Heather Hendershot is a professor of film and media at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and is the author of Open to Debate: How William F. Buckley Put Liberal America on the Firing Line, from which this piece was adapted.

William F. Buckley was not a feminist.

This hardly constitutes a shocking revelation. In the 1960s, the women’s liberation movement was not a welcome cultural turn for him. He could, by contrast, more fully understand the pressing concerns of the civil rights movement, and acknowledged that racism was a pernicious problem. Likewise, he understood that countercultural youth—antiwar activists, poets, musicians—were seeking a better world, even as he disagreed about what made the world flawed and what would make it better.


Many kinds of disaffected and rebellious liberals were, like the hippies, comprehensible to Buckley, and he was eager to debate them on Firing Line, the TV show he hosted from 1966 to 1999. But he just didn’t get feminism.

On the whole, Buckley supported the notion of “equal rights” (as he defined them) but not of the “equal rights movement,” which he felt had gone in an altogether too radical direction. True to form, he opposed the kinds of structural changes that many feminists called for—both the reformist liberals of the National Organization for Women and the more radical, revolutionary left-wing crowd.

Yes, sexism and inequality existed. Yes, it was unfair that working women were denied promotions simply because they were women. But such problems were not insurmountable. Strange notions that women could stop shaving their legs, stop bearing primary responsibility for housework and child care, stop taking their husbands’ last names, stop taking husbands at all—what on earth did this have to do with “equality”?

Yet Buckley was not unsympathetic to all of feminism’s goals, nor did he harbor the callous antipathy toward the movement typical of so many on the right. On Firing Line, Buckley consistently maintained that women were not “inferior” to men, but simply “different” and worthy of male protection and respect. This did not mean that women should be legally disadvantaged, paid less than men, and so on.

Today, such ideas sound conservative, if not rabidly so, but taken in the context of the late 1960s and early 1970s, some of Buckley’s notions about women teetered on the edge of progressive. After all, he admired professionally successful women and did not declare that they were destroying the traditional home. Consider that in 1969, many conservatives were absolutely livid that a female character on Sesame Street was employed outside the home as a nurse. Anti-feminists were digging in their heels and did not like the changes they were seeing on TV, never mind the changes under way beyond the screen.

Today, such ideas sound conservative, but taken in the context of the 1960s and 1970s, some of Buckley’s notions about women teetered on the edge of progressive.

In this climate, the fact that Buckley invited accomplished female lawyers, professors, and activists onto his TV show to debate political issues seems rather enlightened. To put it rather conventionally, in attacking feminism on Firing Line in the 1970s, Buckley attempted— with uneven success—to be a perfect gentleman. He opposed the women’s lib movement, but was respectful of feminist intellectuals and eager to hear and debate their ideas. By inviting them on his show and treating their arguments seriously, he gave them legitimacy—proving by example that theirs were ideas worth listening to, and giving feminism a coveted platform to reach an influential audience.

Over the course of hundreds of Firing Line episodes, Buckley revealed himself as a figure somewhat different than he is sometimes remembered, and whether you’re politically on the left, right, or more towards the center, there is much to learn from watching the show. Firing Line was a space where people on the left and right could have honest debate in a forum where discourse was not driven by soundbites. Instead of an endless churn of talking heads, Firing Line hosted real, long conversations. In our charged era of partisan hot takes, Firing Line offers an example of not only how we can discuss politics and ideas, but also of how we can listen to and engage with those with whom we disagree.

***

Buckley was sometimes puzzled by feminism, wondering aloud on his TV show why women would want to eliminate chivalrous behavior, but his primary interest throughout the 1970s was in sparring with smart feminist guests, debating the very issue of patriarchal oppression, while also questioning the pros and cons of the Equal Rights Amendment. Firing Line’s presentation of women’s lib was unique by virtue of the fact that Buckley had very specific worries, such as his near-obsessive concern about the potential impact of feminism on spoken and written language. And while the notion of disrupting traditional institutions was troubling to Buckley, he was not venomous in his rhetoric opposing it.

On the other hand, Buckley was quite comfortable expressing the old male chauvinist platitude that women could hardly claim to be disempowered in light of how bossy they generally were. On an episode of Firing Line that centered on freedom of expression, he exclaimed to feminist lawyer Harriet Pilpel, “God, the women I know aren’t oppressed as regards their freedom of expression. … Supposing it were documented that women speak twice as much as men. Would that take care of the problem?” Pilpel firmly told him off and iced the cake of her counterargument by observing that, “the amount of time available to women and for the discussion of women’s issues is minuscule as far as television is concerned.” She was completely right—though it was, of course, ironic to make this observation to a male chauvinist hosting one of the few shows that did provide reasonable time for such discussion.

