Stuff You Should Know - The 1977 Women's Conference That Changed America

Episode Date: April 9, 2024

The 70s were the decade of the woman in the US. America finally was coming around to the understanding women and men are equals and the government sponsored a conference to advance women’s rights. The opposition that arose changed the fabric of America.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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I dive into the convoluted and confusing ancient sources so you don't have to. Listen to Let's Talk About Myths, Baby on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh. There's Chuck and Jerry's here too. And this is Stuff You Should Know, the watershed moment in American history edition.

That's right. In which we tackle, not literally, take on, no, cover? Yeah, cover. It's very neutral. Not literally. Take on? No? Cover? Yeah, cover. It's very neutral. The Houston, Texas conference, the National Women's Conference in Houston that was from November 18th to 21st, 1977, which was the only time that the U.S US government got together and said, here's some money, go out and put together a conference and a group of delegates that represent the women in this country,

and come back to us with ideas on action we can take, but mostly won't. Well, they left off the mostly won't part. They didn't find that out until afterward. Yeah. Gloria Steinem, who is one of the co-founders of now and like, um, a quintessential second wave feminist, she called this the most important event nobody knows about.

And it really was this, this was a very specific moment in time, um, where Olivia helps us with this, where she pointed out that, um, this is probably the last moment where the federal government would be like, sure, we're going to fund a conference to find out how to better women kind, woman kind. the last moment where those women could go into that conference, assuming that the stuff they came up with was going to actually have legs and move forward in Congress. Yeah. Did you see the FX miniseries, Mrs. America? I did not, which is surprising because I've been chewing around the edges of it in other

research and I still not seen it. It was really good. Oh, I'm sure. It looked like it's just a murderers row of great actors. Great actors and it's, I'm sure you can still watch it, but a lot of the people in this story figure in that mini series. Well, that's the thing.

This is a, it was a huge, huge deal. The historian named Marjorie J. Spruill wrote a book on this and she called it the crest of the second wave of US feminism. It is also conceivably the time, the moment where the Christian right became a thing, where the religious right, I should say more specifically, and that the religious right became, came to hold tremendous sway over the Republican Party. A lot of people point to the election of Ronald Reagan. Some people take it a little further back and point to Jerry Falwell's organization of the Moral Majority Political Action Committee. Nope. Apparently it happened two years before Falwell

in Houston, Texas, and it was a rally that was designed to oppose this women's conference by women who were threatened by the idea of women being stripped of their traditional roles of homemaker. There was a huge opposition of women who believed that the family was the basic unit of society and that that family was meant to have the mom stay home with the kids and the dad go off and be the wage earner. And that worked fine and dandy after the post-World War II era. But that became increasingly difficult as time wore on. Real wages failed to keep up with inflation, and

all of a sudden you actually kind of needed the mom to go out and work. And so to these women, this is like a literal breakdown in the fabric of society, and they were very upset about this, and they very much blamed feminists who seemed to want to push things in that direction, not only weren't opposed to it, they wanted to push things in that direction, and so this huge opposition came up. That's right. And it was also a time specifically, you know, you're talking about the opposition movement just in general, but specifically to oppose the Equal Rights Amendment, which was proposed first in 1923, technically passed the House and Senate in 1972, still not written into the U.S. Constitution.

We can't get into it now because it is a very long and convoluted story. Well, we did an episode on it. Did we, on the whole thing? Mm-hmm. How, when was that? I know, man, I know. I would say in the last three years. Interesting, because there's new stuff I would say in the last three years.

Interesting, because there's new stuff that's happened in the last few years. So I wonder if it was before that. Dish. Well, I mean, just like lawsuits like Virginia coming on board, which means we had three quarters of the state approval. Basically everything in place is required to make a constitutional amendment. But then people are like, well, wait a minute, other people rescinded theirs and Virginia came on late

and theirs had previously been rescinded. So then there were lawsuits and here I said we weren't getting into it and I'm kind of getting into it. But I think the last lawsuit said it's still not happening. And that was in the last lawsuit said, it's still not happening. Man. And that was in the last couple of years. That's still just crazy to me. Yeah, it is.

But anyway, yeah, we did do an episode on that. That's why it seems so familiar. But- We did. And the reason why it seems familiar is because Phyllis Shafley figured big into that and she figures big into this too. Yeah, so Phyllis Shafley was an attorney, a very much conservative right-wing activist

and who was played by Cate Blanchett wonderfully in Mrs. America. Oh, I bet. Yeah, she did a great job. She founded the STOP ERA, I was about to call it a club, organization and I just have to shout out the fact that STOP is what's called a backronym.

That's when you have an acronym that's already a word. So, all you really needed was an organization called STOP-ERA. It actually stands for Stop taking our privilege privileges and you can't use a word from the acronym or backronym in your acronym or backronym. No or else you're just saying it twice right? Yeah it's just so clumsy and we like to critique acronyms as good or bad. I give stop ERA just an unnecessary. Okay yeah we need a rubber stamp for that or no a metal clanging sound like Uh, I give stop ERA just an unnecessary. Okay. Yeah. We need a rubber stamp for that or no, a metal clanging sound. Like you've embossed it.

At any rate, Phyllis Shaffley founded that. You don't want to work this out. All right. What are we doing? The, the, so you remember like the old, um, production company that created drag net, it was like Mark seven or something like that. Don't remember that, but sure. Well, we'll go off and watch an episode of Dragnet.

And then at the end, I'll point it out to you. Okay. And it was like a sit, UBU set, good dog thing. Kind of, but yes, exactly. It was the same premise. Um, but it was, uh, it was somebody like putting like a metal stamp and they hit it with like a like a hammer.

Yeah, yeah. And it made that metal embossed engraving sound. Okay. That I wanna rip off is what I'm saying. All right, so we give Stop ERA an unnecessary. Ooh, that sounds good. That was really good, Jerry. Hopefully Jerry's able to find that.

The, we should talk about the beginnings, the seed of this conference. It happened on the heels of the UN saying 1975 is the International Woman's Year and they had a international conference in Mexico City that year and that's when Gerald Ford stood up and said, all right, here's an executive order, number 11832. We'll give you five million bucks, it's about $29 million today, to create the National Commission on the Observance of International Women's Year. And like, go have your big conference, work out what you want to bring back to us, which is what we referred to earlier.

Yeah, and that five million sounds like a lot to fund some conferences, and it is, but I read from somebody who was kind of sour on the whole thing, pointing out that that's less than a nickel a woman for every woman that was in America at the time. You have a 29 million comparatively. You can't pull the conference off of that.

I'm with you, but the- Okay, I'll do it for a million. A very important point was, it was also conference off of that. I'm with you, but a very, very important point was it was also a series of conferences. First, they had state conferences first to figure out what they were going to bring to the national conference. So it was like this year long of conference and

like looking back now, you're like, wow, people were talking about women and women's rights a lot at the time. And it was a huge, like there was, it was just in the zeitgeist, like women's rights was moving forward at this incredible clip. Just two things, time declared, um, the 1975 man of the year to be the American woman.

Yeah. And I read that the 1971, 72 Congress, I think that was the 92nd Congress, they passed more women's rights legislation than all previous legislative sessions combined. So it was, it was a huge, it seemed like a juggernaut, and of course women were going to have all the rights that men have, the Equal Rights Amendment was going to become a part of the Constitution. It was just in the air.

So this conference just made sense. Yeah. Can I read that Time Magazine quote? Because it's pretty great. This was in the quote unquote Man of the Year article. It said, enough U.S. women have so deliberately taken possession of their lives that the event is spiritually equivalent to the discovery of a new continent. That's so awesome. Man, whoever wrote that, nice work. James Time.

Oh, Jimmy Time. So there's a congress person named Bella Abzug, battling Bella Abzug from New York, who was a real firebrand and was one of the biggest advocates for this congress, I'm sorry, for this conference in Congress, and she got together with some other organizers. Like you mentioned, there were state

and regional conferences. They were gonna choose about 2,000 delegates, and they were really, really smart because, and you know, maybe if we told Josh, I was putting together sort of a easily two-parter on just the history of feminism. Josh who? Oh, you weren't talking to me just now, I see.

No, I was talking to the listener, you know. I gotcha. People out there in podcast land. I'm psyched about that one. I've been wanting to do that forever. And we need to do that sooner than later for sure, because I've been wanting to do that one for years. Yeah, for sure.

But I think where I was going was that they were really smart in that, oh, I know where I said it, is that in certain ways of feminism there was not the most representation. And as feminism grew through the different movements that expanded, and this was one of those moments where they got really smart and they were like, you know, we can't just make this about white suburban women or white, you know, I guess, urban women either. We need to expand our pool and talk to women who are farmers and women who are basically women who haven't

been, you know, minority women who haven't been included as much in this conversation will provide child care. If you can't afford to come, we'll pay your entrance fee. So like it was just a really smart way to go about it, which is like let's bring everybody together finally here in the 1970s. Yeah, and it was the conference encouraged that. They were trying to get the best representation of women in America that they possibly could. And so that conference kind of inadvertently encouraged all these different types of feminists to come together like they never had before.

