implication invites readers to understand their own beliefs—and the political implications and applications of those beliefs—as timeless and universal. Here the rhetoric in CWA newsletters acts like the discourse of a dominant public, according to Warner’s definition. Warner says that dominant publics misrecognize their own norms as universal, and that the circulation of their texts repeats these norms instead of attempting to transform dominant norms.

Similarly, from July 1987 through October 1987, the newsletters included a four-article series on the history of the Constitution written by John Eidsmoe, whom the newsletter described as “an attorney and former professor of Constitutional Law and Legal History as well as an ordained minister.” The articles addressed the religious beliefs of the founders, the Judeo-Christian basis of

62 “Reagan Sets May 3 as Day of Prayer,” CWA 6.2 (March 1984): 2.

167 the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. They also posited connections between the creation and evolution debate and the debate over interpreting the Constitution, and the reason for the Bill of Rights. The first article countered trends that de-emphasized the founders’ Christianity, telling CWA members, “Today it is popular to suggest that the Framers were Deists rather than

Christians.” Eidsmoe presented evidence that, “[i]n the sense of holding Christian doctrine and

Christian values, we may say without hesitation that most of the Founding Fathers were Christians.”

The delineation Eidsmoe makes between Deists and Christians presents the readers with the idea of the authentic Christian. The implication is that authentic Christians hold “the basic beliefs and values of the Christian religion.” Eidsmoe identifies two specific beliefs: that Jesus Christ is divine and that God intervenes in history. By leaving the majority of “the beliefs and values of the

Christian religion” undefined, Eidsmoe allows the reader to define them and to assume a common understanding with other readers. Even though Eidsmoe was not a staff member of CWA, his articles represent the approach CWA takes toward history because the article series fills a total of ten pages over four editions; the newsletters did not publish any other such series. He was also a regular speaker at CWA’s national conventions, and his books appeared on the recommended book lists.

Eidsmoe was part of the citation circulation upon which the evangelical women’s political public relied.

The CWA newsletters imply that the evangelical women’s political public follows an illustrious and principled history. They also suggest that their opponents follow a sordid and problematic history. In other words, merely following history is not good enough; readers need to follow the right history. In his 1981 discussion of censorship, Tim LaHaye explains the difference between what freedom means to a Christian and what freedom means to a secular humanist. He notes that for a secular humanist, freedom “means total freedom to do whatever you want.” He uses

168 eighteenth-century French philosophers Voltaire and Rousseau as examples of secular humanists’ demand to have the right “to paint anything, print anything, and say anything without regard for moral decency.” According to LaHaye, this disregard for moral decency in eighteenth-century

France led to a significant increase in pornography in France, which in turn led to “an obsession with sex, carousing, drinking, and drugs, the results were crime, murder, and rape, leading to the revolution that overturned the French government.”63 That revolution led to Napoleon Bonaparte’s dictatorship. In other words, Tim LaHaye presented French history as a warning against both unlimited freedom and loose restrictions on anything that challenged moral decency. His article interpreted historical events in order to serve as a warning relevant to a current political debate.

Throughout the newsletters, historical knowledge also added to an argument’s credibility.

For example, in an article about censorship written by CWA’s legal counsel, Michael Farris, he rebutted claims made by the National Education Association that censorship had affected public school textbooks. Farris wrote, the “NEA’s actions assault historical concepts of freedom and are much closer to the tactics of vigilantes, witch-hunters, and demagogues than their declared goal of the protection of free inquiry.” The NEA had called two private citizens who published analyses of public school textbooks “dangerous censors,” and to illustrate his point about NEA’s misuse of the term “censorship,” Farris informed readers that censors originated in Rome and referred to magistrates who inspected “morals and conduct.” He concluded that “only the government can perform the function of censorship.” He went so far as to say that by using the word “censor” outside of its historical context, the NEA was a leader in “educational coercion (brainwashing to some).”64 In this argument, Farris performed historical knowledge to bolster his argument’s

63 Tim LaHaye, “Is Decency ‘Censorship’?” CWA 3.2 (April 1981): 1, 3. 64 Michael Farris, “Bookburning, Witch-Hunting, and Demagoguery: The NEA in 1983,” CWA 5.1 (February/March 1983): 2, 3.

169 credibility and to threaten his opponent’s argument. The implication was that every argument needs to account for its historical context in order have validity. It also encouraged readers to see CWA’s arguments as having historical roots.

In the world of CWA newsletters, historical precedent also validates legislative decisions. For example, the March 1986 newsletter announced that CWA had filed an amicus brief with the U.S.

Supreme Court in the Bowers v. Hardwick case. In June the Court would uphold the constitutionality of a Georgia statute that criminalized sodomy. The article summarizes the brief’s argument by saying that “states have criminalized homosexuality virtually without challenge for most of American history.”65 In other words, because laws against homosexuality have a historical precedent, those laws should be maintained. The status quo operates as proof of the legitimacy and justice of the law.

Similarly, Jordan Lorence, one of CWA’s staff attorneys, explained the importance of historical precedent in regard to the death penalty, abortion, and sodomy. He wrote, “Clearly, the text and history of the Constitution upholds the death penalty”; “Until 1973 State legislatures had always exercised authority over abortion”; and “Until 1961 all 50 states made homosexuality a crime.” In each of these examples, Lorence upheld a political position because that position is the status quo.

He concluded, “If the Supreme Court can invent new rights in the Constitution, then the foundation law of the land becomes a meaningless mess of mush. The Constitution then has no fixed meaning, only what the Supreme Court says it means and that can be anything.”66 Here, Lorence made explicit

Warner’s link between dominant publics and a misrecognition of its linguistic ideology being universal. Lorence asserted that only when the Constitution has a “fixed”—or universal—meaning can it have power. When language is contingent on its situation, it becomes “a meaningless mess of

65 “CWA Files Supreme Court Brief in Georgia Sodomy Case,” CWA News 8.3 (March 1986): 3. 66 Jordan Lorence, “Constitutional Confusion,” CWA News 8.4 (April 1986): 3.

170 mush.” Therefore, the newsletters offer readers a way to understand their beliefs and values as timeless, stable, and replicable. These characteristics are rhetorical features of dominant publics.

Even though CWA uses history to uphold a political agenda, the newsletters also present

CWA as a unique occurrence of evangelical Christian women transforming politics. In this way, they move against the claim of historical precedent in order to encourage readers to see themselves as brave trailblazers. In the March 1986 newsletter, Beverly LaHaye celebrated the seventh anniversary of the organization’s founding: “It was only 7 years ago that CWA was born. A few concerned and dedicated women were led of the Lord to launch into a program that, to our knowledge, had never been done before.”67 An interview with Beverly LaHaye published in 1984 in the Brethren Missionary

Herald, a publication of the Fellowship of Grace Brethren Churches, quotes her response to a question about what makes CWA different than other organizations. She says, “I feel we have a unique purpose. Their organizations fight specific things. We are not in operation to fight anything.

We are in operation to educate women on what God’s Word says a woman should be, what a woman’s rights are according to the Word of God, what children should be in the eyes of their parents and how they should respond to parents, what a child’s responsibility is to parents and the government, what authority to be under, and that type of thing.”68 Casting CWA as a new and different organization ascribed both a sense of urgency and a sense of legacy to CWA members’ activities, such that any organizational event was a “courageous and historical project.”69 Similarly, in a Saturday Evening Post article that the November 1985 newsletter called “marvelous,” Beverly

LaHaye was quoted discussing the origins of CWA: “As I look back on it, I’m sort of ashamed that I

67 Beverly LaHaye, “A Word from Beverly,” CWA News 8.3 (March 1986): 2. 68 “CWA Takes a Stand,” Fundamentalism File. 69 “Pro-Lifers on the March,” CWA News 7.7 (July 1985): 4.

171 didn’t have a broader vision. But maybe that’s been the uniqueness, because no one sets out to form a national organization that would become the largest women’s group in America.”70

This characterization of CWA’s activism invites readers to understand their support for and participation in CWA’s programs as necessary and special, but it also depends on an erasure of the numerous ways evangelical women have actively shaped American public life. Even granting a conservative definition of evangelicalism (which would most likely exclude Elizabeth Cady Stanton, for example), many prominent women throughout U.S. history combined evangelicalism and political action. For example, Ronald J. Zboray and Mary Saracino Zboray note that throughout the letters and diaries in which antebellum American women crafted political arguments, they frequently used biblical language to “soften the political thrust.”71 In the late nineteenth century, Frances

Willard organized the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union into the largest organization of women; it included conservative Christian women in ways that other women’s groups had not.72

Furthermore, LaHaye’s claim of starting something completely new ignores the substantive work immediately preceding its founding, as Lisa McGirr intricately examines in Suburban Warriors. She traces the religious and political organizations that flourished in the 1950s and 1960s, specifically in

Southern California where LaHaye founded CWA. McGirr argues that conservatives addressed the concerns prevalent in that region; indeed, “In the face of social and cultural change, conservatives have spoken to concerns over the autonomy of communities, the erosion of individualism, the authority of the family, and the place of religion in national life.”73 This list of concerns that

70 Holly G. Miller, “Concerned Women for America: Soft Voices with Clout,” Saturday Evening Post 257 (October 1985): 70, reprinted in CWA 7.11 (November 1985). 71 Ronald J. Zboray and Mary Saracino Zboray, Voices without Votes: Women and Politics in Antebellum New England (Durham: University of New Hampshire Press, 2010), 39; see also pp. 32, 56, 187, 208. 72 Rymph, Republican Women, 57. See also Mattingly, Well-Tempered Women, 39-57. 73 McGirr, Suburban Warriors, 272.

172 conservative groups addressed in the 1950s and 1960s is significantly similar to the issues on which

CWA focused. In other words, CWA was not a new or unique organization, but its newsletters’ claim that it was new and unique offered the evangelical women’s political public an intensified feeling of belonging and motivation to support the organization.

CWA Lifeworld

Religion and Politics

For CWA, political participation and political agendas were a product of particular, evangelical Protestant religious belief. The two were inextricable. The CWA newsletters presented any person’s or group’s political agenda as the consequence of religious belief and practice. For example, Michael Farris presented the argument for engaging in politics by referring to the verse in

Matthew where Jesus says that his followers “are the salt of the earth.” Farris concluded that “the church as the salt of the earth, must be involved in the political and legal arena.”74 According to

Farris, then, the church has a unique duty to engage in politics. Tim LaHaye made similar calls to the newsletter readers. In the April 1984 newsletter he wrote about the upcoming presidential election.

He warned, “The destiny of America hinges on the outcome of the November 6th election, just a few months away.” He reminded readers that the secular humanists understand the urgency of the election and that they will raise funds, register millions of voters, and join with unions to expand liberalism. In order to counteract that force, LaHaye insisted that “Christians have the only army large enough (69 million according to the Gallup Polls) to swing the balance in favor of moral sanity.

. . . The stakes have never been greater. Our nation is at a crossroads—and the conservative,

74 Michael Farris, “Christians—The Salt of the Earth,” CWA 6.8 9 (September 1984): 2.

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Christian populace may well be responsible for the choice that will be made.”75 LaHaye urged readers to take on the responsibility of the success of a conservative political agenda as a Christian duty. The implication was that only the church can accomplish God’s will for the nation, and when

Christians do not actively support a conservative political agenda, they neglect God’s mandate. This connection between a Christian’s duty and her political activism cements not only the relationship between religion and politics but also between authentic Christianity and a conservative political agenda. The assumption is that Christians have similar religious beliefs and religious practices that will translate to a shared conservative political agenda, and that those who do not share a conservative political agenda cannot be true Christians.

This relationship between religion and politics holds true for everyone—not just Christians.

The CWA newsletters account for their political opponents’ agendas by claiming that secular humanism is a religion that leads to anti-God policies. This idea gets repeated throughout the

1980s.76 Every annual conference from 1984 through 1991 offered a workshop or seminar on recognizing the dangers of humanism as the established religion in American government. In the recommended reading lists published in most issues, the newsletters frequently featured books written by Tim LaHaye on secular humanism. In an article published in the August 1981 newsletter,

Tim LaHaye justified calling secular humanism a religion and the basis for the connection between religion and politics. He wrote, “Remember, a philosophy of life or way of thinking influences

75 Tim LaHaye, “November 6—A Day of Destiny or Infamy?” CWA 6.3 (April 1984) 4. 76 Michael Jameson, “Humanism ‘Dialogue,’” CWA 3.3 (June 1981): 2; Tim LaHaye, “Secularism v. God Consciousness,” CWA 3.4 (August 1981): 2; Frank York, “The Humanists Seek to Destroy Religious Freedom in America,” CWA 5.3 (June/July 1983): 1; Michael Farris, “A Tale of Two Teachers,” CWA News 7.3 (March 1985): 5; Tim LaHaye, “Secular Humanism: A Religion or Not?” CWA News 7.4 (April 1985): 1; Farris, “Ted Kennedy Is a Fundamentalist,” 6; Samuel L. Blumenfield, “Is Humanism a Religion?” CWA 11.10 (October 1989): 19; Samuel L. Blumenfield, “Is Humanism a Religion?” CWA 11.11 (November/December 1989): 8; Samuel L. Blumenfield, “Is Humanism a Religion?” CWA 12.1 (January 1990): 21;

174 almost every decision a person makes and particularly determines the values he holds.”77 Here,

LaHaye expands the definition of religion to include a “way of thinking,” and asserts that the entirety of someone’s behavior, ideas, and political commitments can be accounted for by her religion. Religion, then, is never separate from politics, and any opponent of the evangelical women’s political public who argued against the role of religion in politics was merely advocating for a different religion.78

This connection between religion and politics justified the designation of CWA’s political opposition as followers of the secular humanist “religion.” Beverly LaHaye attributed feminists’ political goals to their “bondage to the empty philosophies of humanism and feminism,” and she admonished her readers to “expose these amoral and anti-God movements . . . [and] to pray for their captives and offer them the knowledge of Truth.”79 Similarly, in the February 1986 newsletter, the regular column “Network of Prayer and Action” asked readers to pray “that God will have mercy on those who reject and fight against His precepts—especially women like Eleanor Smeal

[president of NOW] and other misguided leaders. The Truth can set them free and change them.”80

Here, the best way to defeat liberals was to pray for their religious conversion because, for the evangelical women’s political public as represented by the CWA newsletters, true Christianity produces a conservative political agenda.

Furthermore, CWA presented itself as an opportunity for religious practice. Beverly LaHaye modeled this throughout the newsletters as she discussed new programs or directions for the organization. She consistently framed each decision as a call or leading from God. The November

77 T. LaHaye, “Secularism vs. God Consciousness,” 2. 78 See also Michael Jameson, “Update on News,” CWA News 8.9 (September 1986): 12. 79 B. LaHaye, “Ex-Feminists Are Finding Truth,” 4. 80 “Network for Prayer and Action,” CWA News 8.2 (February 1986): 4.

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1986 newsletter continued coverage of CWA’s relief efforts for Nicaraguan refugees in Costa Rica.

LaHaye recounted a trip she and a select group of CWA members took to visit the refugee camps, and she said, “I needed a confirmation that this was God’s direction for CWA and not an emotional response.” LaHaye demonstrated that, in her mind, there is a distinction between what she wanted to do and what God wanted her to do. The implication was that, of course, she will follow God, whether God’s plan conflicts with her own plans or not. Throughout the rest of the article, small successes during the trip to the refugee camps signaled God’s favor; LaHaye noted that “God miraculously opened doors” for her to meet with the First Lady of Costa Rica. In other words, God led the way for LaHaye’s political action, and she served as a model for CWA members to emulate.

For example, an insert included in the February 1986 newsletter praised readers for being members of CWA, but urged them to “become more actively involved in being a witness for righteousness in your community by becoming an active member of CWA.” The insert listed several ways readers could increase their participation in CWA, directing them to follow God’s call: “If the Lord leads you to take some action where you are, ask Him to lead you in the activity in which He wants you to serve and then check one of the boxes on the opposite panel.”81 The language imitated the language

LaHaye used to describe her own political action. It confirmed that the newsletters encouraged the members of the evangelical women’s political public to see their activism and support of CWA as a response to God’s leading in their lives. The connection between political activism and personal religious faith increased the urgency for members to participate, and it also increased the urgency for members to oppose CWA’s political opponents, primarily NOW. Because political activism was an outgrowth of religious belief, CWA’s political opponents were also their religious opponents.

