When you hear the name Phyllis Schlafly, what comes to mind? Her battle against the Equal Rights Amendment, of course. But when her name came up in my last blog post, I got to wondering whether she’d also campaigned against Title IX.
First, the facts of her life. I had no idea she was a lawyer. Phyllis Stewart Schlafly earned her BA and JD at Washington University and a masters at Radcliffe. She was a Republican activist who founded the Eagle Forum, a conservative political interest group that she helmed until her death in 2016 at the age of 92. She was the author and co-author of many books, including an anti-feminist book titled, “The Flipside of Feminism: What Conservative Women Know — and Men Can’t Say.”
Schlafly worked tirelessly to defeat the ERA, arguing that it would erase traditional gender roles and force women out of the home. She — a working woman. How ironic! She stoked fears that single-gender bathrooms would disappear (well, she saw the future), force courts to approve same-sex marriage (again, ahead of the curve), that women would be forced to serve in military combat roles and that older women would lose their Social Security benefits.
Her campaigns were made for TV. She dropped off homemade pies to legislators with the slogan, “I am for mom and apple pie.” Ironically, Schlafly and her sister had been raised by a working mother. Odile Stewart was a librarian and teacher. She supported the family through long stretches of her husband’s unemployment during the Great Depression.
Fly, Eagle, fly
Schlafly used the Eagle Forum as a platform for her views on Title IX. In 2003, she ridiculed Bernice Sandler, the “Godmother of Title IX,” for believing that women should have — or that they even want — equal opportunity to participate in sports.*
“But now enter from stage left a feminist named Bernice Sandler,” she wrote, “who took over the Office of Civil Rights in Jimmy Carter’s Department of Education.
“She picked the innocuous word ‘proportionality’ out of the dictionary (not out of the law), and turned it into a feminist code word for one of three tests by which college athletic departments would be judged as to their compliance with Title IX. She created a new definition for this word: if 56 percent of a student body is female, then 56 percent of the students playing on athletic teams must be female.”
It’s this “proportionality” test that Schlafly objected to. This test examines whether the number of male and female students enrolled in the school’s athletics programs matches the male/female student body ratio.
“This rule is not only unfair but ridiculous because men like to play sports far more than women do,” she said. “It’s a fact of human nature that female college students do not seek to play on athletic teams in anywhere near the percentage that male students do.”**
Overall, Schlafly believed that enforcing Title IX is detrimental to men.
“The evidence is overwhelming that Title IX has been turned into a tool to punish men,” she said. “The feminists’ intention is to eliminate everything that is masculine or macho, and to pretend that women are equal to men in physical prowess and desire.”
Back to the future
It’s ironic then that the Eagle Forum has pivoted to the issue of the biological differences between women and men. This year, it introduced “The Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act,” which it says aims to protect the original intent of Title IX — to provide equitable athletic opportunity for males and females.
The act opposes President Biden’s recent attempts to allow gender identity, and not biological sex, to define who is a woman and who can compete on women’s sports teams. Allowing trans men to compete on women’s athletic teams, the Forum says, strips athletic opportunities from women and violates their privacy.
The Eagle Forum is in good company on this issue. A wide array of feminist activists oppose allowing gender identity to drive the Title IX bus. Phyllis Schlafly a feminist? Maybe!
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* Phyllis Schlafly, “Wrestling with Title IX,” The Eagle Forum (February 12, 2003). Schlafly hoped the newly formed Commission on Opportunity in Athletics would eliminate the proportionality test. In its report, the commission made 23 recommendations. The final recommendation was what Schlafly wanted: identifying more ways to comply with Title IX. Didn’t happen.
** She was ignoring the fact that the proportionality test is only one of three ways a college can comply with Title IX. The third test says that colleges can be in compliance if they can show that female students are not interested in participating in an expanded athletic program.