That was a huge lasting impact of it. Yeah. A lot of, there was a lot of infighting in feminism at the time. There was the old guard kind of personified by Betty Friedan who wrote the feminine mystique, um, who was kind of opposed, um, to the, say the gay contingent, which she called the lavender menace, which

she believed prevented mainstream society from accepting feminism and seeing it as credible. Um, the, like you said, feminism was largely viewed through the lens of white middle class women. This was an expanding scope, and it made some people nervous. They were like, well, how are we going to get anything done with all these opposing views?

And it was very fortunate that there was that small contingent of conservatives who were super mad about this It still attended this conference that allowed all the other groups to come together to oppose them and get these planks pushed forward Rather than fighting it amongst one another and it actually brought together Different branches of feminism that are still just part of this coalition today Yeah, there was a lot of coalescing on both sides because of this event. It's pretty incredible. Because Phyllis Schaefli early on championed to try and stop this from even happening, like, hey, Congress, don't fund this thing. That didn't work. And so a woman named Lottie Beth Hobbs of Texas, who features prominently here, had the idea

to like to show up and rabble-rous and make their voices heard on the other side. She initially proposed it and interestingly, Shafley, I think you found this, wasn't immediately on board because she was very, you know, she liked to play chess and not checkers. And she was like, hey, if we show and there's a low opposition turnout, we're going to look like fools. But Lottie Beth Hobbs said, no, we're going and you should get on board. And she did. Yeah, that was Marjorie J. Spruill, the historian, turned that up, which is fascinating. We'll see how that played out. And the committee that was actually formed by the anti-ERA activists was the IWY Citizens

Review Committee. And again, a coalescing. They were like, are you anti-gay? Come and join us. Are you anti-abortion? Get over here. Do you not want the ERA bill passed passed? Come along Catholics, Mormons, evangelicals. And this is what you're talking about earlier that really sort of galvanized

the beginnings of the religious right. Yeah, so the more inclusive the feminists were in the conference, the more targets it presented to people opposed to it, the more likely it made for those opponents to come together in opposition and form like a actual movement with real political clout. And that became the religious right. And apparently it was the inclusion of a woman's right to abortion included as part of the goals of this conference that really kind of created that what had not been a coalition before where it was basically the Catholics who were anti-abortion up to that point and the evangelicals were say like anti-gay. Well now they had something in common, feminism. Feminism is going to ruin everything. There are other people who are anti-ERA and it just

brought all of them together like you were saying. it's just nuts how the fabric of our society today formed over this weekend, essentially in November. Yeah. It's insane to me. It like history so rarely tucked into one little tiny corner. That's like three days. Yeah. And this is a really good example of that rare instance.

Yeah, because you know, you mentioned the anti-abortion, like Roe v. Wade went through in 73, but it didn't even become officially part of the Republican platform anti-Roe v. Wade until 1976. And like you said, it was something to coalesce and bring people together. So like both sides, it's almost like they're going to war. Both sides are bringing in backup and they're mounting the troops to sort of dig in on both sides at this one weekend in Houston.

There were conservative delegates that did get elected. Utah, Mississippi had delegates there. They got elected because they had more, you know, conservative voters in the states. Yeah, those state conferences that were held before the national conference. Yeah, that's where they elected delegates. And if you're in a conservative state, you're sending conservative delegates so much so. Mississippi sent six men to the women's conference as I guess a symbol as well of like these are the men, this is who is in charge, they should be the ones who are the delegates. There was actually seven men, South Carolina sent a male delegate too, but he apparently

didn't show up. So you'll very frequently see that out of the 2,000 delegates, only six were men. Yeah. And Mississippi also sent Dallas Higgins, who was married to George Higgins, who was the leader of the Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi. So do with that what you will. Got a lot of ground to cover, Mississippi. So as far as the other delegates, the non-conservative delegates, they were obviously feminists there with their agenda.

A lot of them were political insiders who had been around for a long time. They brought out all the stars, though. They were like, Gloria Steinem, you get in here. Coretta Scott King, come on down. Shirley Chisholm, who Ruby just did a project on Shirley Chisholm for Black History Month, so I learned all about her, which is amazing. She was the first black woman elected to Congress, right? First black woman elected to Congress and first black woman to run for president of

the United States. Oh, I didn't know that. Neat. Which is incredible. Barbara Jordan, of course, was there. And if you want a real showstopper, you gotta get Maya Angelou to write a custom poem for the event. Yeah, what was it called? Like, toward a more perfect union? To form a more perfect union. That was written for this conference.

Yeah, pretty cool. So we keep talking about Houston and Texas, and if you're like, well, why would they hold a women's rights conference in Houston or in Texas? There are a couple of reasons why. Texas was actually one of the states that had already ratified the ERA.

