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80% of Americans Believe the U.S. Constitution Grants Women Equal Rights. They Are Wrong
Women are at risk until the ERA is ratified.
Most people today would get in big trouble if they threw a pie in a trad wife’s face, but that’s how disputes were solved in the 1970s.
The drama began at the Women’s National Republican Club Luncheon at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York City. Pearl necklaces and lacquered hair glinted and gleamed under the grand hotel’s chandeliers as anti-feminist housewife Phyllis Schlafly took her seat.
Phyllis Schlafly had made a career out of telling women to stay in their place (the kitchen). This ladies' luncheon was supposed to be a victory lap for Schlafly’s campaign against the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). Instead, it became an unscripted, slapstick moment that the Associated Press would gleefully circulate to every newsroom in America.
Enter Yippie Aron Kay, part left-wing activist, part dessert prankster. Armed with an apple pie from a Greenwich Village bakery, he waited for his cue. When his friend Nancy Borman distracted Schlafly with a feigned conversation about feminism, Kay took a pie from his briefcase and smushed it into Schlafly’s face with the precision of a Marx Brothers routine. “That’s for the ERA, you bitch!” he quipped before…