Happy 100th to one of the Remarkable Women in American History

Phyllis Schlafly was, in the words of the eminent conservative journalist M. Stanton Evans, a woman with “several careers–housewife, mother, media personality, political leader, and constant nemesis of women’s lib.” She was, like National Review’s founder William F. Buckley Jr., a force of nature who tirelessly worked to advance the conservative movement–she wrote 27 books, thousands of articles and op-eds, constantly traveled and lectured, and founded and ran one most successful conservative advocacy organizations, the Eagle Forum.

Schlafly was born August 15, 1924 in St. Louis, Missouri. During World War II, she worked in a munitions factory and shortly after the war, she joined the American Enterprise Institute as a researcher. The same year, the precocious Schlafly entered Republican politics, managing a Congressional campaign in Illinois for Claude Bakewell. At just 28, in 1952 she ran for Congress in Illinois, losing by 63,000 votes to Democrat Charles Melvin Price–she would run once more unsuccessfully in 1970.

Schlafly first appeared in the pages of National Review in 1957 when she wrote a letter to the Editor endorsing the phonics method for teaching school children. She appeared in the magazine again eight years later when she co-wrote with Chester Ward, a retired Rear Admiral, “The Gravediggers,” a short paperback originally intended to support the candidacy of Barry Goldwater in 1964. Reflective of Schlafly’s deep interest in foreign policy, the subtitle of the book was, “Who is Really Risking Nuclear War?” The same year, she sold millions of copies of her self-published volume, “A Choice Not an Echo,” in which she, along the lines of William F. Buckley Jr. and NR, endorsed Goldwater as a means of combating the dominance of Eastern liberal Republicans to make the Republican Party a vehicle for conservative politics.

The questions of deterrence, nuclear war, and the Communist threat were key to Schlafly’s rise in the conservative movement. However, the issue during that period which she would most make her mark on was that of the ERA–the Equal Rights Amendment. The ERA dated back to 1923, when Alice Paul first introduced it following the successful adoption of the 19th amendment and its guarantee that the right to vote could not be conditioned on the basis of sex. The ERA was reintroduced in 1972 and had a great deal of popular and political support, with 28 states ratifying it by the end of 1972.

Schlafly was not content to allow the amendment to win, creating the Eagle Forum to oppose the measure on the basis that there were innate differences between the sexes and that such a strict legal requirement of equality of the sexes would destroy the family and have other perverse effects–including, she warned, the eventual requirement that women register for the draft. As M. Stanton Evans recounted in NR , Schlafly attacked the ERA by defending traditional womanhood, “stressing the creative, civilizing role of women, the centrality of home and family, and the profound differences between male and female psyches which the radical feminists would deny.” For Schlafly, like the fight against Communism, the ERA represented an affront to the West and the traditional values of Western Civilization.

She explained all of this to Buckley in a debate on Firing Line concerning the ERA in 1973, saying that the “ERA won’t give women any more than they’ve already got, or have a way of getting. But on the other hand, it will take away from women some of the most important rights and benefits and exemptions we now have.”

Commenting on the incredible success of Schlafly’s grassroot conservative movement, the magazine’s editors in 1982 declared her to be one of the “most remarkable women in American history,” even if the “ideologically engineered textbooks” of the public schools would never recognize it. Of her victory against the ERA, the Editors wrote that, “She has triumphed over the major media, the bureaucrats (and bureacrettes), and the ‘women’s movement’ almost single-handedly. The ERA is dead.” They understood that while the left portrayed the defeat of the ERA as a loss for equal rights and demonized Schlafly as playing on “people’s worst fears,” Schlafly had understood that the real victory was over a aggrandized judiciary who, under the amendment, would have had power to “define ad libitum outside the political process” the meaning of “equal rights” just as the Warren Court had the rest of the Bill of Rights.

Decades after her greatest conservative success, NR’s Kate O’Brein wrote of Schlafly in 2005 the “Founding Mother:” “With her well-reasoned arguments and tireless advocacy, she recruited thousands of women to her cause. They would stop the ERA, evolve into the powerful pro-family movement, and go on to transform the GOP and American politics.”