81 “Will You Take a Stand for Righteousness in America?” CWA News 8.2 (February 1986): unpaginated insert.

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Consequently, the newsletters invited CWA members to oppose NOW because it was an organization that supported secularism and therefore fought against Christianity.

The newsletters often characterized CWA as an organization exclusively for evangelical

Christians in two significant ways. First, staff and leaders of CWA were expected to demonstrate an active Christian faith. The June/July 1980 newsletter asked readers to consider becoming state chairmen, and mentioned that only applicants with “a personal relationship with God” would be considered.82 The April 1981 newsletter announced a need for a “mature, single Christian” to become the National Director of Prayer Chapters, and among the requirements the article listed was a letter of reference from the applicant’s pastor.83 Second, the annual conventions that CWA began hosting in 1984 included educational programming, such as seminars on American history or current political issues, but they also included practices associated with evangelical Protestant churches, such as sermons on Sunday mornings and frequent praise and worship sessions. The newsletters encouraged readers to attend the conventions in order to experience “an inspirational and spiritual experience for Godly women probably unparalleled in our nation,” to “stand up as Esther did and be used of God to change our nation,” to experience a “pouring out of God’s blessings upon those who come,” and to be encouraged through “challenging speakers, instructional workshops, thought- provoking devotionals, and motivational musicians.”84 After each year’s conference the newsletter published letters from those who attended and wanted to report “fantastic inspiration and rich spiritual blessings”; and to describe how they were “blessed by the devotional speakers each

82 “Reps Sought for CWA State Chapters,” CWA 1.6 (June/July 1980): 4. 83 “National Field Director Needed,” CWA 3.2 (April 1981): 4. 84 “CWA Convention Highlights,” CWA 6.5 (June 1984): 3; Beverly LaHaye, “A Word from Beverly,” CWA News 7.9 (September 1985): 2; “Convention Time—Expectations and Needs,” CWA 8.9 (September 1986): unpaginated insert; “CWA Convention ’88,” CWA 10.8 (August 1988): 4.

177 morning to spiritually motivate them into action.” Even one skeptical attendee’s “heart was changed and she is now a CWA supporter.”85 These conventions, then, were not just informative, but experiential and spiritual. In order to encourage women to become involved in politics, CWA helped their members to experience a God-given call to be politically active.86

Collective Subjectivity

This approach to political action—one that is closely intertwined with religious belief— articulated an identity that the newsletters invited CWA’s members to share among one another.

Throughout the newsletters, women readers are not encouraged to think of themselves as individuals but as a type of woman who is the same as other members of the evangelical women’s political public. Whereas Schlafly emphasized that the individual was the foundational component of society, CWA characterized society as made up of families and group identities. In Klatch’s study of the women involved in the New Right, she notes that some conservative women “believe the primary element of society is the rational, self-interested individual,” while others “consider the family to be the sacred unit of society.”87 Eagle Forum was an example of the former, and CWA was an example of the latter. CWA was explicit in its communal emphasis even in its mission statement:

“Protecting the rights of the family through prayer and action.”88 The newsletters characterized the family as a unit that has rights that are threatened and addressed readers as protectors of the family.

Furthermore, the newsletters offered readers a way to understand themselves in the context of

85 Beverly LaHaye, “A Word from Beverly,” CWA News 7.11 (November 1985): 2; Beverly LaHaye, “A Word from Beverly,” CWA 8.10 (October 1986): 2; Beverly LaHaye, CWA 12.1 (January 1990): 3. 86 See also “Christians Pray and March Outside U.S. Supreme Court Building on Capitol Hill,” CWA News 8.2 (February 1986): 5. 87 Klatch, Women of the New Right, 4. 88 Masthead, CWA 5.7 (December/January 1984): 1.

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Christianity, family, and political action. In fact, Beverly LaHaye explicitly described CWA as an answer to many women’s need to find and enact an identity: “As I travel around the country, I become more and more aware that women are looking for their unique place in society as they enter different seasons and experiences in their lives. Out of that need, Concerned Women for America was created to offer a vehicle through which women could express their definition of womanhood, and what it is to be a woman of God in this day.”89 Here, LaHaye assumed that readers had the same idea of their “unique place in society” and have the same “definition of womanhood.” In this way, the newsletters offered a replicable identity to readers, and readers were invited to think of themselves as one type of woman who exists in a community of similar women.

One specific consequence of a group identity instead of an individual one for CWA members is that, mainly in the earlier years of the organization, the newsletters constantly reminded readers that individually their efforts would make little impact, but together they could all accomplish much. For example, in a 1981 article informing readers about a boycott to help encourage television advertisers to run their ads during shows that espoused biblical principles,

Beverly LaHaye wrote, “You and I cannot do much by ourselves, but this is one time we can act together to initiate a moral improvement in one of the most influential areas of our society.”90

Readers could join together to create a powerful force that would have significant impact. The

December 1981 newsletter claims, “All the feminist strength and energy in America cannot compare with the powerful tool of thousands of Christian women fasting and praying on the same day calling on God to heal our land.”91 Here the tool was not individual action but collective action: thousands of women praying simultaneously. This idea that the members’ actions only have power en masse

89 Beverly LaHaye, “A Word from Beverly,” CWA 8.6 (June 1986): 2. 90 LaHaye, “CWA Joins Cleanup TV Campaign,” 4. 91 “What Can You Do?” CWA 3.6 (December 1981): 4.

179 implied a homogenous group of women; it elided the diversity within the organization and within evangelical Christianity.

Not only does the idea of collective action offer women a group to which to belong, but it also urges women to act, since only if many women act can any woman make a difference. The June

1989 newsletter included an anecdote written by Beverly LaHaye about meeting a young woman at a retreat. The woman asked LaHaye to forgive her for not working enough as a Prayer Chapter leader over the last year. LaHaye responded with a clear call to collectivity: “I am grieved when people say to me, ‘Beverly, we are so proud of what you are doing.’ I know their hearts are well-meaning, but it is not what I am doing. If it were left for me to do alone, it would be a failure. . . . It takes all of us working together to really have an influence on America. Let me say to any who may have signed up to be a Prayer/Action Chapter Leader, What are you doing? Will America be affected by the amount of prayer and action your group is involved with? I hope so. If not, then we all need to work together with a deep concern for the future of our nation, and specifically America’s children.”92

LaHaye encouraged her readers to increase their dedication to CWA and the work of the evangelical women’s political public by characterizing the group as dependent on collective action. The members of CWA could then experience a sense of belonging because the success of the group relies on the commitment of each individual, but this individual is not a unique entity. Each member remains one example of the identity shared across the entire group. The characterization of society as consisting of families and groups leads to an emphasis on collective action that urges members to action and provides them a sense of shared belonging, but it also glosses over distinctions, disagreements, and discontents.

92 Beverly LaHaye, “A Word from Beverly,” CWA 11.6 (June 1989): 3.

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Global Motherhood

CWA offers its readers not only a collective identity through political action but also an opportunity for members to employ that collective identity in their individual lives, mainly through their care for children. As the newsletter expanded over time, issues such as disciplining children and identifying the best educational practices for parents expand from topics covered in recommended books to researched articles that sometimes fill several pages of the newsletter. CWA’s emphasis on motherhood, however, was more than a way for its members to live out their religion and politics in their daily lives. Motherhood also became members’ primary approach to international crises. In this section, I use Raka Shome’s analysis of images of celebrity white women as “global mothers” to argue that Beverly LaHaye’s evocation of motherhood in relation to Nicaraguan refugees attempts to prove the limits of feminism.

Shome argues that Western heteronormativity is perpetuated globally through images showing celebrity white women, such as Princess Diana and Angelina Jolie, caring for children around the world. These images simultaneously support a hopeful vision of a multicultural family and make the “inequalities between nations, histories, and cultures” insignificant. Shome describes how these images reinforce connections between whiteness, beauty, and modernity that elevate white, middle-class, heterosexual women into a moral motherhood and denigrate “women whose bodies are ‘out of place’—the ‘white trash’ woman, the lesbian woman, the non-white woman, the non-Western woman.” These images portray transnational relationships and demonstrate that

Western patriarchal heteronormativity infiltrates global understandings of relations of power and that the logic of whiteness does not operate in the same way in all places. Shome argues that this pattern became particularly pointed at the same time as CWA was gaining strength: “The late- twentieth century celebration of global motherhood acquires an even greater significance when it is

181 placed within the context of the ‘family values’ discourse of the late 1980s, 1990s, in nations such as the U.S. in particular. . . . [A]t a time when in the U.S. there has been a decline in conception rates of white women and yet a pressure on women to acquire parenthood in order to be a ‘fully realized’ citizen, the logic of ‘global motherhood’ offers a means through which to embrace the identity of the mother in order to be a fully realized female subject.”93 Participating in global motherhood, then, afforded the opportunity for Western women the opportunity to fulfill or expand their maternal identities. For CWA members in particular, the newsletters placed this participation in direct contrast to the identity of the feminist woman.

The feminist woman, according to CWA, supported abortion and homosexual rights, but she also hated families and motherhood. While many twentieth-century feminists argued against the patriarchal structure of heteronormative marriage as sanctioned by the state, CWA characterized all feminists as actively opposed to familial relations, especially motherhood. The newsletters claimed that NOW’s support of children’s rights legislation was an attack on traditional and God-ordained structures of authority. In a 1979 article covering the White House Conference on Families, CWA described the event as negatively impacting families by reducing patriarchal power and virility: “The family is being further emasculated by legislation to provide for ‘children’s rights.’” The article mentions that feminists want to eliminate physical punishment from homes and provide health care for children apart from parents and family.94 Elsewhere, support for children’s rights (or “children’s liberation”) is described as “contrary to God’s line of authority in the home.”95 In other words, by legislating for children’s rights, parents’ authority and control over their children decreases.

93 Raka Shome, “‘Global Motherhood’: The Transnational Intimacies of White Femininity,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 28.5 (December 2011): 389. 94 “ERA Works Behind the Scene,” CWA 1.4 (November 1979): 2. 95 Beverly LaHaye, “1980—The Family Tug of War,” CWA 2.5 (May 1980): 1.

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The newsletters portrayed feminists as angry, bitter, and opposed to motherhood. The newsletters explained feminist support for federal child care as a way for women to shirk the burden of motherhood.96 The newsletters consistently called NOW an “anti-family” organization with “little interest in children or families.”97 The June 1981 newsletter reported on a protest that occurred outside the LaHayes’ church on Mother’s Day. The article says that “outside the church on the street were approximately 30 feminists carrying picket signs filled with hostility, sarcasm, and negativism towards subjects such as child-bearing, motherhood, husbands as heads of home and supporter of families. What a sad way for a woman to choose to spend Mother’s Day! These women chose to mourn this special day instead of honoring the blessing of motherhood.”98 LaHaye interpreted the motivation for the picket as “mourn[ing]” motherhood. In fact, these women might have supported a different way to support motherhood, but LaHaye characterizes them as against motherhood itself.

The same edition reprinted an article from Schlafly where she wrote, “[F]eminists ridicule motherhood as a stereotype and do not accept it as an honored career for women.”99 According to the newsletters, feminist women have no capability of—or interest in—fulfilling a maternal role.

This accusation directly contradicted the primarily maternal identity that the newsletters created for

CWA members. It posited all feminists as opposed not just to conservative women’s political agenda but also to the primary identity the newsletters attributed to conservative women. By characterizing

96 Michael Jameson, “Update on the News,” CWA 6.3 (April 1984): 5. 97 Beverly LaHaye, “The Worth of Motherhood,” CWA 8.5 (May 1986): 6; See also “CWA Arrival on Capitol Hill Blacked Out by Most Media,” CWA 5.6 (November 1983): 2; Beverly LaHaye, “What Is the ‘Gender Gap’?” CWA 5.6 (November 1983): 4; B. LaHaye, “Ex-Feminists Are Finding Truth,” 4; Beverly LaHaye, “CWA Women Do Make a Difference,” CWA News 7.10 (October 1985): 2. 98 “Feminists Spend Mother’s Day Picketing Church,” CWA 3.3 (June 1981): 1. 99 Schlafly, “Women Demanding ‘Rights’,” 3.

183 feminists and members of NOW as anti-family, and especially anti-motherhood, CWA creates an opposition that dismisses the central values of a CWA member.

In direct contrast to CWA’s portrayal of feminists’ anti-motherhood, the newsletters presented CWA members’ relief efforts in foreign countries as an expansion of the members’ motherhood. Coverage in the CWA newsletters of the war in Nicaragua and of the refugees there created a dramatic story of Communists destroying a “humble” country and forcing their nefarious political beliefs on innocent citizens who do not support them.100 The first article that Beverly

LaHaye wrote about CWA’s project to assist the Nicaraguan refugees characterizes them as

“destitute,” “helpless,” “less fortunate,” “poor,” “needy,” and “oppressed and victimized by the anti-God philosophy of Communism that has no concern or value for human rights.” LaHaye claimed that God was pleased by her burden for these refugees. She explained that Christian women have a duty to help them. The newsletters published a consistent record of the developing project to provide clothes, medicine, and money to refugee camps in Costa Rica. The primary work of the

CWA members’ relief efforts was to nurture and care for the Nicaraguan refugees. The project was called “Love, Hope ’n Apples,” and the article introducing the project explained that “the program gets inspiration for its name from Mrs. LaHaye’s recent visit to the Tileran Camp and a comment made by a doctor there. The doctor said that most children have not tasted an apple in over a year.

The unwelcome companion of malnutrition could clearly be seen in nearly all the camp’s residents and hopelessness hung over them like a pall of death. But by giving them Love, Hope, and Apples,

100 Lori Berkeley, “The Communist Conquest—Is Latin America Next?” CWA8.5 (May 1986): 7; Barrie Lyons, “A Central American’s Viewpoint,” CWA 8.7 (July 1986): 15; Tim LaHaye, “The Untold Story of Christian Genocide in Nicaragua,” CWA 8.11 (November 1986): 11; Albert Veldhuzyen, “CWA Helps Victims of Marxist Persecution,” 9.5 (May 1987): 6; “Communism’s Effect on Nicaraguan Mothers,” CWA 9.9 (September 1987): 23.

184 we will relieve some of their physical spiritual, and emotional suffering.”101 As the program progressed over the next few months, newsletter articles reported that instead of merely shipping clothes and medicine to the refugee camps, a team of CWA staff and members would travel to the camps personally to deliver the members’ donations so that the refugees could experience direct love and care.102

Reports on these trips highlighted the emotional work of the donations. For example, a year after the initial trip to refugee camps, LaHaye wrote, “The apples are gone, but the love and hope planted by Concerned Women for America in the hearts of Nicaraguan refugees have taken root.”103

The material donations did not last, but they became a vehicle through which CWA members could give the more significant gifts of love and hope. LaHaye named CWA members’ strongest motivation for supporting this cause when she summarized the importance of the program: “A conservative woman’s heart is focused on her family. She needs to influence and test those institutions that affect her family—whether it’s the schools or the government. She even can go a step further to protect the borders of her country. . . . Conservative women become involved because situations like Nicaragua might affect their families and the kind of nation that will be presented to our children and our children’s children.”104 Here, a primary reason CWA members helped refugees in Nicaragua was to protect her own descendants. A CWA member could expand and strengthen her own motherhood through international relief efforts.

The CWA newsletters encouraged readers to think of themselves and their relief efforts in contrast to feminists and liberals whom the newsletters characterized as selfish, uncaring, and

101 “Love, Hope ’n Apples,” CWA 9.1 (December/January 1987): 8. 102 Beverly LaHaye, “Hearts of Compassion,” CWA 9.3 (March 1987): 2. 103 Beverly LaHaye, “Hopeful Refugees Experiencing Our Love,” CWA 9.1 (July 1987): 2. 104 Beverly LaHaye, “Why Feminism No Longer Sells,” CWA 9.10 (October 1987): 5.

