The women’s movement, he said, was a communist conspiracy,
an internal poison in America. The communists wanted abortion
legalized in the United States in order to exterminate Americans
and to damn us in God’s eyes. The Russians invented abortion and
they insidiously had the ideology of abortion planted in the United
States by agents and dupes; and the liberals and the Jew s spread
it. And now the communists had new tactics— lesbians in the
women’s movement. It was a Russian plot to turn the United
States into Sodom and Gomorrah so that God would hate the
United States and destroy it and the Russians would win; and
Marx, the anti-Christ, had been a Jew , and a lot of lesbians were
Jew s, he was no anti-Semite, he had married a Jewish girl but
of course she had been baptized and had accepted Christ. The
Bible—meaning the New Testament because the Old Testament
had really become irrelevant since the New Testament fully revealed what had been concealed in the Old Testament—was the only hope for America’s survival because it revealed God’s will. A
strong and righteous nation depends on fulfilling God’s will. God’s
will is that wives obey their husbands, who are as Christ to them.
Husbands must love their wives; wives must obey their husbands.
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
of access—and the prospect of being physically thrown out as soon
as one’s time was up. So when I raced in, I raced right over to the
Mississippi delegation.
I asked several women to talk with me. They refused even to
look at me. Whoever managed them disciplined them well. They
were a wall of silence. Finally I approached a man sitting on an
aisle. I said that I was from Ms. magazine and would like to ask
him some questions. I was wearing overalls and a T-shirt, and a
press pass with Ms. in large inked letters was hanging from my
neck. The man laughed and turned to the woman next to him,
whispered in her ear, she laughed and turned to the woman next to
her and whispered in her ear, she laughed and turned to the
woman next to her and whispered in her ear, and so on down the
row of delegates. The man did not turn back to me until the identification had been passed to the end of the line. Some of the women had not laughed; they had gasped.
I asked the man why he was at the conference. He said that his
wife had wanted him to be there to protect women’s right to procreate and to have a family. I asked him if he was a member of the Klan. He claimed high office in the organization. He talked about
the Klan’s militant role in protecting women from all kinds. He
himself was physically rather slight, not particularly tall, wore
glasses; I suspected I was physically stronger than he was. Many
times during the interview I realized that it would take a white