Right-wing women argue that passage of the Equal Rights
Amendment will legalize abortion irrevocably. No matter how
often I heard this argument (and I heard it constantly), I simply
could not understand it. Fool that I was, I had thought that the
Equal Rights Amendment was abhorrent because of toilets. Since
toilets figured prominently in the resistance to civil rights legislation that would protect blacks, the argument that centered on toilets—while irrational—was as Amerikan as apple pie. No one mentioned toilets. I brought them up, but no one cared to discuss
them. The passionate, repeated cause-and-effect arguments linking
the Equal Rights Amendment and abortion presented a new m ystery. I resigned m yself to hopeless confusion. H appily, after the conference, I read
Schlafly explains: “Since the mandate of ERA is for sex equality,
abortion is essential to relieve women of their unequal burden of
being forced to bear an unwanted b ab y. ” 19 Forcing women to bear
unwanted babies is crucial to the social program of women who
have been forced to bear unwanted babies and who cannot bear the
grief and bitterness of such a recognition. The Equal Rights
Amendment has now become the symbol of this devastating recognition. This largely accounts for the new wave of intransigent opposition to it.
Right-wing women, as represented in Houston, especially from
the South, white and black, also do not like Jew s. T hey live in a
Christian country. A fragile but growing coalition between white
and black women in the New South is based on a shared Christian
fundamentalism, which translates into a shared anti-Semitism. The
stubborn refusal of Jew s to embrace Christ and the barely masked
fundamentalist perception of Jew s as Christ killers, communists
and usurers both, queers, and, worst of all, urban intellectuals,
mark Jew s as foreign, sinister, and an obvious source of the many
satanic conspiracies sweeping the nation.
The most insidious expression of this rife anti-Semitism was
conveyed by a fixed stare, a self-conscious smile and the delightful
words “Ah just love tha Jew ish people. ” The slime variety of anti-
Semite, very much in evidence, was typified by a Right to Life
leader who called doctors who perform abortions “Jew ish baby killers. ” I was asked a hundred times: “Am Ah speakin with a Jewish g irl? ” Despite m y clear presence as a lesbian-feminist with press
credentials plastered all over me from the notorious
it was as a Jew that I was consistently challenged and, on several
occasions, im plicitly threatened. Conversation after conversation
stopped abruptly when I answered that yes, I was a Jew .
*
The Right in the United States today is a social and political movement controlled almost totally by men but built largely on the fear and ignorance of women. The quality of this fear and the pervasiveness of this ignorance are consequences of male sexual domination over women. Every accommodation that women make to this domination, however apparently stupid, self-defeating, or dangerous, is rooted in the urgent need to survive somehow on male terms. Inevitably this causes women to take the rage and contempt
they feel for the men who actually abuse them, those close to
them, and project it onto others, those far away, foreign, or different. Some women do this by becoming right-wing patriots, nationalists determined to triumph over populations thousands of miles removed. Some women become ardent racists, anti-Semites,
or homophobes. Some women develop a hatred of loose or destitute women, pregnant teenage girls, all persons unemployed or on welfare. Some hate individuals who violate social conventions,