And Houston was a, well, also Barbara Jordan was a congressperson from Texas, from Houston. So they had even more feminist cred. And then Houston actually had a an agency of basically a woman's advocate agency in the city office. And so like all of these things put together, I mean Houston seemed like, hey, this is a city on the rise as far as feminism goes. In reaction and response to finding out that Houston was where the national conference was going to be, the governor of Texas declared that week National Family Week, very clearly through his lot, or Texas's lot, in with the anti-ERA people.

The Houston City Council had diminished the funding for that woman's advocate office to $1 a year, um, and essentially just eliminated it. Um, they, they took a lot of steps to kind of go backwards when they found out this is, this was going to be in Houston. Like most of Houston's establishment was not happy that this was going to happen here. I thought you were going to say it happened in Houston because that meant that I'm one day closer to you. No, no. You ever heard that song? No. that meant that I'm one day closer to you? Mm-mm. No? No.

You ever heard that song? No. Is that a Trondant song? No, it's, I think it's the Gatlin Brothers or Larry Gatlin maybe. What's the song? Houston, parentheses, means I'm one day closer to you. Ha.

It's a good song. Okay, I've not heard of that. Houston means that I'm one day closer to you. Nope, still have not heard that. Yeah, I guess maybe she lived in Dallas or something. Anyway, that joke didn't work, so let's take a break. Is this our first break? It's gotta be.

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On every episode of NPR's Throughline, we take a story from the news and go back in time to where it started. Where it really started. where it really started. To answer one important question, how did we get here? Find NPR's through line on the iHeart radio app or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, so this conference began with a very symbolic event or gesture, I guess, or series of gestures. They modeled it on the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848, which was the big sort of bedrock event of the beginnings of the woman's suffrage movement. And so they got a torch, Olympic style.

Awesome. Got all these athletes, all these women to go, I mean, all across the board, like high school girls, all the way to like Olympians themselves. And they passed that torch quite symbolically from Seneca Falls all the way to Houston. Maya Angelou comes in with that poem, brings the house down, all the heavy hitters are there. The national news coverage is just going bonkers. There were morning TV shows that literally set up camp there.

It was in all the magazines. The First Ladies got together. I think Rosalind Carter was the active First Lady at the time, but Lady Bird Johnson, Betty Ford, they all came and got on stage together. And in the end, including the delegates, anywhere between, you know, 17 and mid-30,000 people, depends on who's counting. Yeah, that's a significant number of people who came to show up. Um, and so they were talking about a ton of different stuff.

Remember all each state sent delegates and each delegate or group of delegates had their own pet project that they want to pass their own. The point was to put together a bunch of planks to form a platform to send to Congress and the president and say, this is what you start passing this and women will be much more equal in the United States. Right? So, um, Livia, um, pointed out some of the planks or all of the planks in the final plan covered arts and humanities. May I do this one?

Sure. Battered women, business, child abuse, childcare, credit, disabled women, education, Child Abuse, Child Care, Credit, Disabled Women, Education, Elective and Appointed Office, Employment, Equal Rights Amendment, Health, Homemakers, Insurance, International Affairs, Media, Minority Women, Offenders, Older Women, Rape, Reproductive Freedom, Rural Women, Sexual Preference, Statistics, and Women, Welfare, and Poverty. Those were the planks that ended up in this final platform. It covered everything, and that was a direct result of bringing so many different women from so many different walks of life together and say, like, what do you need to be to thrive in the United States?

Yeah. They've tried foot rubs. They were like, can we just get, like, one a week from our partner? Is that too much to ask without grousing? Is that okay? Exactly. Can you imagine if the federal government Is that too much to ask without grousing? Is that okay? Can you imagine if the federal government mandated that you have to do that? It'd be hilarious.

Well, at the time they probably said, all right, you get your foot rubbed, but we get two in return. Oh yeah. So there was, you know, I mentioned that the news was covering it big time. And I don't think this is any accident that it was a woman's conference. There was a

lot of talk of like, of infighting and even fighting, or not even fighting, but obviously fighting between the two sides and they may even physically confront one another and get in fist fights. And it's just that sort of old, you know, cat fight trope that's so worn out, and it was, I'm sure, worn out in the mid-70s as well. Of course, that did not happen. One of the reasons is because there were only about 300 conservatives there, and they were just far outnumbered. They did have ribbons. They had lapel ribbons that said majority, which is kind of where this whole idea of, hey, with a moral majority, like, we are the majority. Like most American women don't want what you're suggesting.

