Jill Lepore:

Yes.

So much that I found out working on this book surprised me, but taking stock in particular, really, in a systematic way of how women participate in American political culture, decades before women get the right to vote in 1920 with the 19th Amendment.

And what you see when you do that is that women develop a very specific political style, this moral suasion, the moral crusade, because you think about it, you can't vote. What you can do is tell men how to vote. And how are you going to tell me how to vote? You're powerless.

Well, you're going to say, well, I have more moral authority than you. So, the rhetoric of women being morally superior. So that's where we get abolition and temperance, later prohibition. And in the 20th century, so many moral crusades that are led by women have really not been fully examined by political historians or — so if you think about Phyllis Schlafly, just the leading architect of modern conservatism, isn't fully appreciated in that way.

She starts out in the 1950s as a member of the Kitchen, Cabinet, the sort of GOP ladies auxiliary, the Federation of Republican Women's Clubs. So she goes on to — she's McCarthyite. She campaigns for Goldwater. She's a big promoter of Goldwater.

But then, in 1972, she formed this organization to stop the ERA. And it is a moral crusade, and it really realigns the party system, I think. We think a lot about — it's quite fashionable to talk about the Southern strategy of the Nixon administration. Right?