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1300 l CONTEMPORARY WOMEN’S ISSUES IN RELIGION As had Alice Moore before her, Frost turned in 1983 to Texans Mel Gabler and Norma Gabler for advice about fighting what she saw as “secular humanist” messages in her children’s textbooks. The Gablers encouraged Frost to challenge the Hawkins County Board of Education, which she did, despite her view that “a woman is not supposed to be seen or heard in public” (Bates, 66). The ensuing battle attracted national attention and raged for years, finally ending in federal appeals court when the U.S. Supreme Court denied a hearing of the case. Despite active assistance from Concerned Women for America, Vicki Frost’s contingent lost their battle in court, and many of their children were expelled from Hawkins County schools for refusing to read the objectionable textbooks. However, as Jennie Wilson, an ally of Frost’s, observed, “The world thinks we lost, but we won. . . . Our children are out [of the public schools]. They’re getting a fine education [now], learning their heritage, how this great nation was built on JudeoChristian principles” (Bates, 302). Today’s burgeoning home school movement, which is fueled primarily by evangelicals who identify with the Religious Right, traces its roots to battles waged against school districts by women like Alice Moore and Vicki Frost. Women in Today’s Religious Right Women continue to play important roles in various aspects of the Religious Right movement. Elizabeth Dole, who in 1999 became the first serious major-party female presidential candidate, is an evangelical with strong ties to the Religious Right. Both the Christian Coalition and the Family Research Council have been headed by women: Roberta Combs and Janet Parshall, respectively. Kay Coles James, one of relatively few African American women affiliated with the Religious Right, has held numerous governmental positions at the federal and state levels and for a time served as dean of the (Pat) Robertson School of Government at Regent University in Virginia Beach, Virginia. At the grassroots level, many evangelical women are deeply involved in fighting abortion by volunteering at the nationwide network of Crisis Pregnancy Centers. These centers oppose abortion. To encourage women not to choose abortions, they provide a variety of free services including pregnancy tests, counseling, medical referrals, and information about adoption and health insurance. Women of the Religious Right also launched numerous organizations designed to be counterparts to Promise Keepers, the once visible evangelical men’s movement . Among these counterpart groups were Women of Faith, Chosen Women, Promise Reapers, Heritage Keepers , and Suitable Helpers. The Promise Keepers movement has advocated the long-cherished view among evangelicals that men should be the heads of their households; along with that view comes the imperative for women to submit to the authority of their husbands. Counterpart organizations were designed to teach women how to surrender to male headship. Like Promise Keepers, these organizations have held mass meetings in stadiums and encourage women to live joyfully under God’s domain. Throughout its history, the Religious Right movement has structured the extent and nature of women’s participation through its embrace of traditional gender roles. However, a small but vocal evangelical feminist movement does exist. Clyde Wilcox (Onward Christian Soldiers?) shows that only 16 percent of all white evangelicals oppose gender equality for women. While it has hardly been a champion of gender equality on paper, the Religious Right movement has incorporated women, and even given them the platform to speak as leaders, since its inception. SOURCES: Important general sources on the Religious Right, and women’s roles in it, include Allen D. Hertzke, Echoes of Discontent: Jesse Jackson, Pat Robertson, and the Resurgence of Populism (1993); James Davison Hunter, Evangelicalism: The Coming Generation (1987); Rebecca Klatch, Women of the New Right (1987); William Martin, With God on Our Side: The Rise of the Religious Right in America (1996); Clyde Wilcox, God’s Warriors: The Christian Right in Twentieth-Century America (1992); and Clyde Wilcox, Onward Christian Soldiers? The Religious Right in American Politics (1996). On textbook controversies, see Stephen Bates, Battleground: One Mother’s Crusade, the Religious Right, and the Struggle for Control of Our Classrooms (1993). Personal accounts by women leaders of the Religious Right include Beverly LaHaye, I Am a Woman by God’s Design (1980); Phyllis Schlafly, A Choice, Not an Echo (1964); and Phyllis Schlafly, The Power of the Christian Woman (1981). Finally, for the definitive account of why the Equal Rights Amendment failed, see Jane...

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