Phyllis Schlafly was the voice of opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) during the 1970s. She called the ERA "dangerous" and said it would take away legal rights that women already possessed, including economic support for wives and mothers.
If the required 38 states had ratified the ERA before the deadline, would the amendment have taken away economic support for wives? Would women have lost the right to financial support from their husbands? Phyllis Schlafly successfully instilled this fear in many women.
Legal experts disagreed. "Equal rights" would simply mean that neither husbands nor wives could be put in a less advantageous financial position because of their sex. The ERA would require that economic benefits be evaluated in terms of spouses' function.
For example, in determining alimony or child support, a judge would consider each spouse's resources and non-monetary contributions such as housework and child-rearing. The official ERA Majority Report of the Senate Judiciary Committee said that if one spouse were the primary wage earner and the other ran the home, the wage earner would have a duty to support the spouse who stayed at home. This would mean economic support for those who needed it, but the anti-ERA forces still wanted to define that support in terms of husbands and wives.
Feminist theorists, on the other hand, asked for society to consider each partner in a marriage equally, without assumptions about gender roles. The anti-feminist double standard assumed that mothers should stay at home raising children, but never demanded that fathers stay at home raising children.