Elsewhere on TV, feminists were given much less time for thoughtful self-expression. Take Not for Women Only, a patently misnamed morning talk show hosted by Barbara Walters. In 1973, NOW cofounder Betty Friedan and her daughter appeared on the program to answer hard-hitting questions like, “Are you ever embarrassed by your mother?” It was utter pabulum. Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique had been a major force in kicking off second-wave feminism in the United States in 1963. Ten years later, change had happened, but the goals of that movement were still very much a work in progress, and mainstream media discussion of feminism was typically slim, hostile, or dismissive.

In this context, Firing Line stood out for Buckley’s genuine attempts to engage with, decipher, and debunk feminist goals, while allowing his feminist guests to have their say.

Firing Line stood out for Buckley’s genuine attempts to engage with, decipher, and debunk feminist goals, while allowing his feminist guests to have their say.

For guests like Friedan, who spoke best in sound bites or when reading from prepared texts, Buckley’s approach was no blessing. In debating abortion with Buckley on Firing Line in 1971, Friedan seems to feel like she’s got a real trump card:

FRIEDAN: Supposing that a uterus was implanted in you, and therefore you had to consider this in terms of an issue that was real for you, not just an abstract issue for someone else. I doubt that suddenly you would—you know, just as surely you don’t consider yourself less important than all the sperm that might fertilize eggs that don’t fertilize eggs, so you couldn’t consider yourself as a person … less important than an unborn fetus.

What would William F. Buckley do if implanted with a uterus? It sounds like a setup for an off-color joke. Not taken aback for a second, Buckley responds that he would take care of a fetus with the same sense of responsibility as he would in caring for a senile father or mother. In sum, Friedan speechified on women’s liberation without really engaging with Buckley. She was not invited back for 23 years. Friedan simply didn’t have the chops for TV. Buckley would have to look elsewhere for articulate experts on his favorite feminist topic: the Equal Rights Amendment.

***

The ERA came up quite often on Firing Line, and, really, the show offered the best TV coverage available. The rest of the mainstream electronic and print media tended simply to amplify women’s internal disagreements about the amendment. The real action was taking place outside the spotlight, where lobbyists, activists, and politicians were duking it out, but that was of little interest to the mainstream media.

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Buckley was largely disinterested in the typical “catfight” angle. He knew that some women disagreed about the ERA, but he had no desire to exploit this fact in particular. If Firing Line did often pair women against each other to discuss feminism, it did so not in the name of sensationalism but, rather, because they were the most informed and prominent experts on the topic.

Buckley’s conservative guests shared predictable concerns about the practical consequences of the ERA (the specter of women engaged in military combat loomed large) and, more generally, about the ways that the women’s movement would potentially shake the very foundations of traditional interactions between the sexes.

On the anti-feminist side, a frequent guest was Phyllis Schlafly, a powerful and successful conservative political operative, lawyer and mother of six, who insisted that legally mandated “equality” would unleash the natural male desire to exploit women. As the women’s liberationists of the 1970s enthusiastically noted that the ERA would efficiently invalidate hundreds of discriminatory laws regarding employment, property and family relations, Schlafly predicted that the ERA would unleash a maelstrom of husbandly negligence, as men would no longer be required to support their wives. “Even though love may go out the window,” she wrote in The Power of the Positive Woman, “the [financial] obligation should remain. ERA would eliminate that obligation.” Wives already had it great, she claimed, with housework requiring only a few hours each day, leaving a woman the opportunity to pursue full or part-time work outside the home, or time “to indulge to her heart’s content in a wide variety of interesting educational or cultural or homemaking activities.” (A typical American stay-at-home mom might find this notion somewhat far-fetched.)

Making the first of six Firing Line appearances in 1973, Schlafly sat on the dais in a prim salmon-colored sweater, navy blue skirt discreetly covering her knees, hair swept up with more than a whisper of Final Net. She was the most gracious anti-feminist imaginable—an alarming hybrid of Emily Post and some Bizarro-World Susan B. Anthony. She was utterly composed and never seemed to stop smiling. This was the kind of person you could imagine taking a conference call from Jesse Helms and Nancy Reagan while frosting a Bundt cake.

Unlike Friedan, Schlafly was a media dynamo, a savvy activist who fully understood the nuances of style and spin. For instance, at a public debate with Schlafly in 1973, Friedan had notoriously blustered, “I’d like to burn you at the stake!” The line has often been repeated, though Schlafly’s response is in many ways more interesting: “I’m glad you said that, because it just shows the intemperate nature of proponents of ERA.” The retort perfectly illustrates Schlafly’s capacity to craft a public image for the anti-ERA movement. As NOW members swung further left in the late 1970s, Schlafly dressed her team in tasteful blouses, gave them advice about what makeup looked best on TV, and encouraged them to present homemade pies to legislators opposing ERA.

Now, really, there are as many poorly groomed, uneducated, and rude conservatives in America as there are poorly groomed, uneducated, and rude liberals. But in her TV appearances, Schlafly managed to convey the impression that she was a typical conservative. Comments about burning her at the stake—these things only made her stronger. This prim activist—a delicate flower who had paid her way through college during World War II by working nights testing rifle and machine gun ammo—was perfectly suited to expound upon the dangers of the ERA on Firing Line.

Schlafly and Buckley were aligned on several fronts regarding women’s issues. Neither was opposed to women working, for example, and Buckley certainly had no problem with Schlafly’s hard push to get Republican women more active in the GOP, moving beyond being “merely doorbell pushers” and envelope stuffers to actively shaping the party platform. But in many ways, Schlafly swung further right than Buckley. Looking back on the ERA in 2006, Schlafly stated that she “simply didn’t believe we needed a constitutional amendment to protect women’s rights. … I knew of only one law that was discriminatory toward women, a law in North Dakota stipulating that a wife had to have her husband’s permission to make wine.” One suspects that Buckley would have found it far-fetched to assert that the right to vinification was the single legal inequity facing women in the 1970s.

Similarly, in 1981, Schlafly stated before a Senate Labor Committee hearing on workplace sexual harassment, “Men hardly ever ask sexual favors of women from whom the certain answer is ‘no.’ Virtuous women are seldom accosted by unwelcome sexual propositions or familiarities, obscene talk or profane language.” Buckley was not so naïve as to believe that only the impure of heart were subjected to unwanted sexual come-ons from men.

***

On the left, feminists like Germaine Greer appeared on Firing Line to advocate strongly for the disruption of conventional family relationships and structures. Or, as Buckley put it, on a 1973 program with Dr. Ann Scott from NOW, “[Y]our sister, Germaine Greer … feels that the family is really a very pernicious institution and that the genuine liberation of women won’t come until after the family, the whole idea of the family—the ‘molecular unit,’ she calls it—is destroyed.” Clearly irked, Scott corrects him: “nuclear, nuclear unit.” This rare rhetorical gaffe on Buckley’s part revealed how strange the terms of the movement were to him.

And what of the reference to Scott as Greer’s sister? It is initially perplexing, as Scott looks nothing like Greer and doesn’t speak in Greer’s Oxbridge tones. Remarkably, Buckley was using “sister” in the broad feminist sense without making even the slightest suggestion of sarcasm, though he would use scare quotes just moments later in referencing “woman power.” This was one of his many moments of chivalrous pugilism. If feminists called each other “sister,” he was willing to play along—up to a point.

Remarkably, Buckley was using “sister” in the broad feminist sense without making even the slightest suggestion of sarcasm.



It was one of his many moments of chivalrous pugilism.

The feminist movement’s oft-expressed desire to restructure or destroy the “molecular” family was a pressing concern for Buckley, but he seemed just as perturbed by the notion that matters of etiquette might be revised. Like Schlafly, he expressed anxiety that men would no longer graciously protect the weaker sex. Doors would no longer be opened for women, and moreover, they would be allowed to go down on sinking ships. Buckley exhibited a particularly strong concern about the linguistic impact of feminism (when Friedan had appeared in 1971, he archly introduced her as the “founding father of the women’s liberation movement”).

