Conservative activist Schlafly dies at 92
Phyllis Schlafly was an outspoken conservative activist who helped defeat the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970s and founded the Eagle Forum political group.
Phyllis Schlafly, a conservative activist, lawyer and author who is credited with almost singlehandedly stopping the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970s and who helped move the Republican Party toward the right on family and religious issues, died Monday at her home in St. Louis. She was 92.
Her daughter, Anne Cori, said Schlafly had been ill with cancer for some time.
A champion of traditional, stay-at-home roles for women, Schlafly opposed the ERA because she believed it would open the door to gay marriage, abortion, the military draft for women, co-ed bathrooms and the end of labor laws that barred women from dangerous workplaces.
Almost too late
The brief amendment (“Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex”) was anti-family and anti-American, she said. Equality, she added, would be a step down for most women who are “extremely well-treated” by society and laws.
She was almost too late to stop its passage: By early 1972, when she first published her objections, the proposed constitutional amendment had just passed Congress, and 30 of the needed 38 state legislatures had ratified it.
Schlafly, an experienced anticommunist Republican Party activist, quickly organized the opposition. The effort began operating under the name “Stop ERA” and later became a national organization called the Eagle Forum, which Schlafly dubbed an alternative to women’s liberation. In 1973, the U.S. Supreme Court issued its decision on Roe v. Wade, legalizing abortion. Suddenly, a huge constituency of conservative, family-oriented churchgoers were energized to engage in politics.
Binding together fundamentalists, evangelicals, Catholics, Mormons and Orthodox Jews, Schlafly realized that she could direct a movement of people who believed the family and traditional values were under attack. A best-selling author, radio commentator and an excellent debater, she barnstormed the country, speaking before clubs, church organizations and 30 state legislatures. By the time the deadline for passage of the ERA arrived in 1982, 15 states rejected it and five other states rescinded their ratifications. It fell three states short of passage.
Burial party
Schlafly staged a festive burial party at Washington’s Shoreham Hotel and told a crowded news conference that the ERA “is dead for now and forever in this century” and said the nation could now enter “a new era of harmony between women and men.” Born Phyllis McAlpin Stewart on Aug. 15, 1924, in St. Louis, she was the daughter of a librarian who supported the family of four when her father could not find work during the Depression.
She said she was “saved from the life as a working girl” by marrying wealthy lawyer Fred Schlafly in 1949. She quit her job and became a community volunteer and Republican Party activist. In the early 1950s, she did research for Sen. Joseph McCarthy, the Wisconsin Republican who railed against communist infiltration into the U.S. government.
She won the Republican nomination for Congress from Alton, Ill., on her first try in 1952, but lost in the general election.
She and her husband also founded the Cardinal Mindszenty Foundation to alert the world to the dangers of communism. She published pamphlets that compiled right-wing essays and in 1962 became a radio commentator on a program carried by 18 stations. The atom bomb, she said, was “a marvelous gift given to our country by a wise God.”
After the death of her husband of 44 years, in 1993, she moved from their home near Alton to Ladue, Mo., a St. Louis suburb.
Survivors include six children: Cori, of St. Louis; John Schlafly, who came out as gay in 1992, and lives in Alton, Ill.; Bruce Schlafly of St. Louis; Roger Schlafly of Santa Cruz, Calif.; Liza Forshaw, of St. Louis; and Andrew Schlafly, of Far Hills, N.J., who started Conservapedia in 2006 as a reaction against perceived liberal bias in Wikipedia; 16 grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren.