MSNBC host Stephanie Ruhle hosted an hourlong documentary mourning the "foiled" the Equal Rights Amendment on Sunday night, and also wrote an op-ed for the Cosmopolitan website to promote her show titled "How Women Were Tricked Into Being Afraid of the Equal Rights Amendment." Apparently, women are the weaker sex, so easily tricked by the right-wingers.
Ruhle and her producer Julie Brown nominated conservative legend Phyllis Schlafly as the Trickster In Chief on the ERA:
The person responsible for this crushing loss? Phyllis Schlafly.
Why wouldn’t all women want equal status, and access to all of the same privileges?
Phyllis? This had to be a typo—was the script supposed to read Phillip? No, the MSNBC producers insisted. But why wouldn’t all women want equal status and access to all the same privileges as their male peers?
Schlafly argued the ERA threatened "the traditional American family. She told her supporters that their right to 'be in the home as a wife and mother' was at stake. And if you were any of those things, you certainly couldn’t be a feminist too."
Ruhle complained her own mother was tricked, despite raising her and her sister to be independent:
[M]y mother would never join a women’s march or wear a shirt that said “I’m With Her.” She would never call herself a feminist. She sees feminism as a threat to the tradition of family and marriage—the same practices Phyllis Schlafly devoted herself to protecting.
My mom’s respect for these nostalgic American fixtures far outweighs her allegiance to any sense of sisterhood she may—or may not—feel. In her mind, feminism is more about pink pussy hats and “nasty women” than it is about equality.
But today, we have an opportunity to learn from our mistakes, to make sure that history doesn’t repeat itself.
Women stood in each other’s way in the 1970s because American housewives believed feminism was directly at odds with their way of life. They believed the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment was synonymous with the end of traditional motherhood and family.
But equality is not about changing the status quo. It is about expanding it.
Ruhle & Co. never mention millions of children lost to abortion or the societal ramifications of spreading single motherhood. Those are just "tricks" to mention, apparently. Ruhle closed her feminist sermon with the moral authority, so to speak, of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg:
The Notorious RBG put it best:
“I would like my granddaughters, when they pick up the Constitution, to see that notion-that women and men are persons of equal stature -- I’d like them to see that is a basic principle of our society.”
You can’t argue with RBG.
The female experience looks, sounds, and feels a lot different to every woman. But you can’t spell women without we. The women’s movement is energized. It is loud. These are great things. It is essential that we understand the challenges and hear the voices of women everywhere — in the home and in the workplace alike.
