Phyllis Schlafly and Academic Integrity -- An Oxymoron?

WU alumna Schlafly (1944 A.B., 1978 J.D.) has made a name and probably a fair bit of money for herself by writing, speaking, and organizing against a spectrum of issues she condemns as feminist or liberal - the ERA, Title IX (prohibiting sex discrimination in education), reproductive rights, comprehensive sex education, the right of gays and lesbians to adopt children or teach in public schools, the United Nations, and the teaching of evolution, to name a few.

A conservative political activist long before the ERA passed Congress in 1972 to provide grist for her organizing and fundraising mill, she was credited with helping Barry Goldwater get the 1964 Republican presidential nomination with her self-published book, A Choice Not an Echo.

It is unlikely that the nation's most visible anti-feminist in the second half of the 20th century remained barefoot while pregnant and raising six children, since during those same years, beginning in the early 1950s, she was also running unsuccessfully for Congress (1952, 1970), presiding (as she still does) over the conservative Eagle Forum she founded four decades ago, writing The Phyllis Schlafly Report and a syndicated column, and broadcasting commentaries on hundreds of radio stations.

She has traveled the country organizing, strategizing, writing, and speaking in opposition to women's rights and many other issues, but she admits to no contradiction or hypocrisy in telling other women they should not have families and careers at the same time.

Her arguments against the ERA demonstrate the degree to which she is no friend of the truth.

The ERA, she says, would require the denial of Social Security benefits to housewives and widows. As a lawyer, she must know it simply means that such benefits would be conferred in sex-neutral terms ("homemaker," "surviving spouse").

The ERA, she says, means "abortion on demand." She must know that the ERAs or equal rights guarantees currently in 21 state constitutions have never been used for that purpose.

The ERA, she says, would compel courts to approve same-sex marriages. She must know that the ERA simply says constitutional rights shall be held equally by citizens without regard to sex, and states with ERAs in their constitutions have been able to declare marriage a contract between a man and a woman.

The ERA, she says, would make women eligible for the draft. She must know that Congress already has the power to draft women and was considering the possibility of drafting nurses as the Vietnam conflict ended.

At age 83, Schlafly is still preaching her threadbare anti-equality gospel on campuses, at legislative hearings, and elsewhere. If she went on about race the way she does about gender, it would be obvious that her prejudiced views are often the equivalent of Holocaust denial or hate speech.

Last year at the University of Massachusetts, she said, "I know that women in other countries are … oppressed, but in the United States, it's very different. Women have always been well treated." Ignoring the historic struggle for woman suffrage, she called the Constitution "a beautiful, sex-neutral document."

Feminism, she told a Bates College audience, "is incompatible with marriage and motherhood" and is "teaching women to be victims." She denies a married woman's legal right to claim sexual assault by her husband: "By getting married, the woman has consented to sex, and I don't think you can call it rape."

Women should not be permitted to do jobs traditionally held by men, such as firefighter, soldier, or construction worker, she says, because of their "inherent physical inferiority."

The Washington University Board of Trustees has either a powerful sense of humor or a non-existent sense of irony, since it has also chosen to bestow an honorary degree this year on Dr. Jessie L. Ternberg.

Ternberg, the university's media release says, "blazed a trail for women physicians in her nearly four decades as a researcher and pediatric surgeon. Going into the field at a time when women were discouraged from entering, she was … the first female surgeon at Washington University's School of Medicine." She and a colleague helped find a cure for pernicious anemia with their research on Vitamin B12, and colleagues described her surgeries as "works of art."

Brava, Dr. Ternberg, and congratulations on an honorary degree well deserved!

Of course Washington University has the right to bestow an honorary degree on anyone it chooses. But recipients should be people who have contributed to making the world better in a professionally acceptable way, according to at least minimal standards of intellectual honesty.

Judging by the negative reaction to Schlafly's selection, including an online protest site on Facebook, it is appropriate that Washington University will derive more guilt than benefit by association with this choice. Only by withholding the degree and publicly acknowledging its error could the university have salvaged even a shred of academic integrity out of the situation.

The Board insisted on proceeding today, however, they really should have made their presentation as follows:

"And so, Phyllis Schlafly, in acknowledgment but not in honor of your numerous activities over six decades in the misrepresentation of facts about and the organized obstruction of progress in social and political justice, equality of opportunity, and the guarantee of full citizenship status to over one-half of the nation's population, Washington University mistakenly awards you the honorary degree of Doctor of Humane Letters."

Bobbie Francis is chair of the ERA Task Force of the National Council of Women's Organizations (NCWO), of which NOW is an Executive Committee member.

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