Right-wing Women

“You’re a hypocrite, ” Bob said. “You profess to have Christ

in your life, but you won’t profess Him in public, which

Christ tells you to do. ”

Because I know he’s right, and hate him for making me feel

so bad about it, I end up doing what I’m so scared to d o . 16

Conforming to the will of her husband was clearly a difficult

struggle for Bryant. She writes candidly of her near constant re­

bellion. Green’s demands—from increasing her public presence as

religious witness to doing all the child care for four children without help while pursuing the career she genuinely loves—were endurable only because Bryant, like Stapleton and Morgan, took Jesus as her real husband:

Only as I practice yielding to Jesus can I learn to submit, as

the Bible instructs me, to the loving leadership of my husband.

Only the power of Christ can enable a woman like me to become submissive in the Lord. 17

In Bryant’s case, the “loving leadership” of her husband, this

time in league with her pastor, enshrined her as the token spokeswoman of antihomosexual bigotry. Once again Bryant was reluctant to testify, this time before Dade County’s Metropolitan Commission in hearings on a homosexual-rights ordinance. Bryant

spent several nights in tears and prayer, presumably because, as

she told Newsweek, “I was scared and I didn’t want to do it. ” 18

Once again, a desire to do Christ’s will brought her into conformity with the expressed will of her husband. One could speculate that some of the compensation in this conformity came from having the burdens of domestic work and child care lessened in the

interest of serving the greater cause. Conformity to the will of

Christ and Green, synonymous in this instance as so often before,

also offered an answer to the haunting question of her life: how to

be a public leader of significance— in her terminology, a “star”—

and at the same time an obedient wife acting to protect her children. A singing career, especially a secular one, could never resolve this raging conflict.

Bryant, like all the rest of us, is trying to be a “good” woman.

Bryant, like all the rest of us, is desperate and dangerous, to herself

and to others, because “good” women live and die in silent selfless­

ness and real women cannot. Bryant, like all the rest of us, is having one hell of a hard time. *

Phyllis Schlafly, the Right’s not-born-again philosopher of the

absurd, is apparently not having a hard time. She seems possessed

by Machiavelli, not Jesus. It appears that she wants to be The

Prince. She might be viewed as that rare woman of any ideological

persuasion who really does see herself as one of the boys, even as

she claims to be one of the girls. Unlike most other right-wing

women, Schlafly, in her written and spoken work, does not acknowledge experiencing any of the difficulties that tear women apart. In the opinion of many, her ruthlessness as an organizer is

best demonstrated by her demagogic propaganda against the Equal

Rights Amendment, though she also waxes eloquent against reproductive freedom, the women’s movement, big government, and

*This analysis of Bryant’s situation was written in 1978 and published in

Ms. in June 1979. In May 1980, Bryant filed for divorce. In a statement

issued separately from the divorce petition, she contended that Green had

“violated my most precious asset—my conscience” (The New York Times,

May 24, 1980). Within three weeks after the divorce decree (August 1980),

the state citrus agency of Florida, which Bryant had represented for eleven