‘Simply the Way God Made Us’: Religious Language in Phyllis Schlafly’s Antifeminist Manifesto

This contribution employs the Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA) to analyze religiously-laden rhetoric in the conservative grassroots campaign that blocked the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) in the early 1970s. By adopting a case-study approach, the paper aims to illustrate some of the ways in which religious language has been employed to realize specific political goals. The text under investigation is Phyllis Schlafly’s 1972 manifesto entitled “What’s Wrong with ‘Equal Rights’ for Women”. A prominent conservative icon, Schlafly can be credited with achieving important victories in her antifeminist crusade that purposefully brought conservative family values into the political limelight.