I really ought to attend Phyllis Schlafly's funeral, since I was legally married to her. That was the wildest aftershow party of either of our lives. DJ Yella has a lot to answer for.
Seriously, though, like Margaret Thatcher, she led her supporters out of the world in which a single manual wage could comfortably support the wage-earner, his wife and their several children, and into the world in which any great quality of life could barely be scraped even by a childless couple with two professional salaries.
And, like Margaret Thatcher, she led her supporters into the world in which, so long as there was a "market" for something, then that was all the morality that was deemed necessary.
Neither of them ever quite intended this. But neither of them was stupid. Each of them should have seen what she was doing.
All of that said, Schlafly's predictions about the loss of such things as exemption from military service, and separate public restrooms for women, have very much come true, albeit not without reference to the political movement to which she so attached herself.
Indeed, if you wanted to express such concerns in a British newspaper today, then you would probably have to do so in the Morning Star, in which they do appear fairly regularly.
That first paragraph made me laugh out loud. The rest of this post is very important. I saw the Morning Star's trouble a few months ago for holding the line that the basis of women's emancipation was sex as a biological category and women were oppressed for their biology not their "identity". Courageous stuff.
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