So here's our little pin to suggest that. Right. And so that was kind of how the media portrayed the people who were what the feminists, the other delegates called anti's. The conservative delegates were called anti's by everybody else because they were anti everything. When they passed the platform, you could vote on individual planks, they just voted against the whole thing. It was viewed as this kind of single coalition in step with Phyllis Shafley. And it turns out that there was a reporter for the nation

named Lucy Commissar, who did more digging than the rest of the media and found that, actually, no, like, a lot of the women walking around with majority pins on are, like, yes, they're anti-federal government, but they're pro-federal, federally funded healthcare or childcare. They oppose rape.

Like they weren't, it wasn't just like complete lockstep, she showed, but that wasn't the story that got told about the opposition at the conference by the rest of the media. I'm loathe to make another music joke now. Let's hear it. I just wonder if every time she walked into the room, they said, Hey, don't turn around.

Is that a ace of base joke? You get this one? Ace of base? No Falco. Don't turn around. There are commissars in town. Oh yeah. Okay.

That's a better or worse than the other one. Uh, much better because I've heard that song. Yeah. Different spelling. Plus it's a good song. I'm not convinced that the Houston one day closer to you song is good. Oh, you probably like it. Larry Gatlin.

Sure. You remember the Gatlin brothers? What was their big hit? Houston. Was it really? Cause I've heard them before, but I've never heard of that song. That was a big hit. They were big. That was that whole 70s thing when country just had a big sort of movement, country music

with the Mandrell sisters and all that. But there was another song of theirs that I would have heard of. Well, how about this? You look that up and I'll bring us forward. I haven't assigned it. And set it back like I keep doing. So the platform itself passed, you know, and with flying colors like most people expected it would with all the progressive delegates there.

One of the biggest exceptions of that though was how they were dealing with racial inequality because they had put together a brief addressing this that basically just said, hey, no double discrimination here. Like, it's already bad enough that women of color are being discriminated against because of their skin tone, but you can't double up because they're women as well. And maybe let's get some bilingual programs going. So they trot this out to their delegation, and a lot of women of color stood up and was like, this isn't enough. This is very vague.

So we actually have a plan that we put together beforehand. It's called the Black Women's Plan of Action, the BWPA. And we would like to swap that in for this minority resolution that you've crafted. Right and that was a that was a big deal that it actually got that far and even better than that it actually was voted on enthusiastically. It was like a six-page plank that really covered everything that the that women of color generally were interested in seeing resolved.

And it got added to this platform. Coretta Scott King presented it on the last night to the delegation and it passed by an overwhelming majority. And this is really kind of part of the the spirit of this conference though the women broke into singing we shall overcome together after they they voted in favor of adding that plank rather than just the hey let's all be you know let's be considerate of women of color like that was the original plank yeah and it's also notable because once the black women's

plan of action was presented and they came forward, then Asian women and Puerto Rican women and Chicana and Native American women, they were delegates, there were delegates there as well representing them. And they were like, well, hey, like we should, we should all have our voice. And I think it was just one of those big moments, like we've been talking about, of coalescing,

where a lot of these white feminists were like, hey, you know, I don't know if we've done right by our sisters of color, so like, we're all about inclusion, yet we're not being as inclusive as we should be. And this was that moment when it happened. Yeah, a very similar thing happened with the gay contingent of the feminist second wave, which again, Betty Friedan called the lavender menace,

not because she necessarily had a personal problem with lesbians, but because she saw that as a huge obstacle to mainstream America taking feminism seriously. And one of the reasons why is because at the time, you've heard of man haters, right? It was just kind of like a trope that was funny and it was usually assigned to all feminists. That was what they used to describe lesbians before.

That's what they were characterized as in the media and in the popular culture, man haters. That's the only reason anybody describe lesbians before. That's what they were characterized as in the media and in the popular culture, man haters. That's the only reason anybody could ever be a lesbian. You'd have to hate men. And that also kind of dovetailed with an actual thread of like real disdain for the patriarchy and male dominance that was alive and well in some sections of second wave feminism at the time. And although they represented a minority of feminists in general, including the feminists at this convention,

those are the ones who got the microphone stuck in their face because they made the best press. So they had a disproportionately large voice and they seemed like they were hobbling feminism as a result because who wants to get in league with man haters, you know? Yeah, for sure. And I think there was a real, it seems like at least there was a realization within this conference and within the delegation that they were like,

this is really our moment to bring everybody together because there's obviously gonna be, you know, it's gonna be a stronger movement if we're representing everyone and everyone's on board. So Betty Friedan during the debate very publicly endorsed the resolution, completely reversed her previous position. And that was, you know, people within the movement,

Betty Friedan was a, you know, a very sort of a founding member and a voice that was important. So it was a very sort of a founding member and a voice that was important. So it was a big deal. Yeah, and so when they voted overwhelmingly again in favor of including the gay and lesbian contingent as part of the, I don't remember exactly what the plank was, but it was essentially saying like, guess where your legit human beings,

and we recognize that and everybody should. Um, they broke out into song again and they sang Houston. I'm one day closer than to you. I thought you were going to say like an indigo girl song. No, but I did look up Larry Gatlin still no clue. Have no idea how I've ever heard of him. Cause I've not heard of any of his songs. The Gatlin brothers, nothing.

