Who was Phyllis Schlafly?
Although now rapidly fading from the collective American memory, Phyllis Schlafly helped to usher in a new era of conservatism.
A reactionary presiding over the dawn of the New Right, Phyllis Schlafly was as complex as the movement she represented.
A shrewd politico who framed herself as a deferential housewife, Phyllis Schlafly worked tirelessly to fight the rise of the Women’s Liberation movement. At one point in time she was criss-crossing the U.S. lobbying leaders and organizing her coalition while simultaneously pursuing a law degree all the while trumpeting being a house-wife as the most “fulfilling” career choice.
The irony was not lost on Schlafly’s political opponents, principally the second-wave feminists who derisively noted that she lived a ‘liberated” life while campaigning against liberating them from being house-wives.
Taking umbrage with the growing mass of socially progressive ideas surfacing in the American psyche, Schlafly, through her Eagle Forum, did her best to turn the nation’s collective population of stay-at-home housewives against the proposed Equal Rights Amendment.
Presiding over a grassroots campaign of housewives she organized herself, she became the face of the opposition to the ERA, arguing that the proposed amendment would collectively undermine American women, centering her argument around the idea that the ERA would pave the way for women to be drafted into the military, while also arguing that divorced women would lose such protections as alimony and undermine the general court bias of granting custody of children to them.
Growing up in somewhat tenuous financial circumstances in St. Louis during the Great Depression with a perpetually unemployed father trained as a machinist and salesman of industrial equipment for Westinghouse, Phyllis and her younger sister Odile were supported by their mother who became the family’s chief breadwinner returning to work amidst their father’s unemployment as a librarian and school teacher.
After Catholic school, Phyllis earned a scholarship to Maryville College before transferring on to the more prestigious Washington University of St. Louis graduating in 1944 before moving on to Radcliffe College (formerly the all-women affiliate of the all-male Harvard University) where she secured a Masters degree in Government in 1945.
A political animal from the get-go, Schlafly cut-her-teeth as a researcher for the American Enterprise Institute whilst she worked for Republican Claude Bakewell’s successful campaign for congress in 1946.
Schlafly continued to develop her talents as a political campaigner and grassroots organizer jointly writing with her husband in 1957 a highly influential report, the “American Bar Association’s Report on Communist Tactics, Strategy and Objectives” proving a boon in the development of the burgeoning anticommunist grassroots movement.
This was followed in 1964 with the self-published A Choice Not an Echo, distributed in support of Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign.
Here, Schlafly attempted to discredit the more moderate Rockefeller wing of the Republican party, arguing that they were both corrupt and exceedingly interventionist.
With the tacit support of the extremely conservative John Birch society which she was forced to quit so as not taint the reputation of her book.
Nonetheless Schlafly tacitly approved the Society’s distribution of her book in time for the 1964 Republican primary which eventually nominated her choice — the more conservative Barry Goldwater.
Schlafly’s own attempts to run directly for political office weren’t quite as successful as her ability to influence the conservative movement.
In 1952 she ran for Congress as Republican in the majority Democratic 24th congressional district of Illinois only to lose by a landslide to incumbent Charles Melvin Price.
Her campaign, however, low-budget was supported by the major munitions manufacturer brothers John Olin and Spencer Truman Olin as well as Texas oil tycoon H. L. Hunt.
She subsequently ran against Price again in 1960 to an even larger margin.
In 1967 she lost her bid for presidency of the National Federation of Republican Women against the more moderate Gladys O’Donnell. As it turned out the influential outgoing president and future U.S. Treasurer under President Nixon, did her best to work behind the scenes to undermine Schlafly’s run, putting her full support behind the more moderate Gladys O’Donnell.
In 1970, she ran for the last time against incumbent George Shipley for Illinois’s 23rd congressional district losing by a much closer vote of 53.97% to 46.04%.
Between her entrance into politics working at the AEI and serving on Bakewell’s campaign to her official entrance on the national stage in 1972 with her opposition to the ERA, Schlafly developed a keen political acumen doing her very best to undermine all moderate opposition in the Republican party.
