For generations, Americans have imparted bathrooms with their deepest anxieties about changing social norms and practices. From the Industrial Revolution to Jim Crow to women’s lib to today, restrooms have been a proxy for political fights on almost every major issue in American life — race, class, gender, crime, sexuality, you name it. Much like our current foray, past bathroom brawls drew the involvement of the marquee figures of those eras — President Jimmy Carter, Governor Ronald Reagan, President Lyndon Johnson, and Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., and Phyllis Schlafly, among many others. [...]
While the homophobic “lavender scare” had subsided by the 1970s, conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly drew on both its legacy and on the white backlash to the civil rights movement to mount a brilliant attack on the Equal Rights Amendment. A proposed constitutional amendment guaranteeing sex equality under the law, the ERA had been passed by Congress in 1972 and sent to the states for ratification. By 1974, 33 states had passed the ERA, just five short of the number needed for full ratification. Though the odds of stopping the amendment looked poor, Schlafly quickly organized a national movement to block the ERA’s adoption.
Schlafly’s main objection to the amendment concerned its second clause, which she worried would give the federal government unrestricted power. She quickly realized that this technocratic argument inspired little passion among her foot soldiers. Instead, they wanted her to focus on how the amendment would change their lives and their families. Schlafly contended that if passed, the ERA would destroy the traditional family — and thus society itself — by eradicating sexual difference
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