Success Quote by Phyllis Schlafly

Schlafly’s line isn’t really about battlefield readiness; it’s about boundaries. By calling women in combat “the cutting edge,” she frames a policy debate as a spearpoint in a larger cultural war, where the military becomes the last redoubt of traditional gender roles. The phrasing is strategic: “cutting edge” flatters feminism with the language of innovation while smuggling in menace, as if the modern is inherently sharp, dangerous, and invasive.

Her key move is the word “force.” It presumes that social change doesn’t arise from women’s choices, economic realities, or institutional evolution, but from coercion by elites. That sets up a familiar populist moral geometry: “us” as the ordinary, unwilling public, “the feminist goal” as an organized, ideological project. The military is useful here because it carries national sanctity; if feminism can “take” combat, the argument goes, it can take anything. It’s a slippery-slope narrative built to make one policy feel like a cascade.

“Androgynous society” functions as the real scare term. Not simply equality, but sameness; not rights, but erasure. Schlafly is signaling to an audience anxious about the 1970s-90s churn of the Equal Rights Amendment fight, shifting labor markets, and changing family structures. In that context, integrating combat roles reads less like administrative reform and more like symbolic desecration of an older social contract: men protect, women are protected.

The brilliance, and the cynicism, is how she recasts women’s inclusion as an attack on difference itself. It’s not a dispute over capabilities; it’s a bid to make identity feel like a frontline casualty.