During the Q&A session during Friedan’s 1971 episode, Lynne Williams, a regular on the questioning panel, suggested that she wanted “to do a little consciousness raising” with Buckley. She had recently married and had decided to keep her last name. Why then did Mr. Buckley continue to refer to her as “Miss Williams” instead of “Mrs. Williams”? Friedan interjected that “Ms.” was the solution, but Williams rejected this as too difficult to pronounce. Buckley continued: “I would, of course, call you anything you like. … Miss Millett, who is the author of Sexual Politics, I’m told won’t come on this program unless I refer to her as ‘Kate,’ which I find … sort of decomposing, psychologically decomposing. I call some of my best friends on this program ‘Mr. So-and-so,’ and ‘Miss So-and-so,’ whatever, simply because I tend to feel that it observes a formality which is an act of respect for the audience. I think notoriously the practice has been for people, who also have professional lives, to call themselves ‘Miss So-and-so.’ We called Miss Rosalyn Tureck here ‘Miss,’ and she’s been married four times.”

Williams asked if there was “something more serious” about “Miss,” and Buckley interestingly replied, “The ‘Miss’ in effect says to your own constituency, whether it’s professional or artistic, that they want very much to stress the fact of your being different from merely the connubial choice of your husband.” In effect, Buckley was positing that “Miss” established not unmarriedness, as many feminists claimed, but professional independence. There was no need for the acoustically jarring “Ms.” neologism when a conventional word would suffice perfectly well. Of course, the feminists would ultimately win the battle for “Ms.,” but it’s interesting that Buckley had thoroughly thought through the quandary and come up with a rhetorical solution he found reverential to the successful female professional. Again, chivalrous pugilism.

Buckley took particular pleasure in discussing the language of women’s liberation with Germaine Greer on Firing Line. He opened his 1973 show with The Female Eunuch author by asking her opinion of new feminist-inflected rules about how the sexes should be referenced in textbooks. Greer was adamant that such questions were being addressed in entirely the wrong way:

GREER: The whole linguistic question of women’s liberation is difficult because of the strange paradox of our position… Are you to make “he” and “she” words equal in estimation or are you to screen out “she” as forever incapable of equaling “he” in estimation, grammatically? …

BUCKLEY: But there’s no implied hierarchy, as far as I can see.

GREER: Oh, there is, because—

BUCKLEY: Well, now, [textbook publisher] Scott-Foresman says you should never refer to “early man.” You should refer to “early humans,” which means that you can’t use a synecdoche.

GREER: But not only that. What it means is that the real attitude is going to be concealed by a form of primitive censorship, by a kind of ritual observance, whereas the actual situation won’t change. It’s like calling people “Ms.” when in fact they’re married. It doesn’t change the character of their marriage, and I think it’s a sort of hypocrisy.

BUCKLEY: In other words, you think that the emphasis on nomenclature is preposterous?

GREER: Well, I think it’s such a trivial aspect of a real struggle that I think it’s part of a general movement to co-opt a struggle for existence, really, and turn it into something futile.

Greer’s radical structural analysis was spot-on: Changing language was meaningless if you couldn’t address the foundational issues that made language biased in the first place. Buckley, conversely, felt that language was not biased, but that there must surely be elegant and reasonable ways to adjust our rhetoric in response to changing social conditions and norms. At base, he was delighted to converse with someone who was skeptical about the linguistic demands being made by mainstream liberal feminism.

Needless to say, Buckley found much of Greer’s analysis lunatic—she found great merit in communal childrearing, for example—but he was delighted to hear anyone speak critically of the feminist assault on everyday language, and, politics aside, this woman could really craft a sentence. With someone like Norman Mailer, Buckley could rhetorically spar, but when Greer came on the show, it was like a fencing match. Greer could certainly parry any highbrow literary thrust Buckley might make, and she poked fun at him like a British schoolmarm for quoting Alcibiades: “Oh, come, come … we certainly are flying high today.”

Discussing the exploitation of sex, Greer goes so far as to note that Buckley is “a very pretty man,” which makes Buckley laugh, but not the studio audience. The “very pretty man” moment is both uncomfortable and riveting. It’s far-fetched to imagine that Greer was actually hitting on Buckley, and really, if you are debating feminism with a patriarch and you want to characterize him, pretty is one of the more emasculating word choices. Overall, it’s an engaging episode precisely because Greer and Buckley are so finely matched in terms of wit and intellect, yet their personalities are so different, and it is never totally clear who is out-arguing whom. At one point, Buckley finds himself agreeing with Greer about the proper, compassionate treatment of rape victims. “If that’s part of the women’s liberation movement, I’m for it,” he says. As if realizing he has gone over the edge in agreeing with sound feminist ideas, he changes the topic, asking abruptly, “Why do you want a communist state?”

Greer appeared only once on Firing Line, which is somewhat surprising, as Buckley thought she had given a whiz-bang performance. He tellingly included her in two later greatest-hits episodes. In his thank-you note to her after the 1973 show, he wrote, “Goddamn it you are really good.”

***

The least successful Firing Line episodes were often those featuring conservative guests. One exception was the riveting Margaret Thatcher episode in 1975. Most of the conversation centered on economic policy and the ins and outs of bureaucracy. Left to her own devices, Thatcher would surely not have said anything for or against feminism. She could not possibly have been less interested in the topic. But during the Q&A session, Jeff Greenfield (today a regular contributor to Politico Magazine) observed that there had been an increased number of women running for public office in the U.S. the preceding year, and that “their conservative ideology helps to overcome one of the stereotypical objections [to women who run for office] … there’s a feeling among the electorate … that women tend to think more emotionally, they’re somehow less hard-nosed.”

Greenfield remarks upon Thatcher’s conservative reputation: Did her ideology help her overcome stereotypical objections to women holding office?

Thatcher takes immediate offense, irked by the notion that her gender is of interest to anyone. One senses sweat breaking out on Greenfield’s upper lip.

THATCHER: No. Would you be so very surprised if I said that at home on the whole we just look at the person and not necessarily the sex?

BUCKLEY: Yes.

THATCHER: You would? Well, that’s because you’re a man, you’re limited. … Honestly, I regard these questions as very trivial. You don’t mind my saying so?

GREENFIELD: And if I did, what would I do?

THATCHER: Look, we look at a person to see if they’ve got the abilities. Now, I’ve heard this argument frequently, that women are really rather more emotional than men. Really, women are intensely practical. Again, I don’t mean that flippantly. We are an intensely practical sex. We often get on with the job; we don’t always talk about it as much as men; but we get on doing it. … Now you ask me—look, am I emotional? I don’t know.

GREENFIELD: No, no, no… I think that is a misinterpretation.

THATCHER: You decided not. All right.

BUCKLEY: Excuse me, Mrs. Thatcher, but isn’t a logical consequence of what you’ve just said that there are very few competent women in England?

THATCHER: No, not at all.

BUCKLEY: Because there are very few women politicians. And if everybody proceeds to elect people without any reference to sex, it must mean that they choose men 99 percent of the time because they’re superior. [audience laughter]

THATCHER: No, I’m afraid that women are … very much more modest in running for Parliament than men. Nothing like as many of them put up [run for office], you know. Now, that’s not because the ability isn’t there. Many of them are tied up with bringing up families, etc., and they’re therefore out of the political scene for quite a time. We have far fewer women candidates than men candidates, and so it’s not surprising that fewer get elected. There is an enormous ability there, an ability which could be tapped for both commerce and industry and for political life. We have far more in local affairs because it’s not so difficult for them geographically to get to their local authority as it is to spend mid-week in London. But I wouldn’t put anything like the stress on the question that you do.

GREENFIELD: It just interests me—

THATCHER: I mean, it amazes me that you regard it as a phenomenon. It really does.

GREENFIELD: But of course you are—

THATCHER: I’m just an ordinary politician.

GREENFIELD: No, no. … The first head of a major party in Britain who’s a woman in its history is a phenomenon. Welcome, but a phenomenon. What’s interested me is that it does not seem to have entered into the decision-making process when you took over the leadership of the Conservative Party. Whereas here, it is almost impossible for a woman to run for office and particularly an executive office … without that becoming almost a dominant issue. We’ve elected, for the first time in America, a woman governor, not elected on her husband’s coattails, and it was almost the only issue against her.

THATCHER: But look: I was a cabinet minister. I was secretary of state for both education and science. It so happened that I was perhaps the only person in the cabinet at that time who had scientific qualifications. And all of the people who I worked with in the scientific field said, “Thank goodness we’ve got someone who speaks the same language.” There was no question of “are you a man or woman holding that office?” It was a [question of the] person who was [most] suitable for the job.

Greenfield’s questions are spot-on, and it is absolute nonsense for Thatcher to deny the uniqueness of her own position and to reject the opportunity to consider if it is, indeed, easier for conservative women to get ahead in politics than liberal women. Buckley knows that Greenfield is on the right track with his line of questioning. No sexism in British politics? Poppycock! Buckley pushes back, but, predictably, the Iron Lady does not give an inch. We see here, as we would time and time again, that Buckley seemed to have his most cogent thoughts about gender issues when he disagreed with conservative women. These were also the only women who could put him in his place.

