Beverly LaHaye, anti-feminist founder of Concerned Women for America who was courted by presidents – obituary

Beverly LaHaye, who has died aged 94, was the wife of Tim LaHaye, the evangelist and bestselling author, and founder of Concerned Women for America, a conservative group that campaigns against feminism, abortion and gay rights, and for integrating traditional Christian family values into federal law.

Her husband was credited, through his ministry and his “Left Behind” series of novels, with popularising a belief in an imminent apocalypse in which “true believers” would be physically “raptured” up to heaven, leaving the “unbelievers” to endure seven years of catastrophes presided over by the Antichrist.

His father’s death when he was nine was the catalyst for Tim LaHaye’s beliefs. His wife, by contrast, experienced a more political epiphany in 1978 while watching a television interview with Betty Friedan, whose book The Feminine Mystique (1963) had helped to launch the women’s liberation movement.

As she told the story, she was so outraged by Betty Friedan’s claim that women in America supported abortion rights that she rented a hall in San Diego under the name “Concerned Women for America” (CWA) and put an ad in a newspaper inviting women to a meeting, to which 1,200 women showed up.

Beverly LaHaye’s message was, essentially, that if the sort of egalitarianism that Betty Friedan espoused came to be, American society would collapse. Feminism was “a philosophy of death” that was “threatening the survival of our nation”, and decent women needed to rise up against “lesbianism, Marxism and extreme social change”.

Over the next 40 years Beverly LaHaye and her CWA team proved remarkably skilled at convincing other women that a conservative platform was in their best interests. Within a decade CWA boasted more than 500,000 members, with chapters in every state and what Beverly LaHaye called an army of “kitchen-table lobbyists”, campaigning for the criminalisation of abortion, the teaching of creationism and other evangelical causes.

The CWA’s first victory, with other conservative groups, was to block the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment to the American constitution, which would have banned discrimination on grounds of sex. The amendment had passed both houses of Congress, but under pressure from opponents it failed to meet a 1982 ratification deadline.

Beverly LaHaye became close to President Ronald Reagan, who delivered the keynote address at the CWA’s 1987 national convention, and to the Bushes senior and junior. She frequently testified before Congress, including confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justices at which she championed Right-wing nominees including Antonin Scalia, Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas.

Yet, oddly, some critics detected an unexpected feminist message behind her exhortation that women should put God first.

She was born Beverly Jean Davenport in Detroit on April 30 1929. Her father, a factory worker, died shortly before her second birthday and her mother later married a Ford worker whose surname, Ratcliffe, she adopted. When he lost his job in 1939 the family fell on hard times, and Beverly often had to miss school to care for her mother, who was bedridden with a heart condition.

She attended Bob Jones College, a private evangelical institution in South Carolina, where she met her fellow student Tim LaHaye and dropped out to marry him in 1947. They had four children, but as she admitted in a book, The Spirit-Controlled Woman (1976), as a housewife and mother she experienced “smoldering resentment... from the endless little tasks that had to be repeated over and over again and seemed so futile”.

But she eventually came to realise that “submission” was “God’s design for women”: “I wasn’t just picking up dirty socks for my husband: I was serving the Lord Jesus.”

She went on to take a job as a teletype operator at Merrill Lynch, which she found “kind of exciting”. “God,” she once said, “didn’t make me to be a nobody.”

Settled in San Diego, she worked with her husband to spread his brand of fundamentalist Christianity, giving talks to church groups and leading seminars on family life. In 1970 the LaHayes co-founded San Diego Christian College. In 1976 they published a Christian sex manual, The Act of Marriage, which claimed that religious wives have sex more often and enjoy it more than non-believers.

Beverly LaHaye stepped down as president of CWA in 2006 but remained a fixture in conservative circles.

Her husband died in 2016 and a son the following year. She is survived by another son and by two daughters.

Beverly LaHaye, born April 30 1929, died April 14 2024