185 distant. A November 1986 article introduced the contrast between CWA women and “those feminist-type women covered by the media who demand rights and search for their own comforts.”105 Here, feminists are selfish and unconcerned with the needs of others; they are not capable of acting maternally.106 Furthermore, the liberals “want to . . . betray the courageous men and women fighting on the front lines for freedom and the preservation of Christian values.”107 In fact, LaHaye used relief efforts to Nicaraguan refugees as a test case for the character of women. She wrote, “CWA’s recent project helping the Nicaraguan refugees in Costa Rica was launched in response to real need and in keeping with the conservative ideal of helping others. This is a glorious illustration of giving, not taking. I have seen no evidence of any feminists who have offered to help these poor victims caught in a situation they cannot control. Conservative women were there, reaching out to others, trying to meet their needs.” LaHaye’s argued that because no feminist organizations provided relief to Nicaraguan refugees, all feminists fail at being caring women. The feminist movement, according to CWA, required women “to be totally engulfed with their own selfishness.”108 This characterization of feminists rendered them incapable of performing motherhood, while CWA members expanded their own maternal relationships to the “less fortunate” children in foreign countries. Thus, the newsletters’ rhetoric encouraged CWA readers to imagine themselves as capable and cheerful mothers while it portrayed feminists as failed mothers, and this rhetoric perpetuated the binary of conservative women being essentially different from feminists. However, I argue that this portrayal meant that feminists—and NOW more specifically, since NOW was CWA’s most commonly named political opponent—had to respond to CWA as a

105 B. LaHaye, “How Long Can They Cry?” 1, 5. 106 See also Veldhuzyen, “CWA Helps Victims of Marxist Persecution,” 7. 107 “Communism’s Effect on Nicaraguan Mothers,” 23. 108 B. LaHaye, “Why Feminism No Longer Sells,” 4-5.

186 hostile audience. The binary that CWA created, then, while adding a distinct voice to public discourse, also further widened the disparities between the evangelical women’s political public and the liberal feminist public.

The binary that the CWA newsletters established between conservative women and feminists was necessary for the organization to justify its existence and to motivate its members to action. The newsletters invited CWA members to understand themselves as unique and needed because they ascribed to a distinct understanding of God, history, the family, and women’s roles.

The newsletters articulated a distinct lifeworld recognizable to late-twentieth-century American evangelical Protestant Christians, but they avoided detailed explanations of theology or religious practice in order to appeal to women who might hold competing theologies. These appeals encouraged CWA members to assume a shared understanding across the evangelical women’s political public. The newsletters also offered the evangelical women’s political public a way to position itself in relation to structures of power by identifying God and history as centers of power.

Once members of the evangelical women’s political public recognized God and history as centers of power, then political arguments, policies, and interlocutors could be evaluated based on their relationships to these centers of power. Furthermore, the newsletters aligned the organization and its agenda with God and history in order to demonstrate validity, credibility, and influence, but they also limited the extent of those powers in order to unify and galvanize CWA members to action.

Therefore, the CWA newsletters offer a challenge to rhetorical scholars in two ways. First, they provide evidence that texts circulating within a public contain rhetorical features of both publics and counterpublics. I argue that this contradiction leads to a different understanding of publics and counterpublics. Instead of identifying publics and counterpublics as different empirical objects, I claim that publicity and counterpublicity are rhetorical strategies that serve to organize a

187 public’s relationships to structures of power and other publics. Second, the CWA newsletters offered the evangelical women’s political public a model for political action that engaged other publics. Instead of developing a deliberative model for political action, the CWA newsletters simplified and exaggerated the arguments of CWA’s political opponents. The newsletters radicalized the liberal feminist public by characterizing it as a monolithic group that threatened Christianity.

Overall, the impact of this rhetoric led to a more stratified and contentious discursive space rather than one enlivened by a diversity of ideas and identities. The next chapter demonstrates how NOW responded to both Eagle Forum’s and CWA’s rhetoric, and it argues that public sphere theory can be expanded to account for contention among competing publics rather than emphasizing the potential for rational and democratic deliberation.

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Chapter 4: The National Organization for Women, the Liberal Feminist Public, and a

Feminist Response

Founded in 1966, the National Organization for Women was the largest and most prominent feminist organization in the twentieth-century U.S. women’s movement. It has remained the largest U.S. feminist organization in the early twenty-first century. Even though it might be more familiar to the American public than the wide variety of feminist organizations, feminist movements, and feminists, its political agenda and feminist philosophies represent only a part of the women’s movement that was its origin. An early study of the twentieth-century women’s movement, Jo

Freeman’s Politics of Women’s Liberation, explains the difference between the women’s social movement and the organizations associated with it. Freeman argues, “While there is a relationship between the two, it is an imperfect one, changing over time, and the inevitable concentration of a study on a movement organization should not be mistaken as a thorough analysis of the movement itself.”1 More specifically, NOW’s liberal feminism emphasized greater participation of women in the workplace and in politics, equal partnership in marriage, and legislation that would protect women’s rights to financial independence and reproductive health care. These goals contrasted with the more radical women’s liberation movement that called for a more comprehensive restructuring of society, including the eradication of the nuclear family, gender roles, and, in some cases, gender distinctions.2 However, the relationships between competing feminisms and the organizations formed to support their goals remain complex and imbricated such that any clear distinction is

1 Freeman, Politics of Women’s Liberation, 71. 2 See Joyce Antler, “‘We Were Ready to Turn the World Upside Down’: Radical Feminism and Jewish Women,” in A Jewish Feminine Mystique?: Jewish Women in Postwar America, ed. Hasia R. Diner, Shira Kohn, and Rachel Kranson (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006), 210. See also Firestone, Dialectic of Sex; Mitchell, Women’s Estate; Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One; Echols, Daring to Be Bad.

189 difficult. When Steven M. Buechler asserts that NOW was the “core of the contemporary women’s movement” that “consists of central movement organizations . . . on the one hand and looser networks of self-identified feminist groups on the other hand,” he misrepresents the complexity of the relationships among feminisms.3 Scholars have identified the diverse range of competing opinions and goals that also existed within the National Organization for Women. This diversity was a challenge for the organization not only because consensus was difficult to achieve but also, as this chapter shows, because NOW needed to respond to its opponents with an accurate characterization of its goals and commitments that would not alienate its members.

By the mid-1970s, the women’s movement had achieved some legislative success: the Equal

Rights Amendment had been passed in Congress, and thirty-five of the required thirty-eight states had ratified it; the Equal Credit Opportunity Act and Title IX had passed; abortion rights had been upheld in the courts; and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission had been created.

However, by the 1982 deadline for the ERA, support for women’s issues had been compromised by the intervention of conservative women. Eagle Forum and Concerned Women for America were the two largest conservative women’s political action groups, and their membership and activism rose to their highest levels in the early 1980s. Throughout U.S. history, conservative women have participated in politics, but the introduction of conservative women’s activity and rhetoric into the debate that the women’s movement had begun in the 1960s and 1970s meant that feminists needed to fashion a response to these conservative women. As the last two chapters have shown, the grassroots antifeminist public and the evangelical women’s political public discussed women’s issues and the feminists who advocated for those issues in ways that misrepresented feminist positions, catastrophized the effects of feminist policies, and manipulated feminists’ calls for diversity to

3 Buechler, Women’s Movements in the United States, 4.

190 support their own inclusion in the public sphere. NOW was the most prominent opponent for

Eagle Forum and CWA, and thus NOW needed to address its newest adversaries.

In this chapter, I will analyze the national newsletters of NOW, the National NOW Times, to show that NOW’s response to conservative women included shifts in its own rhetoric to a more forceful position that increasingly relied on arguments about equal rights rather than the consequences of legislation on the lives of women. NOW increasingly vilified conservative women and just as Eagle Forum and CWA did, NOW exaggerated the differences between NOW, Eagle

Forum, and CWA in order to urge its membership to action. Even though the political agenda promoted by conservative women was significantly different from NOW’s political agenda, the rhetoric NOW used against them neglected to acknowledge the nuances and complexities of the range of feminist opinion. I am not proposing that these three publics could or should have created better relationships among one another; instead, I argue that the way they represented their opponents created a discursive space that left very little room for anyone but them.

This case study provides a challenge to rhetorical scholars who use public sphere theory to call for a more inclusive public sphere. As I discussed in the introduction, rhetorical scholars have emphasized the inclusion of more publics into the public sphere as a benefit for healthier democratic discourse since the marginalization of publics has led to social, political, and economic inequalities.

However, adding publics to public debates does not necessarily produce discourse that mitigates those inequalities. Including more publics into a political debate, which would counteract a public’s marginalization, can lead to a more contentious discursive space that does not improve democratic discourse. This chapter, then, examines the national newsletters of NOW to identify the ways in which the organization responded to the conservative women’s publics, and I argue that this

191 response was characterized by rhetoric that shifted away from a focus on plurality, complexity, and coalitions with diverse groups.

The National NOW Times, which began in the late 1960s under the title Do It NOW, imitated major urban newspapers, such as the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune, in its appearance and format. The national newsletter connected the national organization with the members of the smaller state chapters, since during the early 1970s, as the organization grew, one reason members of

“individual chapters began to feel more and more isolated,” Freeman notes, was that the “national newsletter came out only quarterly, and occasionally not at all.”4 During the late seventies and early eighties, each yearly volume of the newsletter contained nine or ten issues, but by the late eighties, yearly volumes contained only four or six issues. The issues varied from twelve to twenty pages, with issues becoming consistently shorter over the 1980s. According to the circulation data published in the newsletter, circulation increased from 125,744 average copies per issue in 1981 to 175,574 copies in 1989. Throughout the 1980s, the newsletter also published advertisements from musicians, from bookstores, for rallies and events organized by other groups, for specific reading material, and for products such as politically themed jewelry or work gloves designed for women. Over the twelve- year period this study covers, from 1979 to 1991, the newsletter editors updated the format a number of times but only commented on the change once in 1985. On the front page of the first issue of the eighteenth volume, a small highlighted article read, “The National NOW Times has a new look! The new format is designed to make the Times more readable and functional for NOW activists.” The article also provided addresses for the editorial offices located in Washington, D.C., where articles, pictures, and advertisements should be sent. Every issue named the president of

4 Freeman, Politics of Women’s Liberation, 87.

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NOW, the editor of the newsletter, and staff writers, but the National NOW Times only partially provided bylines for the articles printed.

The NOW newsletters present a particular challenge to this study because they contained more competing opinions than either Eagle Forum or CWA newsletters. Both of the conservative groups presented a fairly consistent message. Because Phyllis Schlafly provided the bulk of the content for the Eagle Forum newsletters, there was very little variation in opinion, approach, or argumentation. The CWA newsletters employed language specific to evangelical Protestant culture that contained multiple and undefined meanings, so the newsletters were able to address a diverse audience with the pretense of homogeneity. In contrast, NOW newsletters during the 1980s contained articles, advertisements, and news stories with competing opinions that I will identify throughout this chapter. As I outlined in the introduction, the newsletters of these organizations do not provide a thorough representation of the lifeworld of the publics, but they do provide a credible and authoritative organization of information for the public’s members. Therefore, within this chapter, I attribute this credibility and authority to each item in the newsletters. I do not argue that each item had equal credibility and authority for each reader, but that by nature of being included in the newsletters, each item had the potential to contribute to any reader’s understanding of the public’s lifeworld. In other words, NOW used the newsletters to give legitimacy to a range of opinions, but it was still a selective and distinct range of opinions. This chapter identifies those selections in order to argue that the NOW newsletters attempted to reconcile diverse opinions under common values that then provided a framework for the lifeworld that would be recognized by the liberal feminist public.

Over the period 1979-1991, the newsletters contain evidence of the shifts NOW employed to respond to conservative women. The newsletters show that the liberal feminist public had been

193 operating on the basis that plurality was a center of power with which the public aligned itself in order to move toward power and to act publicly. The rhetoric in the newsletters in the late 1970s and early 1980s portrayed plurality and unity as the answer to discrimination. As the 1980s continued and national politics moved toward the right, NOW then shifted the center of power to the state. The NOW newsletters characterized the organization as both fully functioning within the state in order to legitimize its actions and also opposed to the state in order to urge members to action. Furthermore, the lifeworld created by the NOW newsletters shifted in response to conservative women’s publics. The values that the liberal feminist public established shifted from individualism to equal rights, and one consequence of this shift was the changing relationship to religion. At the beginning of the 1980s, the newsletters celebrated women’s individual choice by acknowledging individuals’ religious beliefs and communities. Furthermore, the newsletters contained evidence of strong connections between NOW and religious organizations, and a reader of the newsletters could find many examples of women reconciling feminism with religious faith and practice rather than excluding one or the other. After the defeat of the ERA, there is less evidence of these coalitions and more examples of women fighting religious institutions rather than reforming them. Therefore, the newsletters show the changes that NOW and the liberal feminist public employed to respond to conservative women, and these changes resulted in a shortening of the political spectrum such that ideas and voices other than the liberal feminist public, the grassroots antifeminist public, and the evangelical women’s political public went unacknowledged. In the following sections, I examine the constructions of power that the NOW newsletters employed in order to align themselves with power (publicity) and to oppose power (counterpublicity), and I argue that the shift from plurality to the state reflects the challenge NOW faced in responding to conservative women’s publics. Then I describe the lifeworld the newsletters articulate, paying special

194 attention to the changes over the 1980s in order to demonstrate the impact of conservative women’s publics on NOW’s rhetorical choices.

Publicity and Counterpublicity

Plurality

Throughout the 1980s, NOW’s membership represented a wide range of feminist opinions and commitments. The diversity among feminists and the attempts of NOW’s leadership to maintain a broad and active membership created a need for a way to reconcile these differences. By positing plurality as a center of power in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the NOW newsletters attempted to reframe potentially divisive differences among its members as a sign of health and vitality. There were two ways that the newsletters employed the concept of plurality: endorsing different opinions through deliberation (plurality of opinion) and including different identities in organizational programming and leadership (plurality of identity). First, the newsletters espoused the plurality of opinion by celebrating the inclusion of different ideas and robust discussion, and participation by a plurality of voices became a sign of feminism’s strength. On the other hand, the liberal feminist public opposed that same center of power by reinforcing authoritative organizational hierarchies. Second, the newsletters encouraged participation from its diverse members in order to achieve plurality of identity, but this participation required conformity to established hierarchies and institutions. In this way, the newsletters set limits on the power of plurality: the public could not fully support competing opinions at the same time as it fully supported the executive decisions of the leadership, and the public could not fully incorporate diverse identities while requiring those identities to conform to dominant norms of participation.

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The NOW newsletters created plurality of opinion as a center of power through portraying the organization as a collaborative group in which everyone’s opinion contributed equally. Reports on organizational decisions, the creation and adoption of bylaws, and the election of leaders emphasized the inclusion of conflicting ideas and the process of deliberation among members. The newsletters celebrated NOW’s “democratically structured organization.”5 For example, a 1980 report on decisions made by the National Board described “lengthy discussion and deliberation lasting nearly two days and . . . extensive discussion at many levels of the organization.”6 This description emphasized the inclusion of members with different levels of power, the process of deliberation, the assumption that this deliberation led to a majority consensus, and the endorsement of this process as democratic and therefore better than other decision-making processes. These processes were also highlighted in the issues printed before NOW’s annual national conferences. Throughout the late

1970s and early 1980s, the newsletter published sections designated for news, opinion, and administration, and before national conferences the administrative section published proposed changes to organizational bylaws.7 Each proposal would include the present bylaw, the proposed change, and arguments marked “pro” and “con.” In this way, the organization enacted its democratic process by educating its members before the vote, holding a vote at the national conference to which all members were invited, and then often publishing the voting tallies after the conference. The demonstration of a plurality of voices involved in decision-making provided validity

5 “An Open Letter to The New Republic,” National NOW Times 21, no. 1 (April 1988): 5. The publication hereafter is cited as NNT. 6 “NOW PAC Votes to Oppose Carter,” NNT 13.1 (December/January 1980): 1. 7 After these categories were abandoned in 1985, news about the administration and organization itself was published on the front page instead of in the “Administration” section, which had been the last few pages of every issue.

196 to the conference bylaws and encouraged readers to see themselves as participants in the organization’s decisions, structure, agenda, and activities.

Even as the newsletters reported on the importance of input from a plurality of members, however, they simultaneously defended the authority of those in organizational leadership positions.

In fact, in the early days of the group, the organizational structure was a point of contention between liberal feminists and more radical feminists. Freeman notes that in 1968, “[t]he ‘radicals’ left because of disagreements on structure, not program.”8 From the very beginning, “NOW’s top-down structure and limited resources . . . placed severe limits on diversity, and in turn severe strains on the organization.”9 In other words, the rhetoric in the newsletters that celebrated and encouraged plurality was in direct contradiction to how the organization actually operated—from the top down.

