In September 1983, Beverly LaHaye gave a press conference in Washington, DC, to announce that her four-year-old lobbying group Concerned Women for America (CWA) was about to become a force to be reckoned with in the nation's capital. "This is our message: The feminists do not speak for all women in America," she asserted.
From its new home in Washington, LaHaye promised that CWA would continue to fight against the notion that all women supported a feminist agenda, including things like legal abortion, sex education in public schools, and acceptance of nontraditional families. Struggling against the idea that social conservatism was "antiwoman," LaHaye sought to prove that the religious right actually represented the true interests of most American women.
Nationally prominent women like LaHaye played pivotal roles in building and sustaining the modern religious right as it coalesced into a self-conscious national movement in the 1970s and 1980s. They focused predominantly, though not exclusively, on issues designed to appeal to women in their roles as wives and mothers. In doing so, they helped to ensure that gender and sexuality would be the central issues around which the developing movement revolved. They positioned themselves against contemporary feminism and insisted that feminism did not represent the interests of all women. As they sought to make Christian conservatism more appealing to women, the very fact of their leadership demonstrated that the movement was more than just a network of angry white men upset at losing their privilege in the face of gains by feminists and civil rights activists.
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