How the ‘war on women’ quashed feminist stereotypes

When Phyllis Schlafly is forced to concede that not all feminists are ugly, it’s clear that something has gone awry on the right. Sure enough, in April, Schlafly, a conservative crusader who has been peddling stereotypes of women’s activists as physically and socially unappealing for decades, thought she should warn cadets at the Citadel not to fall for one. “Some of them are pretty,” she said. “They don’t all look like Bella Abzug.”

Schlafly’s anachronistic dig at Abzug, a boisterous New York congresswoman who has been dead for 14 years and whose name and fondness for large hats probably don’t ring alarm bells for many undergrads, betrays the anxiety undergirding her warning. The aged, arid vision of feminism on which conservatives have long relied (and that Abzug embodied only in caricature, never in reality) is finally losing its power.

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