However, the message in the newsletters was that through democratic structures and processes within the organization, the members’ opinions determined the leadership’s decisions and agendas.

For example, throughout its existence, NOW experienced tensions between the local chapters and the national organization.10 The National NOW Times served to defend the organization and its national leadership, especially regarding controversial decisions. For example, minorities and lesbian feminists opposed President Eleanor Smeal’s reelection in 1979 because they supported allocating resources to issues other than the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment. Smeal was reelected, however, and she made significant changes to the national officers and staff. Her detractors saw

8 Freeman, Politics of Women’s Liberation, 81. 9 Freeman, Politics of Women’s Liberation, 80. 10 See Clark A. Pomerleau, “Empowering Members, Not Overpowering Them: The National Organization for Women, Calls for Lesbian Inclusion, and California Influence, 1960s-1980s,” Journal of Homosexuality 57.7 (August 2010): 842-861; and Jo Reger, “Organizational Dynamics and Construction of Multiple Feminist Identities in the National Organization for Women,” Gender and Society 16.5 (October 2002): 710-727.

197 these staffing changes as a way “to purge dissent.”11 At the next annual conference in 1980, the bylaws were changed to extend the terms of the officers and board members to solidify and lengthen the controversial staffing changes Smeal made the year before. The October/November

1980 newsletter reported that the bylaws were changed “so that the internal elections would not interrupt the momentum of the final days of the ERA ratification drive.” The National NOW Times declared that this vote was “[i]n the spirit of total mobilization” and that “the National Conference voted overwhelmingly (by a margin of two to one)” in favor of the bylaw change.12 This report neglected to acknowledge the controversy or the dissent offered by members who, Clark Pomerleau says, “continued to charge [Smeal] with power-mongering and ignoring lesbians.”13 That same issue of the newsletter devoted four pages to pictures and articles about the national conference with the headline, “San Antonio National Conference Success.” By failing to acknowledge dissent and supporting the agenda of the elected officials, the newsletter contradicted the calls for a plurality of opinion.

The newsletters provide evidence that complaints of racism and homophobia had occurred within NOW, but they placed responsibility on majority women, the organization, and minority women to create a plurality of identity as a way to counteract discrimination within the organization.

The newsletters contained numerous articles throughout the 1980s that explained to readers why feminists should support activism against racism and homophobia in an effort to justify programs, events, and conversations addressing discrimination.14 Similarly, after the defeat of the ERA, the

11 Pomerleau, “Empowering Members,” 854. 12 “Officer and Board Terms Extended One Year,” NNT 13.10-11 (October/November 1980): 1. 13 Pomerleau, “Empowering Members,” 856. 14 “Minority Women’s Leadership Conference,” NNT 12.7 (July 1979): 16; Valorie Y. Caffee, “Marguerite Gamble: Another Victim of the Double Whammy,” NNT 12.9-10 (September/October 1979): 4; Christine Riddiough, “NOW to Sponsor Lesbian Rights Conference,” NNT 16.9

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March 1983 newsletter announced a conference that the New York state chapter organized titled

“Our Common Struggle: Minority and Majority Women.” This reflected a common theme throughout discussions on race in the newsletters: that the cause of women’s rights should include both minority and majority women. In other words, those who supported addressing racism and homophobia could not assume that the readers of the NOW newsletters would join their efforts without being first persuaded of the existence of racism and homophobia within the organization.

These explanations imply that the assumed audience of the newsletters included those who had not experienced—and might be dismissive of—racism and homophobia, and they encouraged majority women to accept and validate the experiences of minority women. This encouragement implies the responsibility of majority women have to support efforts to end the discrimination of minority women, and it is one way that the newsletters attempted to reconcile the competing feminist commitments within the liberal feminist public.

The newsletters offered readers opportunities to learn about racism and homophobia, and they provided evidence of NOW’s efforts to welcome diverse identities. For example, in 1979 the newsletters reported on the creation, the leadership, and the plans of the National Minority

Women’s Committee that was “charged with ensuring that the needs and concerns of minority women are fully represented in the programs of NOW,” and invited members, “particularly minority persons . . . to serve with the Committee.”15 The creation of this committee granted power to members who felt excluded because of their identities by giving them a forum for expressing their needs and an official role in the organization. Furthermore, the newsletters celebrated partnerships with organizations for women of color to demonstrate NOW’s support of minorities, announced

(November 1983): 2; Geraldine Miller, “Listening, Learning, and Working Together,” NNT 24.2 (December 1991): 8. 15 “Minority Women’s Committee Recruiting New Members,” NNT 12.4 (April 1979): 14.

199 the creation of an action kit to help local chapters combat racism, reprinted a letter of support from

NOW President Judy Goldsmith to the newly formed National Black Women’s Political Caucus, and included articles that described discrimination against Black women.16 Each of these items reinforced the importance of validating and including the identities of minority women, and these items demonstrated the organization’s acceptance of its responsibility to cultivate a plurality of identity within the liberal feminist public.

The NOW newsletters also placed responsibility on minority women for participating in the plurality of identity that majority women and the organization were responsible for creating. For example, a letter was printed in the April 1983 newsletter titled, “What the ERA Means to Us,” and it opened with the question: “Sister, who told you the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) has nothing to do with Black women?” The writer, writing with the persona of a Black woman, continues to encourage other Black women to work with NOW and its political agenda: “As this political movement builds, we Black women must realize that those ‘suburban white women,’ whom we often say ‘have nothing better to do,’ are on the verge of grasping political power in the name of all women. We often accuse the woman’s movement of being all white—but it is only lily white if we don’t participate. And if we don’t participate, who will represent our unique circumstances? . . . We should never feel we have to choose between being Black and being female. We are both, and it is to our advantage to improve the conditions of both.”17 In this call to action, racial homogeneity exists not because of the white leadership or the structure of the organization or even the institutions of

16 “NOW Mobilizes for August 27 March ‘We Still Have a Dream: Peace, Jobs, and Freedom,’” NNT 16.6 (June/July 1983): 1; “NOW Committee to Combat Racism Plans Action Kit,” NNT 17.2 (March/April 1984): 10; “National Black Women’s Political Caucus Formed,” NNT 17.5 (September/October 1984): 5; “Two Black Women Imprisoned for Voting Rights Activities,” NNT 15.1 (January/February 1982): 15; “Female Guards Face Firings over Cornrows,” NNT 21.1 (April 1988): 3. 17 “What the ERA Means to Us,” NNT 16.4 (April 1983): 8.

200 government, but it exists because of a lack of participation on the part of Black women.18 This letter underlined the power of a plurality of identity to mitigate Black women’s criticisms of the liberal feminist public, and it argued that the success of that plurality relied on the participation of minority women.

The impact of explaining discrimination to majority women, celebrating the organization’s effort to formally include minority women, and encouraging minority women to participate might not have been the creation of a plurality of identity. In her study of the race discourses used by white women involved in a women’s organization from 1972 through 1999, Anna Zajicek concluded that,

“even if some real concern with lack of diversity in the movement’s organization existed, this concern is not likely to provide an impetus for antiracist practices if the connection between structural racism and racial homogeneity is missing.”19 In other words, Zajicek argues that formal inclusion is not enough. The forms and consequences of structural racism need to be explored, acknowledged, and changed. So, even though the NOW newsletters reported on how women of color were being incorporated into the organization’s leadership and the organization’s partnerships, they neglected the exploration of the obstacles to participation that minority women faced that

Zajicek notes would be necessary for antiracist practices. In Zajicek’s study, she identifies five discursive repertoires, including the absence of whiteness that she describes as “a manifestation of white privilege and uneven power relations, wherein whiteness is constructed as an unmarked norms and as the absence of race.” She notes that “the most interesting aspect of absence of whiteness is . .

. how it contributes to the construction of differences and the reproduction of racial hierarchy by

18 See also Dorothy Gilliam, “Reaching Out,” NNT 16.7 (August 1983): 9. 19 Anna M. Zajicek, “Race Discourses and Antiracist Practices in a Local Women’s Movement,” Gender and Society 16.2 (April 2002): 172.

201 simultaneously deracializing whiteness and racializing other identities.”20 Consequently, as the NOW newsletters continually referred to “minority women,” they reified the racialization of the identities that they simultaneously attempted to include. In this way, NOW effectively moved against the center of power that the newsletters identified as a plurality of identity.21

The contradictions I have just described, however, may have been necessary to maintain an engaged membership and to run an effective organization. My argument here is that these contradictions contained rhetorical features of the texts of publics and counterpublics. The NOW newsletters identified plurality of opinion and plurality of identity as centers of power that had validated the organization, and they offered ways that the liberal feminist public could both align itself with those centers of power and oppose those centers of power.

The State

As the liberal feminist public realized the need for a response to the antifeminist activism that gathered strength throughout the 1980s, the NOW newsletters shifted their rhetoric from a call for plurality to a call for a powerful activist bloc that could make a more significant impact on national politics. The calls to action looked similar: the newsletters encouraged readers to write

20 Zajicek, “Race Discourses and Antiracist Practices,” 171. 21 See also “NOW in Congressional Gay Rights Briefing,” NNT 13.6 (June 1980): 10; “NOW Testifies at Hearings on Lesbian/Gay Civil Rights Legislation,” NNT 15.1 (January/February 1982): 5; Terri Leyton, “Wisconsin First State to Pass Lesbian/Gay Rights Laws,” NNT 15.3 (April 1982): 17; Christine Riddiough, “New Jersey Lesbian and Gay Rights Bill Introduced,” NNT 17.2 (March/April 1984): 8; “Lesbian/Gay Rights Score Major Victories in WA State,” NNT 18.7 (December/January 1986): 8; “Lesbian/Gay Rights Under Fire in Washington State,” NNT 19.3 (May/June 1986): 4; Christine Riddiough, “Lesbian and Gay Rights ’84 Project Launched” NNT 17.1 (January/February 1984): 2; Christine R. Riddiough, “Lesbian/Gay Rights ’85 Broadens Its Focus,” NNT 18.2 (March/April 1985): 6; “Kowalski Wins First Legal Breakthrough,” NNT 21.1 (April 1988): 3; “Military ‘Witchhunts’ Continue,” NNT 21.4 (October/November/December 1988): 9.

202 letters, walk in marches, consume feminist-approved products, vote, run for office, and participate in organizational and government committees. However, once the calls for plurality decreased, the newsletters characterized the work of the organization—and the participation of the liberal feminist public’s members—as more rationalized and bureaucratic. The focus of political action shifted from the individual women who participated to the effects of political action in government. Therefore, the NOW newsletters isolated and intensified the power of the state.

In his study of American women’s movements, Buechler states that “against the [women’s] movement stand the institutional structures that the movement challenges [and] the diffuse and traditional sentiments supportive of those structures.”22 Part of my argument here is to demonstrate that, in fact, the liberal feminist public both supported and challenged those institutional structures—and the sentiments that supported them—that the women’s movement was fighting against. For the purposes of my study here, I characterize those institutional structures to be the three branches of the federal government and the state governments, but also the institutions that cooperated with the government, such as the two political parties, lobbying groups, and other political action organizations. The sentiments and myths that supported these institutions were the ideas of individual citizens and their rights, accountable and responsive leadership, and the idea of hierarchical power. The liberal feminist public depended on alliances with institutional structures in order to accomplish their political goals, and therefore it acted publicly by highlighting the organization’s political success. However, when it challenged those institutions for being subject to sexism, racism, and heteronormativity, it acted counterpublicly in order to urge its members to action.

22 Buechler, Women’s Movements in the United States, 4.

203

Before the defeat of the ERA, the NOW newsletters encouraged readers to think of political action as an education into and an enactment of feminism, and they characterized successful political activism as the demonstration of unity among a plurality of women. In this early formulation of political activism, feminism demonstrated its strength by engaging a diverse and dedicated audience whose members understood feminism on an individual level. For example, in 1979, three issues ran articles that encouraged consciousness-raising groups because they provided a strong link between political action and the education of women into feminism. One article noted that “CR helps women focus on feminist issues in a personal and emotional way. The woman who has been through CR can never again take a distant, academic view of the lives of all women today, and she sees her own situation as part of the whole. This kind of understanding creates a strong motivation for becoming more active.”23 The benefit of consciousness-raising groups, then, was for the individual woman to connect personal experience with systemic sexism and political issues. The article claimed that these women would become more politically active, so the end goal was political activism, but the call to political action included discussions of the individual woman’s experience.

As I discussed above, in the late 1970s and early 1980s the organization claimed that a plurality of both opinions and identities demonstrated the success of feminism. Later in the 1980s, however, the calls to political action emphasized not individual women but the political impact of women as a bloc.

The major turning point was the defeat of the ERA. Newsletters began including articles about women as a voting bloc rather than a group of diverse activists.24 The strength of feminist

23 “National CR Committee,” NNT 12.5 (May 1979): 10. See also “An Introduction to Feminist/Political CR,” NNT 12.9 (December 1978/January 1979): 17; “CR and the ERA,” NNT 12.8 (August 1979): 11. 24 Everett Carll Ladd, “Does Reagan Have a Problem with Women?” NNT 15. 2 (March 1982): 9; Clay Richards, “Women Seen as Major Political Force,” NNT 15.3 (April 1982): 1; “Illinois ERA

204 action was no longer based on a plurality but on its impact on the state. After the deadline for the

ERA passed in June 1982, NOW President Eleanor Smeal commented, “This development is a dramatic indication that we are entering a new era of direct political participation for women.”25 In fact, NOW had always encouraged direct political participation, but Smeal’s comment indicated that the defeat of the ERA necessitated a different understanding of this participation. Indeed, by

October of that year, the newsletters announced a new membership campaign that “focuses on economic discrimination and its devastating effect on women.” The campaign’s goal was to increase

NOW’s membership to one million members in order “to fight the Reagan Administration’s rollbacks on women’s rights.”26 Here, the fight against Reagan’s conservative political agenda required not women who understood feminism, but a quantity of women who would support a more liberal agenda. In other words, the focus shifted from the quality of women’s dedication to the quantity of women’s opposition.

The emphasis on increasing the number of women who would support NOW’s feminist agenda strengthened over the 1980s. For example, a new advertisement appeared in the April 1983 issue that read: “It’s a man’s world. Unless women vote! Are you registered?”27 The next edition announced that this slogan was the theme of a voter registration campaign by an alliance of women’s groups. The goal of the campaign was to “get women into the voting booth in 1984 so that we will

Countdown: Let the Majority Rule,” NNT 15.4 (May 1982): 3; Louis Harris, “ERA Support Soars as Deadline Nears,” NNT 15.5 (June/July 1982): 3; “Electing More Women Could Turn Tide for Equality,” NNT 15.6 (August 1982): 7; “An Update on the Gender Gap,” NNT 15.7 (September 1982): 3; “Gender Gap Emerges as Major Factor in 1982 Elections,” NNT 15. 9-10 (November/December 1982): 1. 25 “ERA Countdown Ends: Spurs Renewed Fight for Equality,” NNT 15.6 (August 1982): 1. 26 Terri Lyton, “NOW Launches Major Television, Print Advertising Campaign to Recruit One Million Members by 1984,” NNT 15.8 (October 1982): 1. 27 Advertisement, NNT 16. 4 (April 1983): 2.

205 have the opportunity to put our votes where our rights are.”28 Success in the voting booth depended on numbers, not on why women voted the way they did, and therefore this campaign focused on increasing membership rather than deepening individual women’s personal commitment to feminism. Similarly, when Eleanor Smeal was re-elected as NOW president in 1985, her statement after the election confirmed the shift from collective action for the benefit of plurality to collective action for the benefit of legislative change. The newsletter that announced her reelection stated,

“Smeal pledged to increase NOW’s visibility, put the Right Wing on the defensive, organize on the campuses, and take the women’s movement to the streets. Vowing to call a massive national march next spring to save abortion and birth control, Smeal said, ‘We must move NOW into high gear.

These must be days of growth . . . growth in membership, visibility, and overall activism.’”29 Smeal’s goals indicated that the organization now evaluated its success by its impact on the state. This change responded to the need of NOW to counteract the increasing influence of conservatives. In other words, before the state was primarily controlled by conservatives, NOW focused on educating a diverse group of individual women into a committed understanding of feminism. The result of that commitment, for NOW, was political action, but after the defeat of the ERA the focus shifted from women who participated to the effect that happened in government as a result of their participation.

Participation in political institutions became less about the education and enactment of feminism and more about building a group large enough that could advocate for changing discriminatory laws. For example, the goals for a 1987 Gay Rights march were declared to be “a comprehensive civil rights law by Congress; the issuance of a Presidential Executive Order banning discrimination based on sexual orientation in federal employment; repeal of laws that criminalize sex

28 “Women’s Vote Project Launches Registration Drive,” NNT 16.5 (May 1983): 2. 29 “Smeal Elected NOW President,” NNT 18.5 (August/September 1985): 1.

206 between consenting adults; funding of social services for lesbian and gay youth; and funding of all health and social service programs for persons with AIDS/ARC.”30 Here, the article highlighted how discrimination was a consequence of actions of the state. Similarly, during the 1988 National

Conference, NOW members passed a resolution about domestic partnerships because, “people in same-sex relationships and non-marital heterosexual relationships face discrimination in areas of health benefits, taxation, child custody, insurance benefits, military benefits, survivors’ benefits, inheritance benefits, and community property rights.” In order to resolve this discrimination,

“National NOW shall make a public statement of support for domestic relationship law, and remain current on legislation supporting this, and lobby state, local, and federal legislators to pass such legislation.”31 Consequently, the newsletters established the state as a center of power that perpetuated or ended discrimination. The NOW newsletters had consistently argued that the state had this power, but after the defeat of the ERA, the newsletters intensified and isolated activism in the state as the main purpose of the liberal feminist public.32

Even as the newsletters acknowledged sexism, racism, and heteronormativity in the political system, they offered greater political participation as a solution for these offenses. When Smeal was reelected NOW president in 1985, she held a press conference with the National Press Club. A reporter asked her, “Do you trust the courts, or don’t you, or do you only trust them when they agree with you?” Her response indicated a continued faith in the system: “I think you fight in every arena you can for justice, and you keep going back and back until they get it right.”33 In other words,

30 “October Date Set: Lesbian and Gay Rights March to Draw Thousands,” NNT 19.6 (Winter 1987): 2. 31 “Resolutions Passed by the National Conference,” NNT 21.3 (July/August/September 1988): 14. 32 See also “NOW Vows New Campaign to Win ERA,” NNT 16.3 (March 1983): 1; Maureen Bohlen Babbitt, “Susan B. Anthony Birthday Celebration,” NNT 17.2 (March/April 1984): 2. 33 “Women’s Movement is ‘Fighting Mad,’” NNT 18.6 (October/November 1985): 3.

207

Smeal’s comments imagined that participation in the state was the way to effect change. She did not abandon the political institutions or the idea of democracy itself. When the Supreme Court announced on July 3, 1989, its decision in Webster v. Reproductive Health Services, which upheld a

Missouri state law restricting government health providers from encouraging or performing abortions, NOW President Molly Yard declared, “This decision confirms that women cannot depend on the courts to protect our fundamental rights. We now know we have only ourselves to count on and we must act.”34 Here, at the same time Yard condemned the courts, she incited more action within the courts, the Congress, and other political institutions. She did not condemn the courts and then offer an alternative to acting within the state. In other words, the NOW newsletters provided the liberal feminist public a way to oppose the state while continuing to support it. By opposing the state, NOW gave the liberal feminist public a reason to unify and act; by supporting the state, NOW created a way for the liberal feminist public to participate in—and therefore transform—that center of power.

When the newsletters reported on the activities of local chapters, individual members, and even national events as successful political action, they created the connection between the political action of the members and demonstrable changes in government. Throughout the 1984 presidential election, the newsletters charted the role NOW played in Walter Mondale’s victory in the

Democratic primaries; his selection of a woman vice presidential running mate, Geraldine Ferraro; the development of the Democratic Party’s platform; and the role NOW members played in the

Democratic National Convention, after that party created a requirement that 50 percent of its delegates would be women.35 In other words, the newsletters not only established the state as the

34 “High Court Assaults Abortion Rights,” NNT 22.2 (May/June 1989): 1. 35 See Lisa Lederer, “NOW PAC Backs Mondale,” NNT 17.1 (January/February 1984): 1; Lisa Lederer, “Mondale/Ferraro On to Victory,” NNT 17.4 (July/August 1984): 1; “1984 National

208 primary center of power for feminist action, but they also provided readers with evidence that the liberal feminist public was aligned with that center of power.

The newsletters demonstrated the liberal feminist public’s response to the impact of the increasingly powerful conservatives in the 1980s. Whereas newsletters from 1979 and the early 1980s imagined political activism as a success of a plurality of women, the emphasis shifted to amassing support to combat the conservative political agenda of President Reagan and the conservative women opposed to feminism. After the defeat of the ERA, the NOW newsletters isolated the state as the center of power and developed a more confrontational approach to conservative women.

Indeed, the newsletters portrayed conservatives as a threat to the lifeworld that the NOW newsletters imagined for the liberal feminist public.

Lifeworld

The rhetoric of the NOW newsletters constituted a lifeworld for the liberal feminist public where women were agents of change. The newsletters imagined that, in response to consistent discrimination, women could be a force in the political arena to influence legislation, get supportive politicians elected, and increase publicity for women’s issues. There were two recurring principles that the newsletters provided for the liberal feminist public to base its engagement in national politics: the primary unit of society was the individual, and the primary justification for political arguments was the pursuit of equal rights for all those individuals. The next two sections outline

Conference: Woman VP NOW,” NNT 17.4 (July/August 1984): 1; “NOW Plays Lead Role in Development of Democratic Platform,” NNT 17.4 (July/August 1984): 4; “Night of Joy and Tears,” NNT 17.4 (July/August 1984): 9; Eleanor Kennelly, “Republicans in Fear of Gender Gap, Feature Women at Convention,” NNT 17. 5 (September/October 1984): 3.

209 those two primary beliefs, and the third section examines the implications for these two beliefs for the relationship between religion and politics as portrayed in the newsletters.

Individualism

A belief in the inherent value of political rights and the individual women who possessed those rights consistently upheld the political arguments in the newsletters. The NOW newsletters justified the organization’s political agenda with the practical effects of legislation on individual women. The newsletters throughout the 1980s opposed policies and legislation by narrating stories of individual women who were disadvantaged by the policies NOW opposed, and the newsletters also voiced support for both political policies and NOW’s own organization through anecdotes of individual women.

Often the newsletters emphasized the practical consequences of political ideas and legislation as a way to show whether the liberal feminist public should support or oppose those ideas and legislation. For example, as NOW President Eleanor Smeal recounted a 1979 debate with Phyllis

Schlafly, she said, “Throughout the debate I frequently referred to personal experiences in my own life as a feminist, as an advocate for women’s rights and as a woman. When I talked about real lives and real people as well as the real facts concerning women who must limit childbearing, the audience seemed to identify with what I was saying.” Smeal also emphasized that “NOW is out there fighting for real women against real problems.”36 Smeal’s concern that her message should connect with her audience led her to address “real lives,” “real people,” “real facts,” “real women,” and “real problems.” Her emphasis on the personal and on the real was in contrast to Schlafly’s arguments

36 Ellie Smeal, “Reflections on a Debate with Phyllis Schlafly,” NNT 12.9-10 (September/October 1979): 7.

210 that relied on principles and logic. For Smeal—and presumably for the debate audience—the warrant for political arguments was the lives of individual women. This article provides a model for political argumentation for the liberal feminist public that legitimized the lives of individual women as a criterion for the validity of a political agenda.37 Similarly, the September/October 1983 newsletter included an article that reported on a congressional hearing where twenty-three witnesses

“outlin[ed] the negative effects on women and children by President Reagan’s administration.” The article mentioned, but did not list, the statistics the witnesses presented, and it quickly moved to a discussion about the witnesses sharing “details of personal struggles—a number appeared to be speaking with great courage as emotions welled to the surface.”38 The stories became the focus more than the statistics, especially because of the description of the display of emotion. The witnesses needed courage to share the personal stories of women and children who had been affected by the economic policies of the Reagan administration. The article did not address the logic of the political arguments or an analysis of the political workings that led to such policies, but instead argued that government policy should attend to the reality of women’s lives.

Beginning in the early 1980s, the NOW newsletters included more appeals for homosexual rights that also focused on the reality of women’s lives. The first appearance of this argument appears in the January/February 1984 newsletter that reported on a speech that NOW President

Judy Goldsmith gave at the 1984 Lesbian Rights Conference in Milwaukee. Goldsmith “described the development of her own commitment to lesbian rights and the need for all feminists to make a personal commitment on the issue” by individuating and personalizing the need for equal rights. She

37 See also Stephanie Clohesy, “Family Assembly Highlights Practical Solutions,” NNT 13.1 (December/January 1980): 14. 38 E. J. Reich, “23 Speakers Describe Hardships of Women,” NNT 16.8 (September/October 1983): 3.

211 said, “When we have worked side by side in the shared fight for human rights, then it is no longer just an abstraction to talk about anti-lesbian and gay discrimination; when it becomes ‘my friend

Ann’ or ‘my friend Joan’ who is being hurt, then the necessity for a real commitment to lesbian rights becomes clear.”39 Here, personal experience motivated commitment to political activism.

Goldsmith did not encourage participation through threats of the destruction of a nation or through a presentation of logical arguments supporting rights for lesbians. She used stories and personal connections to motivate political activism among conference participants. Throughout the newsletters, women’s individual experience became the reason to attract young people to feminism, end violence at abortion clinics, and shore up legislation guaranteeing abortion access.40 NOW’s use of practical effects to demonstrate the justice of legislation and government policies contrasts with

Eagle Forum’s use of logic based on principles and CWA’s use of faith-based and apocalyptic language.

Equal Rights

Even though the NOW newsletters in the 1980s consistently used anecdotes and practical effects of political agendas to justify NOW’s position, they also based political judgments on a concept of equality or equal rights. One opinion piece stated that feminism is synonymous with equality: “Feminism is just a word, after all. In the end, a word can be misspelled, misinterpreted or

39 Christine Riddiough, “1984 Lesbian Rights Conference Draws Hundreds to Milwaukee,” NNT 17.1 (January/February 1984): 1. 40 Trisha Flynn Cheroute, “Media are Fabricating End-of-Feminism Trend,” NNT 16.3 (March 1983): 9; Maureen Anderson, “NOW Holds over 30 Weekend Vigils in Abortion Clinics,” NNT 18.1(January/February 1985): 3; “Tolerance, Aborted,” NNT 18.1(January/February 1985): 9; Maureen Anderson, “Justice Asks Supreme Court to Overturn Roe v. Wade Decision,” NNT 18.5 (August/September 1985): 1; Kristin Thomson, “NOW Organizers Target College Campuses,” NNT 24.2 (December 1991): 6.

212 misplaced. But a rose by any other name is still a rose. And feminism by any other name, or no name at all, still means equality.”41 This definition of feminism offered readers a vague but powerful standard by which to judge political policies. Throughout the 1980s, equal rights were associated with a wide range of issues, such as access to abortion, pay equity, affirmative action, insurance pricing, housing and employment discrimination, safe working conditions, free speech, and healthcare.42 Even though the newsletters associated equal rights with each of these specific issues, rights themselves were characterized as timeless and universal, much like Eagle Forum’s moral principles and CWA’s evangelical rhetoric. As conservative publics gained influence throughout the

1980s, the rhetoric they employed required an equally forceful moral rhetoric from their liberal political opponents. Therefore, the NOW newsletters increased the usage of equal rights rhetoric and decreased the use of arguments focused on practical consequences; the newsletters encouraged the liberal feminist public to see all the ways in which equal rights were being threatened in order to respond adequately to conservative publics’ rhetoric.

The liberal feminist public responded to the increased visibility of the religious right and its claims based on morality and religious truth by making use of terms like “equality” and “rights.”

Once the newsletters cast a political issue in terms of rights, that political issue was reduced to two

41 Cheroute, “Media are Fabricating End-of-Feminism,” 9. 42 “‘Lobby Day’ Will Challenge Opponents of Civil Rights 18.8,” (February/March 1986): 1; Diane Doughty, “Abortion Funding Restrictions Continue,” NNT 17.5 (September/October 1984): 4; “Pay Equity Gallops Across America in 1985,” NNT 18.7 (December/January 1986): 2; Lisa Lederer, “NOW and NAACP Protest Judge Stance on Affirmative Action,” NNT 18.4 (June/July 1985): 8; “Montana ERA Wins over Sex Discrimination,” NNT 18.3 (May 1985): 1; Alisa Shapiro, “Craft Appeals to Supreme Court,” NNT 18.7 (December/January 1986): 5; “NYC Passes Lesbian/Gay Civil Rights Ordinance,” NNT 19.2 (April 1986): 3; Karen DeCrow, “Equality in Action,” NNT 19.4 (July/August/September 1986): 7; “Reagan Lifts Ban on Industrial Housework,” NNT 21.4 (October/November/December 1988): 2; “The Price of Free Speech,” NNT 21.6 (February/March 1989): 4; Loretta Ross, “The Impact of Webster on Women of Color,” NNT 21.6 (February/March 1989): 2.

213 opposing sides: one that supported rights and the other that opposed rights. In this way, these terms simplified political debates for the liberal feminist public, but they also disallowed any nuance to those debates by characterizing NOW’s political agenda as supportive of equal rights and characterizing the political agenda of NOW’s opponents as jeopardizing equal rights. In the late

1970s and early 1980s, before the defeat of the ERA and the reelection of President Reagan, the newsletters did not always employ this rhetorical strategy. In 1979, NOW President Eleanor Smeal attended a meeting in Washington, D.C., that brought together supporters and opponents of abortion in the hope of finding some consensus about other reproductive health issues. The discussion was restricted to talking about anything except abortion. The newsletter reprints Smeal’s opening remarks and identifies those in attendance: “In calling the meeting, Eleanor Smeal, NOW

President said, ‘The abortion issue controversy has taken on the overtones of a religious war. The resulting polarization is beginning to spread to other reproductive health areas.’ . . . Leaders attending the meeting included National Abortion Rights Action League, Planned Parenthood,

United Auto Workers, Right to Life Crusade, former lobbyist for the National Right to Life

Committee, Life Amendment PAC.”43 Early in the debate over abortion, then, there was potential for those who disagreed to acknowledge their disagreement on abortion but to work together on other issues. As the debate continued over the 1980s and the two sides calcified their positions, they did not attempt consensus even on issues not related to reproductive health, such as condemning pornography or explicit song lyrics.44

Increasingly throughout the 1980s, the NOW newsletters designated the state as the protector of women’s rights. By focusing the liberal feminist public’s attention on how the state was

43 “Looking for Consensus on Reproductive Health,” NNT 12.4 (April 1979): 1. 44 “115 Activists Testify at NOW Pornography Hearings,” NNT 19.2 (April 1986): 8; Kristin Thomson, “A Picture Is Worth a Thousand Explicatives [sic],” NNT 23.3 (March/April 1991): 15.

214 securing or threatening women’s equal rights, the newsletters intensified the consequences of competing political commitments. Much the same way that Eagle Forum and CWA claimed that a liberal political agenda threatened civilization or Christianity, the NOW newsletters invited the liberal feminist public to understand that a conservative political agenda threatened women’s timeless and universal rights. For example, during the controversial confirmation of Supreme Court

Justice Clarence Thomas in 1991, the newsletters framed the debate around Thomas’s threat to established rights. One article invited readers to “prepare for battle” because the court was “more extreme and more out of step with mainstream beliefs than at any time in our history.” Indeed, the article claimed that Thomas’s nomination would threaten “equality under the law regardless of race, sex, religion, or national origin, the right to free speech and free expression, separation of church and state, and the right to privacy, including the right to abortion and birth control.” These claims imply that the Thomas nomination would dismantle the rights that “[m]illions now take for granted.”45 The newsletters place the most significant issues for the liberal feminist public under the umbrella of equal rights, and then the newsletters explain that those rights are threatened by conservatives. In fact, conservatives—including Justice Thomas—did oppose NOW’s political agenda, but by framing their opposition as a threat to equal rights, the newsletters intensified and catastrophized that opposition. The implication was that if conservatives occupied positions of power, they would rescind those rights.46 This rhetorical strategy was powerful, effective, and

45 “The Thomas Court Nomination: Women Are Prepared for Battle,” NNT 23.5 (Summer 1991): 4. 46 See also “Gay Rights Referenda Won,” NNT 12.9 (December 1978/January 1979): 6; “Recent Examples of Reagan’s Insensitivity to Women’s Rights,” NNT 15.8 (October 1982): 6; Maureen Anderson, “House Hearings on Clinic Violence Investigate Civil Rights Violations,” NNT 18.2 (March/April 1985): 6; Sandy Roth, “How Much More Protection Can We Take?” NNT 14.5 (May 1981): 3; “NOW Vows to Intensify Drive for Equal Rights In 1985,” NNT 17.6 (November/December 1984): 3; “Right-Wing Targets California Chief Justice,” NNT 18.7 (December/January 1986): 4; “Abortion Foes Claim ‘Seminal Rights,’” NNT 21.2 (May/June 1988): 2; Nancy Buermeyer, “Gay Civil Rights Record New Advances,” NNT 21.2 (May/June 1988): 6;

215 necessary to unify the liberal feminist public, to urge them to action, and to justify NOW’s political action. However, it also sanctified equal rights such that alternative argumentation strategies were neglected. In other words, just as the Eagle Forum and CWA newsletters characterized the liberal feminist public as enemies of civilization and Christianity, the NOW newsletters invited the liberal feminist public to understand conservative publics as enemies of rights. Consequently, the discursive space that these three publics created was contentious and intensified the disagreements between them. The addition of conservative publics to debates about national politics and women’s issues resulted in further stratification of these publics rather than deliberation in service of resolving disagreement.

This emphasis on equal rights within the political sphere did not end with the defeat of the

ERA, but in fact intensified through the 1980s and into the early 1990s. In fact, the newsletters began to frame nearly every issue in relation to equal political rights. For example, as AIDS came to national attention, the NOW newsletters explained that it was a concern relevant to feminists because “the right wing has launched attacks which threaten the civil liberties of all gays—lesbians and gay men—and feminism.”47 Here, the political debate surrounding AIDS becomes relevant through political rights rather than the consequences for individual sufferers of AIDS. During a

1989 march for abortion rights, NOW President Molly Yard declared that women will be free only when equal rights are guaranteed by the American government, and that NOW’s purpose is to make sure the government guarantees those rights. In her speech she said, “’We are hear [sic] to say that

American women will safeguard their constitutional rights to legal and safe birth control and

“Testing Our Limits,” NNT 22.1 (April 1989): 4; Patricia Ireland, “Racketeering Laws Side with Individual Rights,” NNT 22.2 (May/June 1989): 4; “Court Deals Setback to Privacy Rights,” NNT 22.3 (July/August/September 1989): 2. 47 “Reagan Threatens Veto of AIDS Bill,” NNT 16.7 (August 1983): 2.

216 abortion, and we will work to add the Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution. American women and girls will be free, and we will be equal to the men in this country.’”48 In Yard’s formulation, rights transcend time, place, and the political system but can only be granted through the state.49 Similarly, as the newsletters begin to cover women’s issues in other countries, rights continue to be the main criteria for deciding the justice of other governments as well as the

American government.50

In their discussion of rights discourse throughout U.S. history as developed by African

American activists, Celeste Michelle Condit and John Louis Lucaites note that often rights discourse assumes that “equality” has an incontrovertible link between the original usage in America’s founding documents, the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, and the usage at any particular point it gets employed in political rhetoric. This assumption erroneously construes equality as the “cleansing away of more-or-less cosmetic conditions to arrive at our essential foundations of equality.”51 In other words, equal rights discourse often implies an essential meaning of equality that, in fact, does not exist. Instead, the meaning of equality remains contingent upon its specific usage.

48 “600,000 March for Abortion Rights,” NNT 22.1 (April 1989): 1. 49 See also “Testing Our Limits,” NNT 22.1 (April 1989): 4. 50 See “NOW Lobbies for Sanctions against South Africa,” NNT 18.4 (June/July 1985): 8; “NOW to Rally in Denver at 20th Anniversary Conference,” NNT 19.3 (May/June 1986): 1; Patricia Ireland, “Brazilian Women Make Significant Gains for Equality,” NNT 21.3 (July/August/September 1988): 9; “Global Feminist News,” NNT 22.3 (July/August/September 1989): 8; Loretta Ross, “Filipino Women Challenge Status Quo,” NNT 21.2 (May/June 1988): 5; Patricia Ireland, “Brazilian Women Use Visibility as Tool against Macho Violence,” NNT 21.2 (May/June 1988): 7; “Christic Institute Appeals Ruling on Racketeering Case,” NNT 21.3 (July/August/September 1988): 7; Loretta Ross, “Aquino Bans Women’s Groups,” NNT 21.4 (October/November/December 1988): 3; Loretta Ross, “Salvadorean Women Endure Civil War, Strife, Poverty,” NNT 21.4 (October/November/December 1988): 10; “French Delegation Organizes for March,” NNT 21.5 (January 1989): 6; Patricia Ireland, “Eritrean Women Struggle to Build a New Society,” NNT 21.6 (February/March 1989): 13; Marie-Jose Ragab, “International Delegations Join March in Solidarity,” NNT 22.1 (April 1989): 3. 51 Celeste Michelle Condit and John Louis Lucaites, Crafting Equality: America’s Anglo-African Word (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), xvi.

217

Condit and Lucaites argue for regarding “the word equality as a specifically rhetorical and political foundation of American life.” When the NOW newsletters portrayed rights as timeless and permanent, equal rights rhetoric operated in ways similar to Eagle Forum’s moral principles rhetoric and CWA’s evangelical religious rhetoric. Each of these strategies drew on stable and absolute ideas to justify and amplify political agendas.

Dean Spade’s work on the trans rights movement in the early twenty-first century helps to clarify the limitations of rights discourse. He explains how anti-discrimination laws based on equal rights individualize discrimination, create the idea that the playing field is equal, and “make the mistaken assumption that gaining recognition and inclusion in this way will . . . allow us to compete in the (assumed) fair system.”52 Furthermore, the equal rights frame “permits—and even necessitates—that efforts for inclusion in the discrimination regime rely on rhetoric that affirms the legitimacy and fairness of the status quo.” The kind of work that NOW celebrated and pursued in the 1980s, then, “misconceive[d] how the violences of racism, . . . sexism, and homophobia operate.”53 Rights discourse often relies on an understanding of discrimination as perpetrated by one individual to another, and therefore leaves structural and generational discrimination invisible. For the NOW newsletters, which focused both on the primacy of the individual and on equal rights,

Spade’s critique is especially relevant. By focusing on the equal rights of individuals and justifying a political agenda that participated within the established political system, NOW attempted to respond to the real threat of the New Right and the restricting of civil liberties gained in the 1960s and 1970s.

In order to effect real change within the political system, however, the rhetoric in the NOW newsletters made equal rights and the individual sacrosanct, and therefore did not acknowledge

52 Dean Spade, Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law (Brooklyn, NY: South End Press, 2011), 86. 53 Spade, Normal Life, 92.

218 alternate ways of deconstructing social and political inequalities. However, this focus on the individual and equal rights did serve the organization’s goals, and it organized political arguments for the liberal feminist public such that political activism became a significant method to mitigate sexism, racism, and heteronormativity. Furthermore, the combination of focusing on the individual and equal rights allowed the NOW newsletters to validate religious feminists.

Religion and Politics

Throughout the 1980s, CWA accused NOW members of being secular humanists. The evangelical women’s political public characterized the liberal feminist public as hostile to any and all religious belief and practice. Indeed, the organization acknowledged that religious institutions were common sites of women’s oppression. NOW’s founding purpose statement created seven task forces to research specific areas of discrimination, including one addressing “discrimination against women in religion.”54 In the late 1970s and early 1980s, that task force was called the National

Women and Religion Committee, and it was led by Georgia Fuller. The committee disappeared after the ERA defeat, and religious issues became a part of the National Committee on Society and

Culture in 1983. Throughout the 1980s, too, advertisements opposed religion, and in 1991 an article acknowledged that “Christianity, Judaism and Moslem religions are relatively recent religions, all of which are patriarchal and male-oriented.”55 However, throughout the 1980s, the NOW newsletters included more stories of women participating in religious institutions than women who rejected religion altogether. Consequently, the newsletters provided evidence for the liberal feminist public that not being religious did not necessarily mean being antifeminist, and that being feminist did not

54 Freeman, Politics of Women’s Liberation, 75. 55 Karen Ashmore, “A Primer for Dealing with a Racist Society,” NNT 24.2 (December 1991): 8.

219 necessarily mean being antireligious.56 When the conservative publics ignored the instances when

NOW staff and members remained committed to both feminism and religion, they misrepresented the threat that NOW posed to American civilization and Christianity.

The connection between religious organizations, practices, and leaders was strongest during the campaign to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment. NOW participated in rallies, events, and prayer vigils with religious organizations and religious leaders.57 For example, in the May 1979 newsletter, an article reported on a rally in Washington, D.C., held by rabbis in support of the ERA, and another article expressed hope for support from the Southern Baptist Convention after describing a debate between a pro-ERA Southern Baptist minister and Phyllis Schlafly.58 An insert in the

November 1981 newsletter directly challenged religious arguments against the ERA, stating, “A majority of religious denominations representing tens of millions of Americans believe that a woman

[sic] should have legal rights as individual persons and thus have the same rights and responsibilities as men.”59 Throughout 1981, the newsletters reported on numerous prayer vigils in support of the

ERA, including a national prayer vigil held at the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church, sponsored by the Religious Committee for the ERA, and attended by two thousand people. The report described the vigil in terms not of political action but of religious practice: “There was singing, there was pageantry, there was prayer for the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment,

56 See Ann Braude, “A Religious Feminist—Who Can Find Her?: Historiographical Challenges from the National Organization of Women,” Journal of Religion. 84:4 (October 2004): 555-572; Ann Braude, “Faith, Feminism, and History,” in The Religious History of American Women: Reimagining the Past, ed. Catherine Brekus (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 232-252. 57 “Interreligious Prayer Service,” NNT 13.5 (May 1980): 7; “Twenty-One Mormon Protestors Arrested,” NNT 13.12-1 (December/January 1981): 4. 58 Dina Bachelor, “Rabbis Rally for ERA,” NNT 12.5 (May 1979): 4; “Hint of Change in Southern Baptist Position on ERA after Debate?” NNT 12.5 (May 1979): 9. 59 ERA and Religion: Churches and Equality (Washington, DC: National Organization for Women, 1981).

220 but most of all, there was a spirit that pervaded the service, a spirit of liberation.”60 In the April 1981 newsletter, Catholics Act for ERA ran an ad that read, “Does God Support the E.R.A.? You bet she does!”61

Throughout the 1980s, however, the National NOW Times continued to cover religious issues and address religion as part of a feminist project. The Coalition for Women and Religion, based in

Seattle, Washington, ran ads several times every year in the newsletters. These ads included text such as “Women in Religion—Pioneering for Change,” “Begin your feminist religious confrontation,” and “Religion: Our Final Foe or Our Final Ally?”62 The ads recommended reading Elizabeth Cady

Stanton’s The Woman’s Bible, or Joann Haugerud’s The Word for Us, described as the “first non-sexist .

. . [text of] John, Mark, Romans, and Galations [sic], now targeted for destruction by allies of the

Moral Majority.”63 News articles covered activities of religious women, such as when religious communities changed to sex-neutral terminology in their Scriptures, when women became religious leaders, when churches supported gay rights, and when churches worked for the poor.64 The newsletters did have harsh words for some religious activists, but these were directed at those who

60 See “ERA Religious Service Draws Thousands,” NNT 13.6 (June 1980): 4; “ERA Events Highlight Inaugural Activities,” NNT 14.3 (March 1981): 1; and “2000 Attend National Prayer Vigil,” NNT 14.8 (September 1981): 12. 61 Catholics Act for ERA, “Does God Support the ERA?” NNT 14.4 (April 1981): 7. 62 See NNT 14.2 (February 1980): 3; NNT 14. 9 (October 1981): 10. 63 NNT 14.2 (February 1980): 3. 64 Georgia Fuller, “National Conference Pushes for Women Priests,” NNT 12.9 (December 1978/January 1979): 12; “Emerging Catholic Opinion Favors Women-Men Equality in Ministry,” NNT 12.4 (April 1979): 12; Nancy Stultz and Barbara Timmer, “Reformed Church Vote: Women Are People, Too,” NNT 12. 9-10 (September/October 1979): 3; Bonnie Sloane, “In Brief,” NNT 14.2 (February 1980): 2; Gloria J. Windell, “Woman Refused Communion While Wearing ERA Button,” NNT 14.2 (February 1980): 5; “Protest Marks 3rd Anniversary of Vatican’s Denial of Priesthood to Women,” NNT 14.3 (March 1980): 10; Bonnie K. Sloane, “In Brief,” NNT 13.8 (August 1980): 2; Bonnie Sloane, “In Brief,” NNT 15.4 (May 1982): 6; Bonnie Sloane, “In Brief,” NNT 16.5 (May 1983): 10; Judith Kay Meuli, “In Brief,” NNT 16.4 (April 1983): 10; “In Brief” NNT 18.3 (March 1985): 11.

221 opposed NOW’s feminist agenda and were usually accompanied by examples of religious activists who supported it. For example, a caption of a photo from a pro-choice march says, “At the cathedral, Articles of Protest were affixed to a column, torn off by a male anti-abortion zealot who accused the group of being ‘Nazis,’ and were reattached to the column and decorated with white carnations.” This caption calls out the man for being a zealot, but the article also includes photos of

Catholic and Episcopal clergy leading a Requiem Mass for “all women who have died because of restrictive abortion laws.”65 In fact, the content of the article focuses on the support for abortion rights that religious officials offered. The photos of Catholic clergy were especially inspiring since the clergy were acting in direct contradiction to the Catholic leadership that opposed abortion. The newsletters do expose readers to the idea that religion is to blame for women’s oppression, but this message is the rarer one. Women who wished to negotiate their religious belief, community, or practice with feminism could find stories of other women attempting the same negotiation and examples of tolerant religious institutions.

While the newsletters treated religion with respect, religious institutions with patriarchal hierarchies were strongly criticized. For example, during the campaign to ratify the ERA, the

Mormon leadership excommunicated Sonia Johnson because of her pro-ERA activism. The newsletter followed her story closely. The first article that appeared about her described Johnson as

“a fifth-generation Mormon, mother of four, and head of Mormons for ERA,” who “now faces, according to the tenets of her own faith, eternal separation from her family for her work for equal rights for women.” The “three-man Bishops Court” would “decide Sonia’s future as a Mormon woman,” and when asked to respond to the charge of apostasy, “a trembling Sonia Johnson met the

65 Jean Marshall Clarke, “National Anti-Choice Convention Meets Amid Pro-Choice Dmeonstrations,” NNT 12. 9-10 (September/October 1979): 9.

222 national press outside her door [and] in a faltering but clear voice, she read aloud” her statement.

The newsletter reported, “Asked by a reporter what the decision would mean to her future life, she replied in a quiet voice: ‘Everything changes now. . . my whole life has been centered around the

Church.’ But she made it clear at the same time that her resolve to work full-time for the Equal

Rights Amendment has not abated.”66 Johnson provided an excellent example to counter religious conservatives because she disagreed with her antifeminist religious authorities but did so without being aggressive or weak. The newsletters did not criticize Johnson for her choice to be a member of an antifeminist religious community, but the article did criticize the male leadership for making

Johnson’s individual choice obsolete. In June 1980, when the national president of the Mormon

Church upheld Johnson’s excommunication, she called the leadership “the good old boys of the

Mormon hierarchy.”67 Furthermore, this article detailed the ways in which the decision-making process was secretive, unnecessarily inconvenient for Johnson, and inevitable. The implication was not that religious faith is problematic, but that religious institutions led by men with patriarchal attitudes oppress women.

Throughout the 1980s, the newsletters criticized the Catholic hierarchy most often. The newsletters celebrated Catholic women and nuns who supported the ERA or abortion rights and women who fought for women to be priests, and they portrayed the Catholic hierarchy as politically driven and out of touch.68 In 1984, a group of Catholics including priests, laypeople, and twenty-four nuns signed an ad that was printed in the New York Times announcing a nationwide campaign for an

66 Bonnie K. Sloane and Georgia Fuller, “Mormon Church Excommunicates ERA Leader,” NNT 13.1 (December/January 1980): 1. 67 “Excommunication of Johnson Upheld,” NNT 13.6 (June 1980): 9. 68 “U.S. Nuns Stand Up for Their Rights,” NNT 13.1 (December/January 1980): 8; Bonnie Sloane, “In Brief,” NNT 16.5 (May 1983): 10; Bonnie K. Sloane, “In Brief,” NNT 16.9 (November 1983): 16; “In Brief,” NNT 17.1 (January/February 1984): 10;

223 organization called Catholics for a Free Choice. The ad called for a dialogue about birth control and abortion within the Catholic Church and responded to the Catholic hierarchy’s vocal opposition to

Geraldine Ferraro during the presidential campaign. The National NOW Times focused its coverage on the nuns, reporting that the Vatican had singled them out for punishment even though the nuns’ superiors had issued a statement in support of them. The article summarized the superiors’ statement by saying, “They said they would honor the consciences of the women who had signed the ad.”69 On the one hand, the male Catholic leadership refused to respect or listen to women’s opinions in favor of a political policy that NOW characterized as damaging to women. On the other hand, the female Catholic leadership supported different opinions and “honor[ed]” those who might disagree. Consequently, the problem was not religion, religious institutions, or even hierarchy within religious institutions, but patriarchal hierarchy.

The newsletters continued reporting on developments in the controversy, and NOW organized protests and rallies to voice opposition to the Catholic hierarchy.70 Throughout the coverage, the newsletters consistently referred to their opponents as the “Catholic hierarchy.” In the

June/July 1985 issue, a message from the “Vatican 24” thanked NOW for “support in our struggle with the Vatican.” The nuns explained the conflict by saying, “The Vatican is consciously choosing to ignore women’s experiences; minimize women’s lives; trivialize women’s struggle to make

69 Maureen Babbitt, “Vatican Closes the Door on Dialogue and Dissent,” NNT 18.1 (January/February 1985): 2. 70 Maureen Babbitt, “Hearings Challenge Sexism in Catholic Church, Lend Support to ‘Vatican 24’ Nuns,” NNT 18.2 (March/April 1985): 4; Maureen Anderson, “NOW Protests Catholic Hierarchy with ‘Witness for Women’s Lives,’” NNT 18.3 (March 1985): 1; Maureen Anderson, “Catholic Hierarchy Escalates Anti-Woman Campaign against Reproductive Rights,” NNT 18.3 (March 1985): 4; Connie Rogers and Laura Hartwell, “NOW Challenges Catholic Hierarchy with ‘Witness for Women’s Lives,’” NNT 18.4 (June/July 1985): 1; “Vatican ‘2’ Refuse to Bow to Rome’s Will,” NNT 19.4 (July/August/September 1986): 4; “Nuns Facing Imminent Dismissal,” NNT 21.1 (April 1988): 1; “Nuns Resign from Order,” NNT 21.3 (July/August/September 1988): 7.

224 difficult moral decisions on reproductive rights; and to divide women against women. The Vatican is denying the fact that diversity exists and they are expelling dissenters in the name of obedience.

Their commands are attempting to override consciences. And what about all of us? We are strong.

We have survived. We are Women. We are good and strong women. We will continue to stand with women whose experiences are real and can not be minimized. We will continue to stand with women who are capable of making choices and do not make choices lightly.”71 Here, the foundation of the coalition between NOW and these religious women was not common faith but a shared oppression and a shared approach to the political issue of abortion. This statement from the nuns expressed the values of individualism, equal rights, and plurality that the NOW newsletters consistently used in support of NOW’s political agenda. Furthermore, like Sonia Johnson, these nuns were dedicated to an antifeminist religion at the same time that they were dedicated to the same feminist agenda as NOW. The nuns, too, were subject to male leadership that made their individual choices obsolete. Consequently, the newsletters expressed support for these religious women who held feminist commitments similar to the ones the newsletters encouraged in the liberal feminist public. The newsletters also supported religious NOW members and argued that participation in church was not mutually exclusive with supporting gay rights. One of the resolutions passed at the Lesbian Rights Conference in 1988 addressed homophobia and church participation.

The resolution called the members to “Support lesbians for whom religion is important; encourage mainstream religions to support lesbian and gay issues.”72 In other words, women could be both religious and feminist, but religious institutions with patriarchal leadership threatened feminism.

71 “Message from Some of the Vatican 24,” NNT 18.4 (June/July 1985): 5. 72 “Lesbian Rights Conference Drafts National Agenda,” NNT 21.4 (October/November/December 1988): 8.

225

Because religious institutions were configured as another arena of women’s oppression, the newsletters determined that true religious expression, practice, and beliefs shared a commitment to equal rights that was employed in support of NOW’s political agenda. In an article reporting on

Pope John Paul II’s criticism of liberation theology, Georgia Fuller explained that liberation theology

“looks to the experience of biblical and contemporary oppressed people for the basic ingredients of salvation. In North America, liberation theology grew a new dimension—feminist theology. . . . John

Paul accused liberation/feminist theology of being ‘re-readings of the gospel’ and ‘theoretical speculations.’ But what does Jesus say? ‘Do not think I have come to bring peace on earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother’ (Matthew 10:34-35) . . . and perhaps, even, a people against their pope.”73 Fuller aligned liberation theology with Jesus, the ultimate authority for Christians, and she challenged the pope’s opinions because he opposed feminist theology—and therefore feminism. She invited readers to undermine the pope’s authority in favor of Jesus’s, not based on theological disagreement or biblical hermeneutics. The pope’s opposition to feminism was enough for Fuller to criticize his opinion about feminist theology.

According to the NOW newsletters, true religion always aligns with equal rights for men and women, heterosexuals and homosexuals. When religious leaders oppose equal rights, they fail to represent true religion. During the campaign to ratify the ERA, a group of Mormon women challenged that Church’s teaching and protested in support of the amendment. When the Church leadership eventually dropped charges against these women, the coordinator of the Washington

Mormons for the ERA said, “We must continue to doubt the sincerity of the Church’s motives for dismissing the charges in the light of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints’ continued

73 Georgia Fuller, “The Pope on Liberation,” NNT 12.3 (March 1979): 7.

226 effort to defeat the Equal Rights Amendment. Such activities do not evoke the spirit of ‘live and let live.’”74 Here, the newsletters encourage the liberal feminist public to determine the sincerity of the

Church’s actions—and religion—by its support of NOW’s feminist agenda. True religion is also not homophobic. NOW organized a conference in 1979 addressing homophobia in churches, and the participants concluded that “‘it is, in fact, the homophobes who are truly separated from the power of the gospel of Christ and who find increasing need to scapegoat Gay and Lesbian people in the face of economic pressures and the loss of control within their own lives.’”75 This conclusion offered the liberal feminist public a way to understand the religious argument that conservatives were using to oppose homosexual rights. In fact, the newsletters claimed, a church’s stance on homosexual rights directly correlates to its connection to the Gospel. In all of these cases, support for equal rights in the political arena determines the morality, truth, and authenticity of religion.

The appearance of pro-religious language changed over the period between 1979 and 1991.

In the early years, NOW newsletters reported that religion and feminism worked together in support of the ERA. After the ERA’s defeat, NOW’s National Committee on Women and Religion disappeared, and religious issues—while still covered in the newsletters—became less frequent.

Once the newsletters began reporting on the violent protests at abortion clinics by anti-abortionists

(usually activists who used religious discourse to support their politics), partnerships with religious organizations still occurred, but were given much less coverage.76 NOW also began demonstrating the moral aspect of its position, possibly in response to the increased effectiveness of religious

74 “Mormons Drop Charges,” NNT 14.2 (February 1980): 3. 75 Georgia Fuller, “NOW Co-Sponsors Conference on Homophobia in the Churches,” NNT 12.7 (July 1979): 7. See also Bonnie K. Sloane, “In Brief,” NNT 13. 12-1 (December/January 1980): 2. 76 “150,000 Women, Men, Children March for Women’s Lives on Two Coasts,” NNT 19.2 (April 1986): 1; “Women Refuseniks Appeal for Help,” NNT 21.2 (May/June 1988): 4; “The Price of Free Speech,” NNT 21.6 (February/March 1989): 4; “600,000 March for Abortion Rights,” NNT, 1; “NOW Activists Outraged by Thomas Confirmation,” NNT 24.1 (October/November 1991): 2.

227 language to justify a conservative political agenda. Overall, however, throughout the 1980s, readers who opposed religion unconditionally found much less support within the pages of the National

NOW Times than readers who supported participation in Christianity and Judaism.

Overlap, Opposition, and Opportunity

As a primary organization of the liberal feminist public, NOW faced a rhetorical challenge with the addition of antifeminist and conservative women’s voices to the public sphere in the 1980s.

Eagle Forum and Concerned Women for America used NOW as the representative of all feminists, and their newsletters portrayed NOW as radical, thoroughly secular, and a threat to American civilization and Christianity. This portrayal, while effective at urging conservative women to action, misrepresented both NOW and the liberal feminist public. As this chapter has demonstrated, the

NOW newsletters encouraged the liberal feminist public to work within the established political system and to support religious feminists. By calling NOW radical, the grassroots antifeminist public and the evangelical women’s political public placed the liberal feminist public at the far left of the political spectrum, leaving any group with more radical ideas symbolically excluded from the public sphere.

The NOW newsletters similarly urged the members of the liberal feminist public to action through characterizations of Eagle Forum and Concerned Women for America as significant threats.

Indeed, the two conservative organizations did constitute threats to NOW’s political agenda—and to the progress of feminism. However, my argument here is that by responding to the conservative organizations by vilifying them, the newsletters used rhetorical strategies that did not widen the discursive space for a better functioning democracy, but instead narrowed that discursive space. For example, after the defeat of the state ERA in Vermont in 1988, the National NOW Times printed two

228 articles about CWA. The first described the connection between CWA and Oliver North, who had spoken at CWA’s national conference in 1986, and the second claimed that CWA was “widely believed to be the brain child of Paul Weyrich and other New Right male members.”77 The second article stated that CWA “pumped more than $350,000 into that tiny state to defeat the ERA” and therefore invited the reader to be shocked by CWA’s associations and influence. The characterization of CWA urged readers to action through animosity and defensiveness. Similarly, the newsletters treated Phyllis Schlafly with contempt throughout the 1980s. For example, an article that reported on the Republican National Convention in 1980 says that “Phyllis Schlafly, the Radical

Right’s preeminent woman leader, was none-the-less given no platform recognition during the entire convention. The powers that be felt compelled to keep her invisible and instead to seek public support by parading pro-ERA Republican women at the podium.”78 Here, even Schlafly’s own party kept her hidden because she was so radical and divisive. Eagle Forum and CWA indeed used inflammatory language to characterize NOW, and after the defeat of the ERA, which demonstrated the impact of these conservative women’s publics, the NOW newsletters employed different rhetorical strategies in order to provide the liberal feminist public ways to clarify its position and discredit the conservative women’s statements. Specifically, the NOW newsletters intensified the power of the state, focused more often on equal rights, and celebrated religious women less often.

My goal here is not to chastise NOW for its response to conservative women, but to demonstrate that when more publics become active in a discursive space, that space is not always widened. In

77 “The Oliver North—Concerned Women for America Connection,” NNT 19.6 (Winter 1987): 6; “CWA—The Women’s Arm of the Religious Right,” NNT 19.6 (Winter 1987): 6. 78 See also “Hint of Change in Southern Baptist Position on ERA after Debate?” NNT 12.5 (May 1979): 9; Carabillo, “Right Wing Kills Child Care,” 9; “Schlafly’s Husband Held ‘In Contempt,’” NNT 13.5 (May 1980): 11; “Domestic Violence Act Attacked by Schlafly,” NNT 13.5 (May 1980): 11; “Boise NOW Confronts Phyllis,” NNT 14.4 (April 1981): 4; Ellen Goodman, “ERA Awards,” NNT 15.7 (September 1982): 7.

229 fact, the more publics that voice conflicting opinions, the more threats to each public’s position, and, as the case studies of Eagle Forum, CWA, and NOW show, each public defends its own position with more rhetorical strength while creating higher obstacles to alternative ideas.

230

Conclusion

Calls for a more inclusive public sphere in response to the marginalization of certain publics rightly demand that those marginalized publics be recognized and respected in order to end political inequality. However, in order for these marginalized publics to be included into the public sphere on an equal playing field with dominant publics, the “informal impediments to participatory parity,” as

Nancy Fraser calls them, must be eradicated. Fraser argues that those impediments can only be overcome when “systemic social inequalities have [been] eliminated.”1 Her example of one such systemic inequality is sex discrimination, and she explains that just because women have been added to a conversation, they are not given parity since “protocols of style and decorum” still correlate and mark the inequality between men and women. Because the elimination of systemic social inequalities seems a daunting—if not impossible—task, public sphere theorists have theorized both the existence of and the need for counterpublics, which are, according to Fraser, “parallel discursive spaces where members of subordinated social groups invent and circulate counterdiscourses to formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests, and needs.”2 These parallel discursive spaces allow counterpublics to validate the identities of their members and to create opposition to the dominant public sphere.

Fraser’s prime example of a counterpublic is the late twentieth-century U.S. feminist counterpublic that “recast [feminists’] needs and identities” and reduced the disadvantage that feminists experienced in the public sphere. This feminist counterpublic, though, faced opposition not only from the dominant publics from which it was excluded but also from conservative women who entered the discursive space that feminists occupied. By the late 1970s and early 1980s, the

1 Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere,” 121. 2 Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere,” 123.

231 conservative women’s publics had increased in visibility and influence in U.S. national politics while the feminist counterpublic’s influence had diminished. In other words, during the 1980s, conservative women’s publics increasingly contributed to national political debates. Thus this period presents a case study for public sphere theory to account for the changes in relationships to power that these publics experienced and the shifts in the discursive space around women’s issues that occurred. The examination of the organizations’ newsletters in this study presents an occasion to see three different publics interact over time within a shared discursive space and the effects of those interactions on that discursive space. By examining the interactions of multiple publics over time, scholars can more accurately theorize about the definition of a public, the role of circulating texts, and the ways to mitigate social and political inequality.

Michael Warner’s formulation of publics and counterpublics offers three significant ideas that I use to expand public sphere theory to account for the interactions among these competing publics that led to conservative ideas gaining influence. First, Warner characterizes the work of a public as poetic world-making; each public articulates a lifeworld. Second, he notes that each public’s arguments determine the field of possible interplay, and third, he argues that publics are a modern form of power. I use these three ideas to propose four ways that this case study can expand public sphere theory. First, the newsletters of Eagle Forum, Concerned Women for America, and the

National Organization for Women offered members of the grassroots antifeminist public, the evangelical women’s political public, and the liberal feminist public coherent and unified lifeworlds that attempted to reconcile contradictions and complexities within their respective publics. Second, each public’s articulation of its exclusion from the public sphere determined its argumentation strategies. Third, in the process of debating political issues, these publics created discursive spaces wherein they failed to acknowledge the complexities of their opponents’ lifeworlds and failed to

232 acknowledge alternative publics. Fourth, these publics articulated relationships to power with which they could align themselves and against which they could compete, showing how publics can act both publicly and counterpublicly.

The investigation of these organizations and their corresponding publics relies on the understanding that the circulation of texts is co-constitutive with the creation of publics. Michael

Warner says, “A public is a space of discourse organized by nothing other than discourse itself. It is autotelic; it exists only as the end for which books are published, shows broadcast, Web sites posted, speeches delivered, opinions produced. It exists by virtue of being addressed.”3 For Warner, publics require texts from multiple genres that circulate and produce publicness. Each of the organizations in this study and the texts it produced participated in a larger public. For example, Eagle Forum newsletters circulated within the grassroots antifeminist public; CWA newsletters circulated within the evangelical women’s political public; and NOW newsletters circulated within the liberal feminist public. Each of these publics also included other organizations, other texts from other genres, and a lifeworld to which the organizations’ newsletters contributed. In other words, formalized organizations such as Eagle Forum, CWA, and NOW can be understood as primary creators of texts that circulated within their corresponding publics. These texts fashioned a lifeworld that the members of each public responded to and identified with—at least partially. For example, each organization’s newsletters offered readers a way to understand the relationship between politics and religion. For Eagle Forum they were two separate spheres, for CWA religious belief determined a political agenda, and for NOW progressive political commitments verified and authenticated religious practice. The articulation of the relationship between religion and politics found in each set of newsletters offered readers a coherent way to understand themselves, their political opponents,

3 Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 67.