Particularly notable was the pummeling he received from Clare Boothe Luce.

Luce and Buckley were friends, and the two were politically aligned on numerous fronts. Like Buckley, she was passionately anti-communist, adamantly in favor of the free market, and tenaciously opposed to FDR’s policies and their aftermath. However, she had been a booster for the GOP and for Eisenhower, and this put her at variance with Buckley, who thought Ike was too moderate; she was never quite as far to the right as Buckley. Buckley had supported McCarthyism, for example, though he had reservations about the man, while Luce had complained that all of the hullabaloo stirred up by McCarthy and HUAC was a ridiculous distraction from the real work of fighting communism. Further, she certainly wasn’t as socially conservative as Buckley. In 1943, when the “Wayward Wives Bill” came before Congress, which would have eliminated government benefits for women who were unfaithful while their husbands fought the war, Congresswoman Luce suggested that an amendment be added “that if the serviceman is unfaithful overseas, the wife’s allowance be doubled.” The bill died.

Luce’s later work for National Review and other publications in the years following the Bay of Pigs invasion fiasco would, however, propel her to “her emergence as an oracle of Republican conservatism,” as Wilfrid Sheed wrote in his biography. Past the prime of her career, Luce was drawn to Buckley seeking friendship and personal and political alliances. Even though there generally wasn’t much tension to propel their discussions, Buckley enjoyed having Luce on Firing Line. And, really, the shows weren’t bad, because the two had a strong rapport and Luce was quite articulate and interested in a number of issues that Buckley rarely engaged with, such as overpopulation and environmentalism. She was a powerful woman who exuded charm and confidence.

Unlike Buckley, she had not been born with a silver spoon in her mouth or graced with a palatial family estate in Connecticut. Luce had been born in a humble home, out of wedlock, in Spanish Harlem. Like Buckley, she was a devout Catholic (though, unlike him, a convert) and outspoken about her faith, and was in possession of tremendous wealth (her husband, Henry Luce, was the impresario who published Time and Life, among other magazines), and was a cosmopolitan type with a taste for the finer things. Luce had a distinctive sense of style and a particular taste for bespoke dresses “with deep, lined pockets for her spectacles, powder compact, lipstick, small notepad, and gold Cartier pen,” Sylvia Jukes Morris noted, all of which freed her from the tyranny of the handbag.

Like Buckley, she had pursued a political career; unlike him, she was successful in those efforts, winning election to the House of Representatives twice in the 1940s, and having been ambassador to Italy during the Eisenhower administration. She had several times been contemplated as a possible Republican vice presidential candidate. Over the years, she had taken numerous lovers—wealthy businessmen, dashing military men—before her dramatic turn to Catholicism at age 42 tempered her infidelity. Buckley was adventurous, but Luce was an adventuress. Even while ostensibly walking the straight and narrow in her Catholic years, she had not hesitated to drop acid with her priest.

Vogue had once compared encountering Luce “to being dynamited by angel cake.” She could definitively hold her own with Buckley on Firing Line. In 1975, when Luce asked to appear (her fourth visit) specifically to discuss feminism, Buckley could hardly refuse. He opened with a spirited introduction.

Buckley and Clare Boothe Luce debating feminism on “Firing Line.” | Firing Line/Hoover Institution

BUCKLEY: The Equal Rights Amendment which, for a while, appeared to be on the verge of adoption, appears once again to be stalled, suggesting a subliminal resistance to formal equality for women which surprises not at all Mrs. Clare Boothe Luce, who, throughout her life, has given her time equally to pleading the cause of female equality and demonstrating the fact of female superiority. …

Clare Boothe Luce was never a failure, which is different from saying she has never been unhappy. As a young woman, she became very quickly the managing editor of Vanity Fair. After an unsuccessful marriage, she became Mrs. Henry Luce and began writing Broadway plays, mostly successful. … She acted, from time to time, as a war correspondent for her husband’s magazines before entering Congress as a representative from Fairfield County. She was appointed ambassador to Italy by President Eisenhower and subsequently ambassador to Brazil, a post she did not in fact achieve because of the exercise of one of her most seductive faculties, to wit her occasional inability to curb her tongue. She is currently a member of the President’s Advisory Board on International Intelligence. … I should like to begin by asking her whether she finds implicit condescension in the rhetorical formulations with which men tend to introduce her.

