Publication Title
Washington University Law Review
Volume
102
Page
1801
Year
2025
Abstract
In a nation whose Constitution purports to speak for “We the People,” too many of the stories that powerful Americans tell about law and society include only We the Men. A long line of judges, politicians, and other influential voices have ignored women’s struggles for equality or distorted them beyond recognition by wildly exaggerating American progress. Even as sexism continues to warp constitutional law, political decisionmaking, and everyday life, prominent Americans have spent more than a century proclaiming that the United States has already left sex discrimination behind.
This symposium essay draws on my book, We the Men, to explore how forgetting women’s struggles for equality—and forgetting the work America still has to do—perpetuates injustice, promotes complacency, and denies how generations of women have had to come together to fight for reform and against regression. The essay uncovers a crucial tool in the anti-feminist arsenal, wielded by women as well as men. Using internal movement documents along with external primary sources, I show how anti-feminists over the past half century, like anti-suffragists before them, have shrewdly exploited and reinforced America’s penchant for overstating progress.
Proclaiming that the nation has already established women’s equality has made it easier for politicians and activists to oppose feminist reform and promote regression while simultaneously purporting to support women’s rights. The crusade that Phyllis Schlafly and her allies waged in the 1970s and 1980s to block the Equal Rights Amendment took full advantage of this mode of attack, repeatedly deploying assertions about the achievement of women’s equality that were supposedly universal but kept white middle-class heterosexual women foremost in mind. Schlafly’s ideological heirs have followed her playbook in the decades since. Conservative and reactionary legislators and activists routinely insist that America has already triumphed over sex discrimination and wield that contention against feminist mobilization, including feminist efforts to increase government support for childcare, protect abortion rights, defend affirmative action, and push for the ERA.
I argue that remembering women’s struggles more often and more accurately can help the nation advance toward sex equality. These stories highlight the persistence of women’s inequality and make clear that real progress has always required women to disrupt the status quo, demand change, and duel with determined opponents.
America needs more conflict over women’s status rather than less. Conflict has the power to generate forward momentum. Patiently awaiting men’s spontaneous enlightenment does not. Transforming America’s dominant stories about itself can reorient our understanding of how women’s progress takes place, focus our attention on the battles that are still unwon, and fortify our determination to push for a more equal future.
Recommended Citation
Jill Elaine Hasday, Phyllis Schlafly and How Forgetting Women's Struggles for Equality Perpetuates Inequality, 102 Wash. U. L. Rev. 1801 (2025), available at https://scholarship.law.umn.edu/faculty_articles/1130.
Rights
http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/
