Phyllis McAlpin Schlafly

• Phyllis McAlpin Schlafly
• Born: August 15, 1924
• Died: September 5, 2016

Was a conservative activist and lawyer who campaigned against the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment. Schlafly’s activism and her beliefs regarding the role of women in society made her into a central figure of the culture wars that began in the 1970s. Her political views and organizing skills drew women into the Republican Party and changed its direction after the 1960s.

Schlafly was born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1924 to John Bruce Stewart and Odile Dodge Stewart. He father was a machinist and salesman who lost his job and most of the family wealth during the Great Depression. Subsequently, Schlafly’s mother gained employment and helped support the family, working seven days a week. At their mother’s insistence, Phyllis and her sister received prestigious and costly private school educations. An excellent student, Schlafly went on to graduate from Washington University in St. Louis in just three years in 1944. She would then receive a full scholarship to Radcliffe College, Harvard’s women’s-only liberal arts counterpart, where she graduated with a master’s degree in government in 1945. Much later, in 1978, she would graduate from Washington University in St. Louis School of Law. In graduate school, Schlafly wrote about ambitions of working in Washington, D.C., and she even supported the United Nations. Upon graduating from Radcliffe, she found employment with the American Enterprise Association, the forerunner to the American Enterprise Institute, where she delved into conservative ideas and began writing.

In 1949, at twenty-five years old, she married John Fred Schlafly, Jr., a prominent and wealthy lawyer who was fifteen years older than she was. A year later, Schlafly gave birth to the first of six children. A committed wife and mother, Schlafly was also politically ambitious. In 1952, local Republicans approached her husband to run for Congress. Her husband refused the offer, but Phyllis accepted and she ran for Congress in the 24th congressional district of Illinois. She won the primary and proved to be an effective campaigner, knocking on doors and accepting every invitation to speak. She lost the election to the Democratic incumbent, Charles Melvin Price, who refused to shake her hand afterwards because of her inflammatory campaign rhetoric. After running for Congress, she served as president of the Illinois Federation of Republican Women from 1956 to 1964. Schlafly was a delegate to the Republican National Convention in 1956, 1964, and 1968 (as well as in 1984, 1988, 1992, 1996, 2004, and 2012).

In the 1950s, Schlafly was an ardent anti-communist. She worked with her husband to help found the Cardinal Mindszenty Foundation in 1958, a conservative organization that warned Catholics of the communist threat. She published pamphlets and newsletters that strung together bizarre and sensational conspiracy theories that linked New Deal liberalism to communism. She even proposed that communists were able to steal atomic secrets from the Truman administration because of advanced Soviet brainwashing programs. Through the 1950s, Schlafly’s inflammatory and sensational style began to develop more fully.

By the 1960s, Schlafly was convinced that the Republican Party was dominated by effete and corrupt East Coast liberals who were too weak to defeat the Soviet menace. She wrote A Choice Not an Echo, a pamphlet that explained why Barry Goldwater was the only option for true conservatives in the 1964 presidential campaign. In classic Schlafly style, she combined folksy domestic truisms with bizarre conspiracy theories. Although the pamphlet was self-published like Goldwater’s The Conscience of a Conservative, it became wildly popular among a growing group of conservatives and sold more than three million copies. So influential was A Choice Not an Echo that at the 1964 Republican National Convention over 90 percent of delegates reported having read it. Schlafly would go on to write twenty-seven books in total over her lifetime.

In 1972, when she learned about the Equal Rights Amendment (an amendment to the constitution that would bar forms of gender discrimination), Schlafly founded STOP ERA, an acronym that stood for “stop taking our privileges.” The ERA was largely unopposed. It passed in the House and the Senate and 30 of the necessary 38 states had ratified it. Presidents Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Jimmy Carter supported the amendment and so did many of the First Ladies.

Schlafly nearly singlehandedly stopped the ERA’s progress. She believed that equal rights would undermine the “special privilege” that women held in society. Schlafly believed that without social and legal obligations to women, men would divorce and abandon their families. The amendment would destroy women’s ability to stay at home and care for children and without the family, the rest of society would collapse. She organized women to oppose the amendment, primarily evangelical Christian women who had never involved themselves in politics before. Over 90 percent of ERA opponents were members of a church. As political activists they were novices, but STOP ERA turned them into seasoned veterans. As its head, Schlafly taught women how to run phone banks, hold press conferences, hold fund raisers, and dress for news broadcasts or interviews. By 1982, time had run out for the ERA to be ratified and it failed. When ratification began in 1972, it seemed inevitable. The amendment had bipartisan support. By 1982, it was dead and a politically partisan issue.

Schlafly participated in her feminist counterparts’ strategy of making the personal political. Personally, she believed women’s position should be in the home, as housewives and mothers, and politically she supported the Republican Party. She seemed a reactionary counterweight to second-wave feminism. Interestingly, Schlafly neared a feminist critique of the Republican Party in her 1967 book Safe—Not Sorry, writing: “The Republican Party is carried on the shoulders of the women who do the work in the precincts, ringing doorbells, distributing literature, and doing all the tiresome, repetitious campaign tasks. Many men in the Party frankly want to keep the women doing the menial work.”

STOP ERA morphed into the Eagle Forum and, after the ERA died, Schlafly continued to write and speak as one of the nation’s foremost culture warriors, providing an alternative model for femininity and political participation for women across the country. She was a brilliant organizer and a sharp debater who brought millions of women into politics and, importantly, into the Republican Party. Schlafly, perhaps better than any other culture warrior, used the concept of tradition as a powerful political tool, playing into the stereotype of church ladies and stay-at-home moms. STOP ERA activists were known to bring freshly baked pies with them to meet legislators they were lobbying. All of this gave an air of Christian morality and social respectability to vehement resistance to social changes.

See Donald T. Critchlow, Phyllis Schlafly and Grassroots Conservatism: A Woman’s Crusade (2005), Andrew Hartman, A War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars (2015), Michelle M. Nickerson, Mothers of Conservatism: Women and the Postwar Right (2012). An obituary appeared in the New York Times (September 5, 2016).