Nope. All right. There's a song called broken lady, which sounds awful, but that's their like of any of his songs. The Gatlin Brothers, nothing? Nope. All right. There's a song called Broken Lady, which sounds awful, but that's their like biggest hit. And I don't think I've heard that one. Hmm. Was it Broken Lady parentheses, get me some glue?

What is going on with you today? I don't know. I'm a big lover of the parenthetical song title. You don't see those anymore. It's true. It's true. You really don't. I was, oh, who, what was it? Oh, that cutting crew song,

I Just Died in Your Arms Tonight. Great song. Great song. Is that a parenthetical? Yes. I just is in parentheses as if that's needed. Are you serious? Yes, the title of the song is in parentheses.

I just in parentheses, died in your arms tonight. Like it couldn't just be died in your arms tonight. Wow, a front-loaded parenthetical, that's unique. But also, I say we brand this one unnecessary too, shall we? Okay. Very nice. I did not see that coming up again, frankly.

So they did not sing that song, but after that vote, there was also obviously a reproductive freedom resolution. This supported government funding for abortion and sex ed. That passed very easily as well, like everything else, but the conservatives were really upset about this one, obviously, and say they got up on stage with a huge blown-up picture of an aborted fetus. And they sang, everyone's getting up and singing, I imagine much to John and Yoko's dismay, they sang, all we are saying is give life a chance. And in the meantime, the other side is out

there chanting choice, choice, choice. And it's just a, you know, it's quite a scene happening there. Like the energy in that conference center must've been incredible. For sure. And then everybody got brought down when the plank, the proposal to create a cabinet-level Department of Women's Affairs was voted down.

And they had good reason too, actually. That there were a lot of women who were like, sure, that sounds good. There were a lot of other women at the conference who were like, no, we do not want to pigeonhole all of women's problems into one agency. Like our problems and the thing, and our goals and our hopes, they spread over everything else.

Like we're, we're humans. Like we should, we have all the same interests that men do. Why should we just have one cabinet position that all of our stuff is shoveled into? It doesn't make any sense. So they actually combined their votes with the antis, who again were voting against literally everything that everybody else was voting yes on.

And they actually managed to scuttle that one. I think that was a good move. I think so too a good move. I think so too, because I wonder if all the eggs had been in that one basket, if four years later they're like, you know what, we're gonna ax that position and all together. Yeah.

Or that cabinet. Yeah, like they did with the woman's advocate agency in Houston. Yeah, and then all of a sudden you're nowhere again. Right. All we're saying is give life a chance. You want to take our second break and then come back and talk a little bit more about the counter mobilization and what came of that? Let's do it. Imagine you asked two people the same exact set of seven questions. I'm Minnie Driver

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You can't fully understand the moment we're living in without knowing where we've been. On every episode of NPR's Throughline, we take a story from the news and go back in time to where it started. Where it really started. To answer one important question, How did we get here? Find NPR's through line on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. ["Sky's Field Show Theme Song"] All right, so we mentioned at the beginning

and sort of peppered throughout some of these counter protests. These aren't the actual conservative delegates that are there at the conference. This is the group headed by Texan, Lottie Beth Hobbs, who was the president of an anti-ERA group called Women Who Want to Be Women, the WWW. This was happening across town. There was also a woman named Nellie Gray. She was the president of March for Life.

They had their own big rally. And this is where they really brought together, like we mentioned earlier, like, hey, if you lead a group, a Catholic group or a conservative group, or any sort of, this is where they started sort of dubbing themselves the, I don't know about traditional family, but just the family movement, the pro-family movement. Right. Which is, you know, a bit of a thumb in the eye

to the other side saying, you don't care about families. Exactly, you know, a bit of a thumb in the eye to the other side saying, like, you don't care about families. Exactly. You must be anti-family. It's standard grade school tactics, and you still see it today. Oh, you absolutely do. But this was the moment where they got together on the other side of town and said, everyone who is against this stuff, come together and will at least try to put our differences aside

and coalesce as well. Yes, they also got huge support from No Ma'am, the national organization for men against Amazonian masterhood. And I think something like 15,000 people came out for this anti-ERA, anti-feminist rally that they held in opposition to the women's conference. Remember, the high end of the women's conference was 32,000.