There is so much to unpack in this oration. First, Buckley pointedly opens by noting that the ERA has sputtered once again, a fact of no small interest to Luce, who had lobbied for the bill in Washington and even dropped pro-ERA leaflets from a plane over New York State in 1923.

In response to the bait with which he had concluded his introduction, Luce notes that Buckley had managed to get through the whole thing with only one “masculine putdown”: he had referred to her inability to “hold her tongue.” Had Buckley “been speaking of a man who spoke out and made enemies for himself,” she explains, he would have said of such a man that he was “blunt” or “overly candid.” But “hold her tongue” is specifically “a phrase that men frequently use about children and women.”

Buckley inadvertently confirms that this is exactly what he had in mind when he responds, “Sort of comes out of Taming of the Shrew?” Luce bluntly rebuts: “No, it comes out of man’s desire, highly successful, through the centuries to master women.” Following this, Luce gives over much of the program to explaining exactly what made Jesus a feminist.

After much spirited discussion, Buckley seeks to tie things up. Smiling, flirtatious, and utterly in command of the conversation, Luce responds, “Bill, I’m much too fond of you to tell you what I really think about you.” “Publicly,” Buckley interjects almost bashfully, making any perceptive viewer understand that Luce has told him off privately on numerous occasions. Luce grins, shoots him an impossibly sexy septuagenarian look through her Coke-bottle glasses, and states categorically, “I think you’re one of the most charming and subtle and sophisticated of male chauvinists.” It was a knockout blow. The defeated Buckley escaped to the Q&A.

***

Betty Friedan, Germaine Greer, and Phyllis Schlafly were all famously for or against feminism, and one quite expects to see them appear on Firing Line debating the issue. But the feminist who appeared most often on the show was not a political celebrity but rather a relative unknown: Harriet Pilpel.

Pilpel was general counsel for Planned Parenthood during the years when the Supreme Court ended bans on contraception and abortion. A board member of the American Civil Liberties Union, Pilpel had “insisted, in 1964, that the ACLU defend women’s reproductive rights and the civil liberties of homosexuals, two issues it had until then refused to touch.” Pilpel was the liberal’s liberal. As the right extended its attack on sex education to attacking abortion, gay rights, and pornography, Pilpel confronted the same issues from the other side.

Since she had appeared on Firing Line some 30 times, one might assume that Pilpel had some kind of flair for TV. To be sure, she was a skilled, articulate public speaker. She was very busy on the liberal, legal lecture circuit and regularly guested on shows such as Good Morning America, Donahue, and The MacNeil/Lehrer Report. Pilpel radiated competence and was always very well prepared, with pages and pages of hand-scrawled notes on her lap. She was a very proficient lawyer who happened to be comfortable on TV, but her charisma was low-key, and she was not exactly glamorous.

Pilpel was capable with her facts, but her quips were few and far between. She was not there to banter. What was perhaps most interesting about her repeat appearances on the show was not her articulate support of women’s rights—which was indeed quite impressive—but what she inadvertently accomplished: showing that feminism was about as mainstream as your aunt Mildred. Sure, Buckley had hosted more radical types, but Pilpel served as the show’s feminist refrain for more than a decade, and her low-key, businesslike approach to the topic offered the strongest antidote imaginable to the radical, bra-burner image. Buckley surely had not meant to present a “normal” image of feminism, but he had done exactly that.

William F. Buckley has been mythologized as a hero of the conservative movement, and even if you are opposed to that movement, it is right to praise him for his thoughtful televisual interactions with liberals. Sadly, this kind of reasoned political debate is sorely lacking in today’s TV landscape. Notwithstanding the firecracker tempers that went off on some of the Firing Line debates of the 1990s, and the “bare knuckled intellectual brawls” that were not uncommon in the earliest years of the show, Buckley was consistently open to honest debate with his ideological opponents. One feels this openness strongly in most of the episodes centered on feminism and the women’s movement, where Buckley patiently engaged with ideas that seemed particularly foreign to him.

But despite his careful listening to the opposition, it was very rare for him to change his mind on any political issue—a reality particularly clear in his interactions with feminists.

On this point, perhaps we should give the last word to Margaret Thatcher: he was a man, he was limited.