I wish my grandmother had chosen feminism
Her fork in the road moment…
A Note From Megan | Publication Date: April 7th, 2026
CW: references to childhood sexual abuse
This past week, Michael and I started watching a fascinating show on FX called Mrs. America.
Set in the 1970’s, the show follows the infamous Phyllis Schlafly as she works to block the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA)—an amendment that would make it illegal to discriminate on the basis of gender.
In an effort to advance her STOP ERA campaign, Phyllis Schlafly is often the one credited with uniting diverse religious groups—Catholics, evangelicals, and Mormons—to cohesively advance the conservative political agenda of the more extreme fringe of the Republican party in the late 1970’s and 80’s.
And it was during this time period that Christian Nationalism began to emerge as a more mainstream religious and political ideology. It was also the era in which Jerry Falwell founded the Moral Majority (1979).
In fact, both Phyllis Schlafly and Jerry Falwell are considered to be key architects of what we now think of as the “religious right.”
Over the weekend, I was reflecting on the show, Mrs. America, and realized that my grandmother would have been a young housewife in the 1950’s and 60’s.
This means she was the “target audience” for both the second wave feminist movement, launched when Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique in 1963, as well as the anti-feminism movement championed by Phyllis Schlafly.
To provide some context, my grandmother’s marriage to my grandfather, which took place in the early 1950s, was pretty much doomed from the beginning. Because my family is big on “secret-keeping”, I don’t know all the details, but the facts that I’ve been able to gather over the years indicate that my grandfather was a very abusive man—emotionally, physically, and sexually.
And while his propensity for abusiveness was certainly significant enough in its own right, my grandparents’ diverse religious backgrounds set them up for some massive challenges as well.
From what I know of the story, my grandfather was raised Catholic and my grandmother was raised Protestant. She agreed to marry him in the Catholic church (so it would be legit from his family’s perspective) if he would then convert to Protestantism after they sealed the deal.
Apparently this “compromise” did not unfold smoothly or cooperatively, so my grandparents began attending a Mormon church as a “middle ground” between their two faith systems.
By the mid-50s, they had three children together—two biological boys and an adopted daughter—all born between 1954 and 1956, and they attended the LDS church together until the late 1960s.
In the early 1970’s, my aunt approached the Mormon church leadership and made a credible accusation that my grandfather had sexually abused her throughout her childhood. The leadership believed her, and my grandfather was officially excommunicated soon after.
The heartbreaking reality, and a long-held family secret, is that my aunt actually first disclosed the abuse to my grandmother years earlier, but she refused to believe my aunt. So when my grandfather was excommunicated from the Mormon church, she chose to stand by him and leave as well.
What does this story about my grandparents have to do with Phyllis Schlafly, the religious right, and the radical feminist movement of the 1970s?
Well, given all that was going on socially, culturally, and politically at the time, I truly believe this was my grandmother’s “fork in the road” moment.
Radical feminism was at its height in the 1970’s, and women throughout the nation were beginning to make more empowered choices for themselves and their families.
During this time, my grandmother still had one young child at home—my mom who was born in 1965 and would have been around 7 or 8 years old. The older three were in their late teens and were out of the house by that time. My grandmother gave birth to her last baby in 1974.
As I thought about my grandmother’s timeline—and what was happening culturally and politically when my aunt first disclosed my grandfather’s abuse around 1968—it hit me like a ton of bricks: she could have joined the feminist movement.
Her life as a wife and homemaker was deeply oppressive, and it would have made complete sense for her to seek the type of liberation the feminists of that era were advocating for.
And I can’t help but wonder—what if she had picked up a copy of The Feminine Mystique and declared, “enough is enough.”
But she didn’t. In fact, she did the opposite.
She didn’t go the Betty Friedan way. Instead, she went the Phyllis Schlafly way and absolutely doubled down.
After my grandfather was formally excommunicated from the Mormon church, she and my grandfather started attending a local fundamentalist evangelical church.
My grandmother leaned hard into the extremely conservative, Jerry Falwell-influenced radical right-wing of “traditional family values.” She also began homeschooling her youngest child (my mom’s younger brother) before it was even legal in the state of Pennsylvania.
Eventually, she would push my mom to homeschool me and my siblings as well, which is how my family came to be deeply immersed in an especially virulent strain of Christian Nationalism—reinforced not only through our fundamentalist religion but also through our “faith-based” Christian curriculum.
For as long as I can remember, my grandmother’s religious and political beliefs were an outsized influence in my family, especially after my parents divorced when I was around 10 years old.
Looking back, it’s clear she was more of a convert to the entirety of the politicized “religious right” than she was to an individual “personal relationship” with her Lord and Savior, though she was very devout in her spiritual beliefs.
As I put all these pieces together, it helps me to understand my own deconstruction journey more clearly, and why I have never really been able to separate out religious deconstruction from political, social, or cultural deconstruction.
All of the elements have always been so tightly threaded together in my experience that unraveling one necessitated unraveling them all—probably common for many folks raised in Christian Nationalism.
Here’s the thing I keep coming back to as I watch Mrs. America.
What if my grandmother had made a different choice? What if she had gone the Betty Friedan way instead of the Phyllis Schlafly way? What if she had gone the other direction when she reached that fork in the road in the late 60s, early 70s?
Economically, she may not have been able to leave my grandfather. However, she was the one pushing to attend the evangelical church, to embrace the radical religious right, to homeschool my uncle even though it wasn’t legal at the time.
She was the one who raised my mother to be an anti-feminist and who continued to wield her considerable influence over my siblings and me as she assisted my mom with homeschooling us.
But what if she hadn’t? What if she had allowed the ideas posited by Betty Friedan—and later by Gloria Steinem and many others—to percolate in her consciousness?
In my grandmother’s situation, I think gravitating to a high-control religion (both Mormonism and evangelical Christianity) was her way of trying to create safety and stability for herself and her children.
In fact, she probably hoped a high-control religion would help to straighten out my abusive grandfather. And to some degree, it did seem to temper the worst of his behaviors, although it’s deeply disturbing to me that he never received any real consequences for sexually abusing my aunt.
When I think about my grandmother’s story as a whole, especially her choice to lean into control rather than liberation, it prompts me to consider my own choices from a more zoomed out perspective.
Sometimes, when I look at the world and it feels like it’s all going to hell in a hand basket, I think about the lasting influence of my decision to leave the high-control religion she had chosen to join.
I went the other way at the fork in the road. I chose freedom and liberation.
While I often feel like I’m not doing enough to improve the conditions of the world we’re living in, I do feel a sense of pride in myself when I consider the trickle-down effect of just that one decision—the decision to leave high-control religion.
And I hope when you think about your choice to leave, you feel proud of yourself as well. Because you also went the other way at the fork in the road. You made a different choice, probably despite significant pressure to keep conforming.
Even though recovery may feel messy and painful and even confusing at times, you made an exceptionally important decision to change the trajectory of your life and the generations that may follow you.
You did that! And that’s definitely something to be proud of.