Indeed, during the 1960 Republican National Convention, she led a revolt of “moral conservatives” against the moderate Richard Nixon’s stance “against segregation and discrimination” foreshadowing her opposition to the ERA and any attempt by the Federal government to effectively enforce one of the most famous quotations from the declaration of independence that “all men are created equal”.
By the late 1970’s her political influence became such that she was able to take on American feminists head on, when she organized a counter-conference against the feminist 1977 Houston National Women’s Conference bringing in some 15,000 people in her bid to remind the nation that the contemporary feminists did not respect the political prerogatives of the extreme conservative minority to whom she belonged.
The ‘Pro-Life’, ‘Pro-Family’, agenda established by her highly successfully conference would eventually be adopted by political mainstream of the Republican party.
Having developed her political voice and a great deal of influence over the prior quarter of a century, she was poised to take on the ERA, organizing a STOP (“Stop Taking Our Privileges”) ERA campaign.
Beginning in 1970’s, the feminist organization National Organization for Women began lobbying the U.S. Senate in order to bring about congressional passage of the Equal Rights Amendment winning a meeting with senators to discuss the issue.
After a great deal of lobbying, Congresswoman Martha Griffiths brought the Equal Rights Amendment to the House floor after some 15 years of the joint resolution languishing in the House Judiciary Committee.
Eventually passing both House and Senate in 1972, President Richard Nixon immediately endorsed the passing of the bill.
Beginning in March 1972, the floor was opened for the amendment to be ratified, with a deadline set for 1979.
With the backing of her newly founded Eagle Forum a socially-conservative grassroots organization — she launched her attack on the ERA, arguing that the ERA would have the effect of essentially nullifying any of the gender-specific privileges currently enjoyed by women including dependent wife benefits under Social Security, separate restrooms for males and females, and of course exemption from the Selective Service and the military draft.
More explicitly, Schlafly brilliantly pandered to her conservative audiences deepest fears ominously noting that enacting the ERA would mean government-funded abortions, homosexual schoolteachers and men refusing to support their wives.
Her methods proved successful and before long, her conservative audience began to write to legislators relaying their concerns regarding the ERA.
At the time of the start of her campaign against the ERA, the ERA had been ratified by 28 out of the required 38 states.
Seven more states subsequently ratified the amendment bringing the total to 35 culminating with Indiana’s ratification in 1977 before the amendment was defeated.
In the eyes of most mainstream experts, Schlafly’s campaign proved a key player in the narrow defeat of the amendment.
Key to this victory was of course Schlafly’s understanding of her audience and her brilliant ability to exploit political opportunities.
In the late 1970’s the feminists of NOW briefly attempted to establish a program that would help older divorced and widowed women.
Many widows were otherwise ineligible for Social Security benefits while few divorcees received alimony when divorced after a ‘career’ as a housewife and few had any work skills to use in the workforce.
Younger activists, however, criticized such a program believing that such a program should be oriented towards helping poorer minority women, rather than older middle class women who were essentially screwed by the system, thus this program was abandoned by 1980 in favor of the ratification of the ERA allowing for Phyllis Schlafly exploit this political vacuum.
Schlafly chided feminists for abandoning this older group of economically disenfranchised women, paradoxically arguing the ERA would unbalance laws in favor of men stripping the legal protections that these already economically disenfranchised women urgently needed.
Schlafly continued her point by noting that the ERA was designed for the benefit of young career women warning that if the ERA was enacted and men and women were treated equally, then middle-aged housewives without job skills would be put at an economic disadvantage.
Furthermore Schlafly argued that the ERA would repeal legal protections and eliminate the ‘judicial tendency’ divorced mothers enjoy in receiving custody of her children.
All in all Schlafly’s shrewd political sensibilities, her ability to build up grass-root support and her fundamental understanding and ability to exploit their deep-set political fears enabled her to undermine the momentum of the ERA, ending it in its tracks.