The lower, and the number I see bandied about most often is around 20,000. So this is a significant number of people in opposition coming to Houston for this. And remember, Phyllis Shafley was like, I don't think we should do this. And had Lottie Beth Hobbs not been like, we're doing it anyway, um, this probably never would have happened.

And Phyllis Shafley gets all like across the board, the credit for, for founding this rally. It was almost all Lottie Beth Hobb, but once Lottie Beth Hobb was like, we're doing it anyway, Phyllis Shafley was like, okay, can't beat him, join him. And so she came and spoke.

And in establishing a lot of like that, like you said, thumb in the eye kind of tactics that we still see today, the first thing she said when Phyllis Shafley gave her remarks on stage, she thanked her husband for allowing her to be there. And apparently the crowd just went wild for that one. And one of the other things that I saw is that a lot of the people there

had signs or boasted to the press about how they had paid their own way to make it there, which was a shot at the women who needed help or government funding to attend the Houston conference. It's not very nice stuff. So it was a really, um, very targeted, very specific, very effective, um, anti ER, anti women's conference rally, the pro family rally. And it got a lot of press attention as well.

Like people would report from the women's conference, then they go over to the pro-family rally, and it was just crazy amazing press. Yeah, totally. And it was the moment where they were like, not only did the press notice, but, and this was one of the bigger reasons why they did this, is they wanted

and got the attention of the Republican party. So it's like all of this stuff wasn't officially platformed yet. Right. Or some of it wasn't. And so this was when the Republican Party was like, all right, listen, we need to platform all this stuff officially. And it was just, again, just this three days, it's really incredible how much it shaped things. I know you found an interview where Lottie Beth Hobbs, you know, because she was from Houston and a Texan, like, had this big rally and like, what would have happened had this

not even been in Texas? And who knows, you can only speculate of what would have happened. I imagine, you know, Jerry Falwell came around not too long after anyway, so I'm sure this movement would have taken hold, but maybe not as soon. Here's the thing, maybe not as soon, maybe not as tenaciously, because that rally, the pro-family rally that was in opposition of the Women's Conference, it attracted 15,000 attendees. That got the attention of a lot of different people, including the Republican Party, but also it showed those people, the attendees, like,

hey, you're an Orthodox Jew. Hey, you're Catholic. Hey, you're an Evangelical Christian. Hey, you just hate the idea of the federal government overstepping its bounds. All of us, we have all sorts of stuff that we disagree on. Doesn't matter, because we all hate this other stuff more and want it to not happen. So if we just hang in together, if we just stay together,

we like we can actually have a lot of political clout as a coalition. That rally showed them that. So had that rally not happened, it's entirely possible that coalition might not have formed or not have formed in the way that it did form and it certainly wouldn't have formed in time to basically take over the Republican Party and support the Reagan presidency for the vast majority of the 80s. Like it's astounding to think for good and bad what how different the United States would be. Like this is a turning point in American, modern

American history this weekend. Yeah for sure. It's crazy. That was by the way that was Marjorie Spruill again, that historian who was being interviewed in Houstonia magazine. It's just crazy. Yeah so the outcome of all this was obviously you know they passed all these planks. They write up their report, I guess, called the Spirit of Houston, and they handed it over to President Carter and Congress. So Carter says, you know, I support all this stuff, of course. Your goals look pretty great to me. But then, like I said at the very, very beginning, not a lot actually happened as far as real practical moves.

There was, they extended the, and we talked about this in my freshly remembered ERA episode, where there were a lot of different cutoff dates, like you got to get it done by this year or else it's off the table. He extended the time for ratification to 1982. There was some protections against discrimination based on pregnancy. They said, hey, you can get some social security benefits if you have been a homemaker your whole life and you got divorced, like we're recognizing that as a job for the first time. And a lot of feminists that were there were like pretty upset by inaction and by the fact that Carter supported the Hyde Amendment, which totally took down the reproductive funding plank, basically banning the use of federal funding for abortion.

Yeah, they were also really mad at Carter for cutting social programs to pay for increased defense spending as well, which is not what you think of when you think of Jimmy Carter, but apparently he got a little more conservative later in his presidency. And so it just essentially went nowhere. Like if you read assessments of what came out of the Women's Conference of 1977 in Houston, most of the positive silver lining parts are that it helped women come together who otherwise would not have ever met and basically swap strategies, swap organizing methods, saying like,

hey, we're organizing domestic abuse shelters and rape crisis centers and this is how we're doing it. And basically it helped on the grassroots. It took a bunch of different germs and put them together and they spread beneath the federal level and the state and local level. And it really helped women advance in that sense. But federally, it went nowhere, almost at all.

