A woman ahead of her time

Reading Rick Perlstein’s Reaganland reminded me forcefully of something I already had a vague sense of, having been a teenager during the Carter administration: The extent to which the political debates of that time were precursors to today’s discourse.

This is especially true in regard to gender politics; and no figure captures this better than Phyllis Schlafly. Schlafly grew up in the 1930s in a conservative downwardly mobile Catholic household, that was obsessed with the virtues of capitalism and the evils of communism. After being a star scholarship student in high school and college, she married well and dedicated herself to becoming a right wing grass roots political operative — indeed, she was a pioneer in the development of this kind of work, which would play such a crucial role in the development of the New Right that Perlstein chronicles in his four books on the political history of America between 1964 and 1980.

Schlafly’s initial focus throughout the 1950s and 1960s was pure McCarthy-style red baiting — in her eyes Dwight Eisenhower, Robert McNamara, and Henry Kissinger were all communist sympathizers — but in the early 1970s she had an epiphany — America’s biggest enemy was actually feminism:

According to her first biographer, Carol Felsenthal, it wasn’t until the Equal Rights Amendment had already passed the House that Schlafly decided she was against it. She launched her crusade, stop era, in the fall of 1972, and by the following spring the amendment had won thirty of the necessary thirty-eight state ratifications. