Phyllis Schlafly and the Mike Douglas Show

April 8, 2025

Last week was the anniversary of the 1973 appearance of anti-ERA crusader Phyllis Schlafly on the Mike Douglas Show with Wilma Scott Heide, president of NOW (National Organization for Women). Not an anniversary of enormous import in the world order. And yet, it was a moment in history that proved to be a stepping stone in the undoing of the ERA—through disinformation and showmanship. One that became a pivotal, character-reveal and growth scene in TRUTH, LIES, AND THE QUESTIONS IN BETWEEN. A TV event I’m using to explain who Phyllis Schlafly was—and how she became so consequential.

First, let me set the stage: at 1973’s dawning, the Equal Rights Amendment was on its way to what seemed easy ratification. Responding to feminism’s momentum and national awareness fueled by the 1970 Women’s Strike for Equality, Congresswoman Martha Griffiths managed to yank the amendment out of committee with a discharge petition—where it had been purposefully bottled up for decades since American women won the right to vote—onto the House floor for debate.

October 1971: the House adopted it with a resounding bipartisan 354 to 24 votes (which is even more remarkable when you know that, at the time, only 12 members were female and that conservative influencers were denigrating the debate—like a New York Times opinion columnist who wrote an article headlined: "the Hen-pecked House")! Five months later in March 1972, the all-male Senate also adopted the ERA, 84 to 8. Even the infamous segregationist Senator Strom Thurmond supported the ERA that day.

Within 48 hours of that stunning, nearly unanimous vote, Hawaii, Delaware, New Hampshire, Iowa, and Idaho ratified the ERA. Within a year, 30 states had certified. Only eight more were needed to make the amendment part of the Constitution, guaranteeing: equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.

A whopping 83 percent of polled Americans believed the ERA should become law.

That was before Phyllis Schlafly took up defeating the amendment as her raison d’etre. Before her STOP ERA followers flooded state houses, armed with home-baked bread and cards saying: “To our breadwinners, from your bread-bakers. Please save motherhood.”

Suddenly ratifications slowed. And stopped. When the deadline came—the tally of required states fell short. By three.

(Many argue the ERA has technically been law since 2020, when Virginia became the 38^th state to ratify. For more on that: What Would Publishing the ERA do?)

Who was Phyllis Schlafly? A conservative activist, a bestselling, self-published author, mother of six, with a master's degree in government. She was well-spoken and shrewd, adroitly exploiting the growing resentment homemakers felt against “libbers,” their sense of being dismissed and replacement by the women’s movement.

She’d run for Congress and lost three times before deciding to take on the ERA—turning feminism’s call for equal opportunity and rights into a visceral national debate about gender roles and “family values.” 

A maven of catchy quips, Schlafly was booked frequently on talk shows, either alone or paired with a feminist to defend the ERA. Often, the hosts and her “debaters” were totally flummoxed by Schlafly’s indignant martyrdom and rapid-fire pronouncements backed by bogus sources. They got bogged down in trying to fact-check her rather than stating their own arguments.

On the Mike Douglas Show, she asserted that the amendment would “take away a mother's right to stay home with her children. It will require her to work and produce 50 percent of a family's income, since, under the ERA, a husband will no longer be obligated to support his children.”

Earnestly, Heide rebutted: “The truth is—and we stick to the truth here,” no law specifically required a husband to support his wife. The question only came up during divorce hearings.

But Schlafly remained unperturbed. “Well, I think the ERA will give husbands who want to get out of their marriage obligations a great opportunity to do so...marriage is a contract...if you buy an automobile and you make your payments on time, the court doesn't interfere...most people fulfill their contracts because it's the honest thing to do. But quite a few of them will only pay up because they don't want their car repossessed...if we pass the ERA, we will be proclaiming to all the world that this contract no longer includes the obligation of a husband to support his family.”  

The impact of this kind of claim on dedicated homemakers who’d given up potential careers and self-sufficiency to become the perfect helpmate to husbands—like Dot Appleton, the mother of my Capitol Hill page heroine, Patty—is an important show-rather-than-tell subplot of TRUTH, LIES and the theme of gaslighting’s toxicity. 

In one of her first salvos against the amendment, Schlafly wrote, “American women never had it so good. Why should we lower ourselves to equal rights when we already have the status of special privilege?” And so, the STOP in the countermovement’s slogan stands for: Stop-Taking-Our-Privileges.

Eventually, Schlafly joined forces with “pro-life” groups formed in backlash to Roe, like Lottie Beth Hobbs’ Pro-Family Forum. Together, they morphed into the anti-ERA, anti-choice “Moral Majority” that elected Ronald Reagan—the first president to oppose the ERA.

Schlafly didn’t stop there. Her final book, The Conservative Case for Trump, came out in 2016, the month after her death at age 92. It was co-authored by protégé Ed Martin—a “Stop the Steal” rally organizer the day of the attack on the Capitol, and now Trump’s interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia. Martin has fired all that office’s Jan. 6^th prosecutors and likened the jailing of convicted insurrectionists to Japanese-American internment.

Schlafly’s belief in the sanctity “of God’s design”—that women bear children, so therefore a man’s role is to be father, protector, and provider (a concept Project 2025 also seems to embrace)—was outdated even in 1973.

In the previous decade, when Betty Friedan’s 1963 The Feminine Mystique kickstarted women’s lib, the traditional American family—of cookie-baking, at-home-mommies, cocktail prepared for hubby when he got home, and 2.5 children—was already a myth. Statistically, nearly half of all women in the United States were already working outside the home to help pay the mortgage and buy groceries, being set up, as Friedan wrote, to feel they were: “betraying their femininity, undermining their husband's masculinity, and neglecting their children by daring to work for money at all—no matter how much it was needed.”

Many of Schlafly's dire claims of what the ERA would cause—more and more women “forced to work” for economic reasons, exhausted by trying to juggle their roles as mothers and wives with full-time jobs, many choosing to not have children because of financial pressures and lack of childcare support—have come about anyway. However, they happened without the ERA’s protection of equal pay and opportunity and reproductive freedom.  

Witness the 2020 census: American women still made less than men in the exact same jobs. White women: 83 cents to a man's dollar. Black: 64 cents to the same dollar. Latina: 57 cents. The median annual salary for American men was $61,420. For women: $50,980. A woman would need to work 40 extra days to earn a man's wage in the same job.

(This is one of the chief and clever marketing lures of the TradWife movement, by the way: its influencers label a woman choosing to “return to the kitchen” as liberation and salvation from the burden of career ambitions and the unrelenting pressures of trying to fill multiple roles.)

History is an unending continuum, a metabolic dance of action/reaction, progress/backlash and progress again.

The ERA is decidedly a cautionary tale of the poison of polarization; of pushing for much-needed change without retaining empathy for others who might feel displaced by the shift and looking for ways to include them; of not taking seriously extremists and proactively dispelling calculated, inflammatory fearmongering with dispassionate fact before their hyperbole and conspiracy-theories take hold.

BUT, it is also such an inspiring display of what women can do together when they form bipartisan sisterhood laser-focused on universal goals of equality and autonomy, while letting smaller differences in lifestyles or backgrounds fall to the wayside. Hold onto the fact that in 1973, women had convinced 83 percent of Americans that the ERA was just and a logical update to the founders’ definition of citizens and should be passed. Eight out of ten people, y’all!

We can move such mountains again. Take to heart something said by Jill Ruckelshaus—a co-founder of the bipartisan National Women’s Political Caucus, who became such an important influence in TRUTH, LIES. After Schlafly’s STOP ERA movement grew into a juggernaut, Jill encouraged fellow Caucus members with: “Give me the sadder but wiser girl,” who’s learned from mistakes and defeat, regathered herself and her sisters, and fought on. She’d be fiercer and better armed. She asked from them “everything you have to give (including) your pride in being a woman and all your dreams you’ve ever had for your daughters, and nieces, and granddaughters.”