It went almost nowhere. Yeah. And, you know, we've talked a lot in this episode about the fact that, you know, galvanizing different kinds of women together, but one that we haven't mentioned yet, that Lucy Commissar, don't turn around, she's a nation reporter said to her the most remarkable aspect was not bringing together like necessarily bringing lesbians under their wing and women of color, but bringing women who might typically vote Republican in their past, bringing them in because they cared about some of this stuff

as well. Right. And you don't have to cared about some of this stuff as well. And you don't have to care about all of it to support this thing. And she was just like, that was the most remarkable part to her. Yeah, which makes a lot of sense. But unfortunately, one of the other outcomes of that weekend was you do have to choose. Like these groups, these coalitions solidified and in opposition to one another. So, and both of the political parties

were essentially forced to choose. There was no like, oh, actually I kind of agree with this point over here. So I guess I'm independent, I don't know. The state of the country that we live in today, that polarized country, you can actually date it back to this, this is the cradle of it. I just can't stop being in awe of the effect that it had.

Yeah, totally. I'm always very fascinated by the independent voter. It's really interesting. To be clear, I'm not knocking independent voters. I find it fascinating. Sure, I wasn't knocking them either. It just made me think of something else. I was just trying to cut off the emails.

Like Chuck thinks you should vote all one way. That's not what I'm saying. No, no, no, no, no, no. I don't think that came across like that at all. No. So yeah, if anybody was sending in that email, they would have been wrong, wrong, wrong. You got anything else? Alright. No, I'm done, done, done. Okay. Well, Chuck said done three times in a row, which of course automatically unlocks listener mail. I thought that meant the Candyman appeared. The Candyman reads listener mail.

But the Candyman I'm talking about, you know. You mean the kind that brings you M&M's and stuff, right? No, the kind that, um, smoked with a glass eye. Oh, okay. Alright, this is, uh, sort of an eighth grader. We love reading these kinds of things. Hey, Josh, Chuck, and Jerry. My name is Beatrix, great name.

Yeah. I'm an eighth grader in McKinville, Oregon. I listen to your episodes constantly, all caps, and I really wanted to make it to your Portland show, but unfortunately I missed it. My mom and I live almost an hour away from where I go to school and where she works, so we often listen to your stuff on the way. I recently listened to the Rock, Paper, Scissors ep,

and you mentioned that no one plays just for fun without needing to make a decision. But my class does, and it really annoys me because there's no point. Also, I would love an episode on ADHD, specifically what causes it. Beatrix, that's coming sort of soon. I do have a small confession though guys, though I've been listening for over a year, I still can't tell which one of you is which. It's okay. I can tell your voices apart, but if I was asked I wouldn't be able to say which one

of you is Josh and which one is Chuck. If we switch from time to time. That's right and if you go to that live show in Portland next year, then you can tell. Yeah, there you go. That's the way, talk about cognitive dissonance. Yeah, and how about this Beatrix, send us an email from that same thread

when we go to Portland next year and you and someone else can get on the guest list. Very nice. How about that? You get those freebie tickets. So Beatrix finishes up by saying I'd love if you gave a shout out to Tech Stuff and Stuff They Don't Want You To Know. Nice. Oh, we're gonna shout them out. Hey, way to go Tech Stuff and Stuff They Don't Want You To Know. Two excellent podcasts. You have great taste, Beatrix. Our long time friends and colleagues that do those shows. And finally, I would love it

if you would read this on the air so me and my mom could hear it on the way to school and wish me good luck in high school next year. Good luck, Beatrix. High school is fun. You're gonna do great. Don't you worry about it. From the sounds of this email,

you're just gonna tear it apart, I love it. Knock it out of the park. Knock it out of the park. Well, if you wanna be like Beatrix and send us a just patently awesome email, you can send it to stuffpodcast.ihartradio.com. It's been almost 3,000 years and Greek mythology has proved that it is not going anywhere, but it can be difficult to find entertaining and engaging retellings of these myths that aren't fictionalized.

Lucky for you, I'm here. Let's Talk About Myths, Baby is the Greek mythology and ancient history podcast of your dreams. I dive into the convoluted and confusing ancient sources so you don't have to. Listen to Let's Talk About Myths, Baby on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The second season of El Fló is here. Step into the ever-evol Régeton and get up

close with both legendary figures and emerging talents in the industry. Part of the enormous significance of Régeton is really the way in which personal narratives connect to larger things going on historically and socially. Listen to El Flo on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. This is Edgy Martinez.

Check out my podcast, Edgy Martinez IRL, where I talk to Super Bowl halftime performer and the newly married Usher about relationships. Trust is the main, you know, component to happiness and success in a relationship. Being able to actually hear each other and speak up. I think most of the time we all just wanna be heard. Listen to Angie Martinez IRL on the iHeartRadio app,

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