Life & Wisdom Quote by Liz Carpenter

Carpenter’s line doesn’t argue; it draws a bright, moral boundary and dares the listener to choose a side. “Anybody” is the giveaway: a deliberately sweeping word that refuses the comfort of nuance. In one stroke, she collapses “against women” and “against the ERA” into the same political offense, then escalates the consequence to the bluntest democratic penalty available: permanent unelectability. It’s not persuasion-by-policy; it’s persuasion-by-shame, a tactic that treats opposition as disqualifying character evidence, not a respectable difference of opinion.

The specific intent is mobilization. Carpenter is writing in the political key of the 1970s, when the Equal Rights Amendment was no longer an abstract principle but a live test of power, party loyalty, and cultural identity. The subtext is a warning to politicians who tried to straddle the issue: you don’t get to wink at misogyny and still claim mainstream legitimacy. By framing the ERA as synonymous with women’s basic standing, she pressures voters to treat the amendment as a litmus test and pressures officeholders to treat it as a survival issue.

It works because it’s strategically asymmetric. Opponents are forced onto the defensive: if they resist the ERA, they must explain why they aren’t “against women,” a reframing that makes procedural objections sound like moral evasions. Carpenter, a seasoned political communicator, understood that in mass politics, the cleanest frame wins. This is a slogan engineered to turn principle into a turnout mechanism.