Schlafly deflected the hypocrisy charge by embodying the freedom women already had.

Evidence

A WITTY, BRILLIANT WOMAN, Schlafly infuriated feminists. When she spoke in public, she liked to thank her husband for allowing her to do so just to get a rise out of any “women’s libbers” who might be present. Betty Friedan derided her as an “Aunt Tom,” a “traitor to her sex.” Feminists burned her in effigy. But Schlafly was unflappable. (She once received a death threat while dining in a Houston restaurant; in response she merely smiled and asked for milk in her coffee.) She chalked up feminists’ frustration to the weakness of their arguments: “They’re losing, so they’re irrational and mad.” Her opponents thought she was the irrational one, but she had developed a neatly packaged ideology that seemed impervious to critique. When her adversaries accused her of hypocrisy—she was, after all, hardly the “traditional woman”—she turned that criticism on its head. Look at her! She was proof that women were already free to do what they wanted, without the help of the ERA. — Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne, 169