Phyllis Schlafly

Phyllis Schlafly (1924–2016) was a Harvard-educated lawyer, a Georgetown-trained political scientist, a prolific author, a nationally syndicated columnist, a debate champion, and one of the most effective political organizers of the twentieth century — who spent her career arguing that women should stay home and submit to their husbands. The contradiction was not lost on her critics. It did not slow her down. Schlafly had been active in conservative politics since the 1950s, writing A Choice Not An Echo (1964), a pro-Goldwater polemic that sold over 3 million copies. But her defining achievement was the defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment. The ERA had passed Congress in March 1972 with overwhelming bipartisan support and was ratified by thirty states within a year. It appeared unstoppable. Schlafly launched STOP ERA (Stop Taking Our Privileges) in October 1972 with a specific tactical insight: frame the ERA not as a threat to women's rights but as a threat to women's privileges — specifically the privilege of being financially dependent on a husband, exempt from the draft, and protected from workplace equality that might force them to compete with men. Her slogan: 'ERA means unisex toilets and women in combat.' The campaign was grassroots and church-based. Schlafly organized state-level STOP ERA chapters through networks of homemaker volunteers, coordinating through her newsletter The Phyllis Schlafly Report. She delivered women carrying homemade pies to state legislators — a deliberate visual argument that traditional womanhood was under threat. The amendment needed thirty-eight state ratifications; Schlafly's campaign prevented it from ever reaching that threshold. The ERA died in 1982, three states short. Her Eagle Forum (1972) became a permanent political organization that trained a generation of conservative women activists. Eagle Forum chapters operated in every state, lobbying against the ERA, sex education, abortion, and LGBTQ rights. It was one of the earliest models for the faith-based women's political network the Religious Right would later deploy through Focus on the Family and Concerned Women for America. Schlafly's late career was notable for her early endorsement of Donald Trump — in March 2016, months before the Republican establishment came around. She died in September 2016, months after making the endorsement. Her son John contested her decision; the Eagle Forum split into two factions, with some board members attempting to remove her in the months before her death. Even in dying, she was organizing.

Documented themes

• Patriarchy
• Christian Nationalism
• Abortion Politics
• Gender & Patriarchy

Connections from Phyllis Schlafly

• influenced → ERA Defeated (1982) — Schlafly's STOP ERA campaign, launched in 1972, organized the sustained state-level opposition that prevented ratification. Her network of housewife-activists is credited by historians as the decisive factor in the ERA's failure.
• opposed → Betty Friedan (1972) — Phyllis Schlafly's post-1972 political career was constructed as an explicit, sustained opposition to Betty Friedan's vision of women's liberation. Schlafly's Stop ERA campaign, Eagle Forum, and decades of writing directly countered Friedan's arguments about women's equality and public participation. The ERA fight of 1972–1982 was, in Marjorie Spruill's framing, fundamentally a contest between these two women's visions of American womanhood.
• opposed → National Organization for Women (1972) — Schlafly's Stop ERA campaign was an institutional counter to NOW's ERA ratification campaign. Where NOW organized state-by-state for ratification, Schlafly organized state-by-state against it. Her Eagle Forum was built specifically to match and defeat NOW's political infrastructure. Schlafly named NOW repeatedly in her writing and speaking as the embodiment of radical feminism she was fighting to defeat.

Sources

• Jesus and John Wayne — Kristin Kobes Du Mez (2020), pp. 60-72
• The Phyllis Schlafly Story — Carol Felsenthal (1981), pp. 1-280