Right-wing Women

The feminists in Houston (who were, in fact, entering the Coliseum almost two by two in a sacrilegious if unintentional parody of Noah’s Ark) were part of the communist plan to spread lesbianism,

destroy the family by destroying the wife’s obedience to Christ

through the agency of her husband: the feminists were going to

destroy the United States by spreading evil. The minister’s eyes

were darting in all directions and he seemed visibly sick from the

sudden recognition that the women around him and the woman he

was talking to might actually be lesbians, and some certainly were:

full of malignity, inventors of evil things. I asked him if I could

talk with him again, some other time. He moved away, repelled,

nervous, silent, the rich evangelical blather with which he had

been fulminating when I first encountered him now stopped entirely. He had actually been near some real ones, unnatural, worthy of death.

Inside the Coliseum too there was a right-wing Christian presence. In Mississippi and Utah, official convention delegates not only embodied opposition to all women’s rights, including the

Equal Rights Amendment, but were linked with the Ku Klux

Klan. The Utah delegation, in a press release, denied any association with the Klan and claimed that the sponsors of the conference

“have sought to destroy our credibility by name-calling and trying

to link us with extremist groups like the Ku-Klux Klan. ” The Utah

delegation considered the whole conference a propaganda effort

“carefully designed to quash the views of women opposing the

Equal Rights Amendment and reproductive freedom recommendations. ” 2 The National Commission on the Observance of International Women’s Year (IWY) announced in September, two months before the conference, its decision to uphold the right of all elected

delegates to participate in the convention unless election fraud

could be proven. State elections were supposed to include in the

official delegations “groups which work to advance the rights of

women; and members of the general public, with special emphasis

on the representation of low-income women, members of diverse

racial, ethnic and religious groups, and women of all ages. ” 3 The

true wrath of the IWY Commission was, in fact, for the racist

composition of several of the delegations from right-wing states.

Alabama was cited as a state “whose population is 26. 2 per cent

black, yet w ill be represented in Houston by 24 delegates, 22 of

whom are w hite. ”4 Mississippi stood out as the most vicious violator of the law ’s intent. The IWY Commission characterized M ississippi as “a state whose population is 36. 8 per cent black, and yet will be represented in Houston by an all-white delegation, five of

whom are men, whose election is alleged by local authorities to be

the result of Klanlike activities. ” An individual who identified himself as Grand Dragon of the Realm of Mississippi, United Klans of America, Inc., Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, claimed: “Wre controlled the one [delegation] in M ississippi. ” 5

I interviewed a man from the Mississippi delegation on the convention floor. Press access to the official elected delegates when the convention was in session was tightly controlled. The system of

access strongly favored male reporters, since permanent floor

passes were handed out to dailies, whose representatives were

mostly male. The women’s monthly magazines were low on the

priority list of media coverage: and most of the reporters for those

monthly women’s journals were women. As a result, someone like

myself, representing M s. , had at most a half hour on the floor with

the delegates at any single time, a very long wait for that half hour