233 and political activism. In other words, each public contained diverse and conflicting ideas and arguments, but the newsletters in this study offered readers a way to unify under a common understanding of the world. These formal organizations were one of the many empirical locations where these three publics unified, and the newsletters were one of the many texts where these publics investigated their identities and agendas.

The newsletters of these organizations corroborate Warner’s argument about how the fiction of the unity of the public requires specific reading practices. He says, “The unity of the public, however, is ideological. It depends on the stylization of the reading act as transparent and replicable; it depends on an arbitrary social closure (through language, idiolect, genre, medium, and address) to contain its potentially infinite extension; it depends on institutionalized forms of power to realize the agency attributed to the public; and it depends on a hierarchy of faculties that allows some activities to count as public or general and others to be merely personal, private, or particular.”4 In other words, for the fiction of unity to cohere, a public requires its members to assume that any text’s meaning is immediately accessible to all readers, regardless of their position within the public. The idea of unity also requires texts that draw on, reflect, and perpetuate a specific culture through linguistic features, which Warner calls “language, idiolect, genre, medium, and address.”

Furthermore, the unity of a public requires texts that demonstrate institutionalized forms of power, such as political institutions, politicians, or news outlets, attributing social effects, such as political changes, to a public. And finally, the unity of a public requires texts that enact a separation of issues that are identified as private and particular rather than public and general. The newsletters of these organizations offer a coherent and unified overview of the world that encourages readers to see themselves as participants in a public that is also coherent, unified, and agential.

4 Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 117.

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The notion of unity allows people identifying with publics to imagine that those publics actually exist. As Warner says, “Publics, . . . lacking any institutional being, commence with the moment of attention, must continually predicate renewed attention, and cease to exist when attention is no longer predicated. They are virtual entities, not voluntary associations.”5 However, the notion of the liberal individual with independent agency allows “the moment of uptake that constitutes a public [to] be seen as an expression of volition on the part of its members.”6 Publics do not exist empirically, but the notion of the liberal individual with independent agency means that a public’s members misrecognize the moment of uptake as an assent to the public’s arguments.

Instead, the moment of uptake, as I interpret Warner, is a moment of recognition or identification with the lifeworld that a public’s texts articulate. I agree that the moment of inclusion in a public is the moment of uptake because it helps articulate how marginalized publics remain marginalized.

When members of dominant publics do not—or cannot—have that moment of uptake with a certain public, that public remains marginalized because it goes unrecognized. The newsletters examined in this study constitute a significant portion of the circulating texts with which these public’s members have their moment of uptake. Because the role of these texts is to provide a coherent and unified view of the world, they do not represent the diversity of ideas and opinions present in any public. Instead, they offer readers a coherent and unified message that allows the members of the public to reconcile the contradictions and conflicts present in the public. The newsletters present a monolithic understanding of the world, but this representation reconciles the multiple meanings readers bring to the newsletters. Because reading is not a transparent and replicable act, readers can supply different interpretations of the monolithic representation of a

5 Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 88. 6 Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 89.

235 public’s lifeworld in the newsletters. For example, each organization’s newsletters characterize certain principles as universal and stable. Schlafly justifies her political agenda with “moral principles,” CWA justifies its agenda with “biblical principles,” and NOW justifies its agenda with

“equal rights.” None of these concepts is ever defined in the newsletters, and each of these terms operate, as Kenneth Burke would argue, as God terms.7 Consequently, the newsletters contain not an accurate account of all the ideas these public’s members might have had, but an accurate depiction of the lifeworld that circulated among and unified the public.

All three organizations claimed that somehow those in power discriminated against their views. For each public, however, the reason for the exclusion was different. Furthermore, all three publics used argumentation strategies that indicated the declared reasons for exclusion. For example,

Eagle Forum, as an exemplar of the grassroots antifeminist public, characterized its exclusion based on rationality and moral principles, and the newsletters consistently boasted that Eagle Forum’s conservative political agenda was rational and condemned those in power and its opponents for their irrationality.8 Therefore, the newsletters offered the members of the grassroots antifeminist public both an identity and a reason to be politically active. Similarly, the evangelical women’s political public, as represented in the CWA newsletters, considered its voice to be excluded from the public sphere based on religion. Therefore, it consistently used religious beliefs and practices to urge members to action and to discredit CWA’s opponents. If the evangelical women’s political public could have convinced its opponents and dominant publics of its exclusion based on religion, it could justify changing political legislation on the basis of religion. In contrast, the liberal feminist public characterized its exclusion from the public sphere based on sex discrimination. One way that this

7 Kenneth Burke, The Rhetoric of Religion: Studies in Logology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970), 3, 10. 8 Miller, “Schlafly’s ‘Positive’ Freedom,” 293.

236 public justified its political agenda, as demonstrated in the NOW newsletters, was by articulating the consequences of political decisions on the individual lives of women. This argumentative strategy, if successful, would persuade readers that women experienced exclusion in ways heretofore misunderstood or misrepresented. If the liberal feminist public could have convinced its opponents and those in power to understand sex as a basis of exclusion from the dominant public sphere, then it could have gained support for a political agenda that was beneficial to women.

In the case of these publics, the rhetorically constituted basis for exclusion has a relationship to the argumentative strategies the public employs. This relationship can help scholars of these publics identify the relationship to power that each public establishes and therefore delineate the boundaries of these publics. It can also help scholars understand the obstacles presented by adding marginalized publics into discursive spaces. If each public constitutes power in different places and creates a distinct relationship to those centers of power, the effectivity of discourse across multiple publics becomes more complicated because each public operates according to different argumentative norms. Therefore, the interaction between them has the potential to be not only collaborative and inclusive, as rhetorical scholars hope, but also contentious and exclusionary.

In this study, the three publics established a shared discursive space—which included the newsletters, but also media interviews, amicus briefs, marches, and speeches—by citing one another, arguing against one another, and, in the case of the antifeminist grassroots public and the evangelical women’s political public, allying with one another for common goals. These organizations maintained the largest memberships of any women’s organizations as well as the most visible presence in national media during the 1980s, which allowed a larger audience to be exposed to the discursive space that they created among themselves. One reason for this wider exposure was that these publics actively aligned their political activism with more dominant publics by acting publicly.

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As the previous chapters have shown, the newsletters of these organizations established centers of power that they then both supported and challenged. Indeed, these three publics shared enough in common with one another and with more dominant publics that they were able to create a shared discursive space through the texts that the organizations produced and the national media that reported on the programs, actions, and leadership of the organizations. Furthermore, by neglecting to acknowledge more radical publics, the three publics in this study excluded them from the discursive space they created among themselves.

The boundaries of discursive spaces, like the one the three publics in this study created among themselves, depend on the fields of interplay by which participating publics operate. Warner says, “In public argument or polemic, the principal act is that of projecting the field of argument itself—its genre, its range of circulation, its stakes, its idiom, its repertoire of agencies. Any position is reflexive, not only asserting itself but characterizing its relation to other positions up to limits that are the imagined scene of circulation.”9 In other words, every argument that a public puts forth contains characteristics of that public’s understanding of valid argumentation. Each argument has a genre, a limited audience, a threatened set of beliefs, a system of meaning making, and an understanding of what kinds of individuals or groups can act. As each public determines what

Warner calls the “field of possible interplay,” it can allow or disallow overlaps with other publics. In this study, the grassroots antifeminist public and the evangelical women’s political public allowed overlaps among the fields of possible interplay by acting as allies in the political debates of the

1980s. Similarly, by engaging with the liberal feminist public, both of the conservative publics allowed overlaps in their fields of possible interplay. None of the three publics, however, allowed overlaps with more radical groups on the right and the left. In other words, the newsletters of these

9 Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 91.

238 three publics had a citational relationship with one another, but they did not cite texts from other, more radical publics.

Each public articulates a lifeworld that its members recognize, and this recognition, as

Warner explains, “can constitute our social world.”10 In other words, the lifeworld of one public is effectively unrecognizable to members of a different public. When publics share fields of possible interplay, they allow members’ attention to be shared among publics. However, the three publics in this study interacted in ways that allowed their members to engage with all three publics, but not more radical ones. The lifeworlds articulated by more radical publics became invisible to these three publics. In this way, the discursive space created among these three publics became difficult for more radical publics to engage. The NOW newsletters do not engage with racist isolationist militias, and the CWA and Eagle Forum newsletters do not mention more radical feminists such as

Shulamith Firestone or the Redstockings. This study, then, presents a challenge to rhetorical scholars who, as I outlined in the introduction, tend to discuss publics and counterpublics in ways that imply that a healthy democratic discourse is one in which multiple publics with competing political agendas deliberate to reach consensus about shared problems. However, as this study shows, a discursive space created among competing publics also has the potential to strengthen the disagreements between competing publics rather than lead to a consensus.

The grassroots antifeminist public, the evangelical women’s political public, and the liberal feminist public all produced newsletters that have rhetoric associated with both publics and counterpublics, according to Warner. His distinction between publics and counterpublics relies on the difference between replication and transformation: publics assume their norms are universal and merely replicate them, but counterpublics hope to transform the norms of the public sphere. For

10 Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 89.

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Warner, dominant publics misrecognize marginalized ones, and marginalized publics foster a desire to transform the dominant discursive space. However, in my study, there is evidence that these publics did both of these. For each public, the misrecognition of its own lifeworld as universal led to a misrepresentation of the other’s difference. Each public evaluated the other publics by its own standards and its own understanding of valid argumentation. For example, CWA consistently condemned NOW members for being secular humanists and for rejecting all religion as a threat to feminism. While some NOW members might have expressed that view, the organization’s newsletters portray a public that is not thoroughly secular or hostile to religion. Because CWA used its own characterization of political positions as indicative of religion, it misrepresented the fact there some NOW members were committed to Christianity and Judaism. In this way, the evangelical women’s political public simplified NOW’s political identity and condemned it for being more radical than it was. Just as each public misrecognized its own linguistic ideology as universal, however, there remained a hope of transforming the space of public life itself. The grassroots antifeminist public wanted political agendas to be argued on the basis of conservative moral principles, such as the traditional patriarchal family, American exceptionalism, and limited government, rather than the feminist principles, as Schlafly characterized them, of gender sameness, globalism, and a government with large social programs. The evangelical women’s political public wanted political agendas to be argued on the basis of religious belief and practice, and its members wanted the U.S. government to enact policies and legislation that would be compatible with conservative evangelicalism rather than secular humanism, as the CWA newsletters characterized it.

The liberal feminist public wanted political agendas to be argued on the basis of the consequences to individual women, rather than on principles, religious beliefs, or political conventions that primarily benefited men and the traditional family.

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Therefore, these publics acted both publicly and counterpublicly. If we understand publics as not merely publics or counterpublics, we can more accurately and thoroughly account for the ways in which each public articulates its relationship to power and to other publics, and for the changes that occur within the discursive space created between publics. These organizations and the publics in which they participated had a contradictory relationship to power. On the one hand, each organization identified centers of power that determined the dominant norms for that public, and each organization used those norms to validate its own agenda. For example, Eagle Forum’s newsletters identified the media and the American political system as institutions that acted upon society and culture, and the Eagle Forum newsletters emphasized the organization’s successful use of these institutions to demonstrate credibility. For CWA, the centers of power were God and history, so CWA’s newsletters made the case that CWA’s political agenda conformed to God’s values and historical precedent. NOW began the 1980s by identifying plurality as a center of power, and it demonstrated commitment to plurality by highlighting the diversity of its members and the quality of the members’ deliberation. When the ERA was defeated, however, NOW shifted the center of power to the state, and it mobilized its members to action as an amalgamation of voters that could effect political change. In these ways, each organization aligned itself with power to validate its political agenda and to make itself a credible ally to those in power.

On the other hand, these publics also challenged the dominant power structures and created their own ways of deliberating. Eagle Forum railed against the media as a stronghold of liberal manipulation and decried the American political system as ineffectual bureaucracy, invasive to

Americans, and full of corrupt and self-serving politicians. Similarly, while CWA attributed successes to God, the newsletters attributed failures to human individuals. CWA also claimed that the organization was completely unique and was a new entity that had never been created before. NOW

241 counteracted its claims of plurality by instituting a top-down structure that excluded many members, and opposed the power of the state by upholding the primacy of sex discrimination. In each of these ways, the organizations contradicted themselves by opposing the dominant power structures that they relied on to achieve their goals, and therefore, they acted as counterpublics. One way to account for this contradiction is to understand publicness and counterpublicness as rhetorical functions that every public uses. Each public acts with publicity and counterpublicity to achieve different ends. Publicity aligns a public with power so that it can be legible in order to effect change, and counterpublicity opposes those in power so that the public can motivate its members to action.

My study has drawn on these concepts of publics and counterpublics and has elaborated on them to argue that one way to analyze publics and counterpublics is to understand that publicity and counterpublicity are rhetorical constructions. Warner’s theory of publics and counterpublics is uniquely useful because he articulates the cultural work of a public: the construction of a lifeworld and a linguistic ideology. He also enumerates the ways in which a public determines the field of possible interplay that allows interaction among publics. Claims of publicity and counterpublicity contribute to the articulation of a public’s lifeworld and the determination of the field of possible interplay. The interactions among publics, then, are interactions of clashing or meshing lifeworlds, and claims of publicity and counterpublicity are evidence of the intricate moves a public makes toward and away from various centers of power and other publics.

I argue that a public can rhetorically create the centers of power that are most relevant for its lifeworld, but I also acknowledge that it cannot escape the material power structures that operate upon it. Studies that identify publics and counterpublics based on relationships to material power structures are necessary. For example, in “Ideology, Materiality, and Counterpublicity” Robert Asen presents the problematic case of William E. Simon, the Treasury secretary during the Nixon and

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Ford administrations. Asen notes that Simon’s rhetoric contains “textual features consistent with conceptualizations of counterpublicity,” but that Simon’s claim to counterpublicity “presents a problem for public sphere scholars. His articulation of exclusion seemingly fits our theories well, and yet, by many measures, Simon enjoyed considerable access and influence in business, social, and political circles. How, then, should we treat this call and similar cases?”11 Asen’s answer is to analyze the social, economic, and political advantages a public enjoys in order to strengthen some counterpublic claims and dispute others. He suggests that as part of a critical theory project,

“‘counterpublic’ cannot become an analytic category that contains some groups and expels others. . .

. Our goal should not be to decide who may or may not claim counterpublicity, but how invocations of counterpublicity serve various interests and agendas.”12 I am in complete agreement with Asen’s assessment because identifying publics and counterpublics leads to a greater understanding of the effects and implications of social power structures. I also acknowledge that the publics in this study and their claims to counterpublicity can be analyzed according to Asen’s model, and those claims might be found to be specious. However, I would argue that another way to examine the invocations of counterpublicity is that both publicity and counterpublicity are rhetorically constructed and can be used by the same public in contradictory and contingent ways that serve the purposes of effecting change.

11 Robert Asen, “Ideology, Materiality, and Counterpublicity: William E. Simon and the Rise of a Conservative Counterintelligentsia,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 95.3 (August 2009): 263, 264. 12 Asen, “Ideology, Materiality, and Counterpublicity,” 283.

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Works Cited

Newsletters

Concerned Women for America, 1979-October, 1984.

Concerned Women for America News. Edited by Barrie Lyons, November 1984-May 1985.

Concerned Women for America News, June 1985-April 1986.

Concerned Women for America, May 1986-March 1988.

Concerned Women for America. Edited by Michael Jameson, April 1988-September 1988.

Concerned Women for America. Edited by Elaine Lussier, October 1988-December 1990.

Concerned Women for America. Edited by Barrie Lyons, January 1991-June 1991.

Concerned Women for America. Edited by Peter Labarbera, July 1991-September 1991.

Family Voice. Edited by Robert Jones, October 1991.

Family Voice. Edited by Peter Labarbera, November/December 1991.

National NOW Times. Edited by Toni Carabillo and Judith Meuli, December 1978/January 1979-

November/December 1984.

National NOW Times, January/February 1985-Winter 1987.

National NOW Times. Edited by Sheri O’Dell, April 1988-Summer 1990.

National NOW Times. Edited by Rosemary Dempsey, Fall 1990-December 1991.

Phyllis Schlafly Report, 1979-1991.