Schlafly, Phyllis (1924–)

Phyllis Schlafly (née Stewart) became a household name in the 1970s for her crusade against the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). The mother of six who stood up for women's “right” to domestic fulfillment eschewed the kitchen for a 50-year public career building grassroots conservatism by simplifying its ideologies into populist terms. Born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1924, Schlafly was raised as a conservative Catholic.

Schlafly pursued political science at Washington University while working in an ordnance plant. Ironically, Schlafly was a war-time “Rosie.” With a master's degree in government from Radcliffe, Schlafly became a legislative analyst for the American Enterprise Association (now Institute). There she consolidated a theoretical education in anti-Keynesianism and anti-internationalism. Returning to St. Louis, Schlafly, at a youthful 22, managed an upset victory for Republicans in Missouri's 11th congressional district.

In 1949 she married lawyer Fred Schlafly, also a passionate conservative. Schlafly became the exemplary postwar mother—active in the YMCA, the Community Chest, the Illinois Federation of Republican Women, and the Daughters of the American Revolution. With these ties she nurtured a network of conservative women radiating from her new home in Illinois. Assailing “big government” and communism, she ran unsuccessfully for Illinois's 21st congressional district in 1952. Six years later the Schlaflys founded the Cardinal Mindszenty Foundation. Its 3,000-odd North American study groups told Catholics that America could be “red” by 1970, and that nuclear arms negotiation appeased communists. Considered crucial to Barry Goldwater's 1964 Republican presidential nomination, Schlafly's A Choice Not an Echo argued Eastern “king-makers” furthered an “America-last” internationalism and collectivism within the Republican Party. To advance her views, Schlafly has published the Phyllis Schlafly Report since 1967; and ran for Congress, again unsuccessfully, in 1970.

With the ERA, Schlafly found a cause-célèbre that galvanized late-20th-century, “pro-family,” conservatism. The constitutional amendment seemed headed for easy passage with feminism's resurgence. Unions, women's magazines, and religious groups supported it; both party platforms included it; Presidents Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford, and Carter endorsed it; and 30 states ratified it by March of 1973. Alleging that the ERA would take away women's “right” to care for their own children; that it would lead to women's draft in the military, coed bathrooms, and “abortion-on-demand,” Schlafly melded her anti-government politics with a message that spoke to those fearful of the social revolutions of the 1960s and 1970s.

Schlafly joined demagogic appeals with well-focused, state-level grassroots campaigns. In 1972, her Stop Taking Our Privileges or STOP ERA, a national, grassroots group, attracted thousands of conservative Republicans and religious women. The [Page 1271]Eagle Forum, founded in 1975, is her conservative, multi-issue counterpart to the National Organization for Women. Schlafly and her allies kept the ERA from being ratified by the requisite 38 states by 1981.

Schlafly remains an energetic New Right polemicist and activist. She passed the bar in 1978, and has written, lectured, and mobilized against “judicial activism,” feminism, the Panama Canal transfer, prison furloughs, and NAFTA, and for phonics, nuclear weapons in space, and the Defense of Marriage Act.