Concerned Women for America

Concerned Women for America (CWA), founded by Beverly LaHaye in San Diego in 1979 and later headquartered in Washington D.C., was the Religious Right's answer to second-wave feminism. Its explicit project: a women's organization to defeat the feminist legislative agenda. CWA's chapter-based structure — prayer groups organized through local churches — gave it extraordinary reach into communities not served by Falwell's televised organizing or Robertson's CBN network. By the early 1990s it claimed 600,000 members in chapters covering nearly every congressional district. Whether this matched NOW's membership depended on counting methodology (CWA counted prayer chapter participants; NOW counted dues-paying members), but the organizational scale was real and politically significant. CWA's core policy positions have remained remarkably consistent since 1979: opposition to abortion rights, opposition to LGBTQ legal recognition in any form (marriage, adoption, military service, non-discrimination protections), opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment, support for school prayer and religious expression in public life, support for school vouchers, and opposition to comprehensive sex education. CWA was among the first organizations to develop sustained, well-funded infrastructure specifically targeting LGBTQ rights — running conversion therapy advertising in major newspapers in the late 1990s, filing amicus briefs in major Supreme Court cases touching on gay rights, and maintaining continuous lobbying against LGBTQ legislation for nearly five decades. Its early investment in this fight made it a template for later organizations including the Family Research Council and the Alliance Defending Freedom. Through Tim LaHaye's co-founding of the Council for National Policy in 1981, CWA's grassroots network was linked to elite conservative strategic coordination from its earliest years. Through Tim LaHaye, CWA was connected to the CNP's private coordination network — making it, critics argue, both a genuine grassroots organization and a channel for elite strategy. CWA's Beverly LaHaye Institute produced policy research used in congressional testimony. The organization filed amicus briefs in Supreme Court cases on religious freedom and same-sex marriage. Its structure proved more durable than the Moral Majority, which dissolved in 1989: CWA continues to operate as of 2026.

Themes this entry appears in

• Patriarchy
• Anti-LGBTQ
• Political Strategy
• Abortion Politics
• Gender & Patriarchy

Connections from Concerned Women for America

• opposed → Anita Hill (1991) — Concerned Women for America campaigned for Clarence Thomas's confirmation and disputed Anita Hill's account during the 1991 Senate Judiciary Committee hearings. CWA framed Hill's testimony as a politically orchestrated feminist attack on a Christian conservative . Critics saw a double standard: harassment claims were treated as credible against opponents but recast as feminist political weapons when made against conservative men. CWA's defense of Thomas was consistent with Beverly LaHaye's founding vision of the organization as a counter to secular feminist organizations like NOW.
• opposed → ERA Defeated (1979) — CWA was founded in part as an anti-ERA organization and lobbied actively against the Equal Rights Amendment through its defeat in 1982. It worked in coordination with Phyllis Schlafly's Eagle Forum, providing a church-based grassroots organizing layer that Schlafly's organization lacked. The ERA defeat demonstrated the political effectiveness of women-organized anti-feminist mobilization — a template CWA continued to apply to subsequent feminist and LGBTQ legislation.
• opposed → National Organization for Women (1979) — Beverly LaHaye founded Concerned Women for America in 1979 with an explicit stated purpose: to provide Christian women an alternative to NOW. LaHaye said she started CWA after seeing Betty Friedan claim on television to speak for American women. CWA's policy positions — against the ERA, against abortion rights, against LGBTQ equality — were constructed point-by-point in opposition to NOW's platform.

Connections to Concerned Women for America

• Beverly LaHaye founded (1979) — Beverly LaHaye founded CWA in San Diego in 1979 in direct response to second-wave feminism — specifically, Betty Friedan's claim on television that she spoke for American women. LaHaye recruited 1,200 charter members through her church network, later moved the organization to Washington D.C., and built it into the Religious Right's largest grassroots women's organizing structure.
• Betty Friedan influenced (1979) — Beverly LaHaye founded Concerned Women for America in 1979 after seeing Betty Friedan claim on television to speak for American women; she conceived it as a Christian alternative to NOW. The founding logic was direct: Friedan had articulated a vision of women as autonomous public actors entitled to equality; LaHaye founded CWA to provide an organizational home for women who rejected that vision and embraced instead the complementarian framework of Christian womanhood as wife, mother, and helpmate. Friedan's The Feminine Mystique and NOW's political campaigns were the specific threat that CWA existed to oppose.
• Tim LaHaye promoted (1981) — Tim LaHaye's co-founding of the Council for National Policy in 1981 directly linked Beverly's grassroots CWA to the elite strategic coordination infrastructure of the Religious Right. Through Tim LaHaye, CWA was connected to the CNP's private coordination network — making it, critics argue, both a genuine grassroots organization and a channel for elite strategy.

Sources

• Righting Feminism: Conservative Women and American Politics — Ronnee Schreiber (2008), pp. 1–80
• How the Religious Right Shaped Lesbian and Gay Activism — Tina Fetner (2008), pp. 44–78
• Jesus and John Wayne — Kristin Kobes Du Mez (2020), pp. 122–140
• Women of the New Right — Rebecca E. Klatch (1987), pp. 119–165