President Ronald Reagan with evangelical activist Beverly LaHaye, president of Concerned Women for America, shortly before his remarks at the group's annual convention in 1987 in Arlington, Va. Beverly LaHaye, an evangelical activist who helped organize a powerful right-wing backlash to the feminist movement, rallying opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment, abortion, gay rights and other perceived threats to “traditional family values,” died April 14. She was 94.
The organization’s political clout was so strong that President Ronald Reagan delivered the keynote address at its 1987 national convention,Mrs. LaHaye as “one of the powerhouses on the political scene today, and one of the reasons that the grass roots are more and more a conservative province.” Mrs. LaHaye rose to prominence while condemning mainstream feminism, which she considered “a philosophy of death” that was “threatening the survival of our nation.” As she saw it, “the churchwomen had been asleep” and needed to be awakened to the menace posed by “lesbianism, Marxism and extreme social change.”Her turn toward advocacy had unexpectedly feminist undertones, coming amid a frustration with domestic drudgery that “might sound familiar to early readers of Ms.
The organization was far from the first conservative women’s group. But it marked an evangelical alternative to organizations such as Eagle Forum, the conservative advocacy group founded a few years earlier by lawyer and activistMrs. LaHaye joined Schlafly in campaigning against the proposed amendment, an effort to outlaw gender-based discrimination that had passed both houses of Congress and appeared on its way to ratification.
Months later, she pulled her endorsement, frustrated by a campaign letter that had been sent out with her signature but not her permission and that described Kemp as “the only true conservative” candidate.By then, CWA had named Mrs. LaHaye the group’s president for life.