The political operative who battled feminism
Beverly LaHaye 1929–2024
Beverly LaHaye’s life changed when she turned on the TV in 1978 and saw Betty Friedan holding forth on women’s liberation—but she wasn’t inspired, she was aghast. A self-described “fearful, introverted” homemaker married to the pastor of an evangelical megachurch, LaHaye was instantly convinced that somebody had to stand up and speak for “normal and traditional women.” More than 1,200 women showed up to her first meeting, planting the seed that would grow into the lobbying group Concerned Women for America. At its height, CWA had half a million members and wielded such influence that President Ronald Reagan addressed its national convention in 1987, calling LaHaye one of America’s political “powerhouses.” Over a decades-long career, she vehemently fought feminism, gay rights, and abortion, while advocating for school prayer and the teaching of creationism. LaHaye had pink business cards and a soft, cheerful countenance, but underneath was a steely core. “God,” she said, “didn’t make me to be a nobody.”
She was born Beverly Jean Davenport in Detroit, where her mother, widowed when Beverly was 2, married a tool-and-die maker at Ford. After high school, Beverly attended evangelical Bob Jones University, said Christianity Today, but once she met aspiring pastor Tim LaHaye there, she “left school to support her husband in ministry.” Being a housewife didn’t come naturally: She said she harbored “smoldering resentment” until she recast her role as spiritual service, believing that submission was “God’s design for woman.” Forcing herself to overcome her shyness, she “started teaching others what she had learned.” CWA scored its “first victory” by helping to kill the Equal Rights Amendment, said The Times (U.K.). The measure, which would have barred discrimination on the basis of sex, failed to win ratification by enough states by the 1982 deadline, in part because of lobbying by CWA members.
Over the next decade, “LaHaye and CWA only grew more effective,” said The Washington Post. She moved its headquarters to Washington, where she hosted a radio show, testified before congressional committees, and oversaw a staff of more than two dozen. She stepped down as president in 2006 but remained a board member until 2020. Her life of activism, she said in 2009, was not her own doing. “I think God just pushed me up out of my chair.”