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Article Excerpt
From September 27, 1976, Gabriel Garcia Marquez's "The Autumn of the Patriarch."

On October 12, 1971, the United States House of Representatives approved the Equal Rights Amendment by a vote of 354 to 23. Five months later, the same amendment was passed by the Senate by a margin very nearly as lopsided--84 to 8--at which point the E.R.A. was sent on to the states for ratification. Several legislatures vied to be the first to approve it. (So eager was the Delaware state senate that it voted to ratify an hour and forty minutes before the amendment had technically been submitted.) Typical was the debate in Topeka, which took approximately ten minutes. The E.R.A. was supported by Presidents Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Jimmy Carter, and actively lobbied for by the First Ladies Betty Ford and Rosalynn Carter. The A.F.L.-C.I.O., the League of Women Voters, and the National Education Association backed it; women's magazines ranging from Redbook and Good Housekeeping to Cosmopolitan ran scores of positive articles on it, and its many celebrity champions included Patty Duke, Ann Landers, Erma Bombeck, Marlo Thomas, and Carol Burnett, the last of whom once pleaded, "I have three daughters. Unless they're protected by the Constitution, what's going to happen to them?"

Meanwhile, sitting in her living room in suburban St. Louis, Phyllis Schlafly had decided that the E.R.A. was a bad idea. Schlafly had no real organization to speak of, just a monthly newsletter that she mailed to a few thousand supporters, and it was there that she laid out her case against the amendment. American women, she wrote in the Phyllis Schlafly Report, were blessed to live in a country where Christian traditions of chivalry still held--"a man's first significant purchase (after a car) is a diamond for his bride"--and where free enterprise was continually improving life for the weaker sex. "The great heroes of women's liberation are not the straggly haired women on television talk shows and picket lines," she asserted, but "geniuses" like "Clarence Birdseye, who invented the process for freezing foods." Why, Schlafly demanded, should women "lower" themselves to equal rights "when we already have the status of special privilege?" Leaders of the pro-E.R.A. campaign found it hard to take such arguments seriously: according to one contemporary account, copies of the Report became collectors' items among feminists, acquired for their comic value.

The larger significance of events is, of course, often obscure to those busy living them out. Exactly what seemed most ridiculous about Schlafly in the early seventies--her antiquarian views, her screwball logic, her God's-on-our-side self-confidence--was by the end of the decade revealed to be her political strength. First the ratification process for the E.R.A. slowed, then it stalled out entirely. The last state to approve the amendment was Indiana, in...

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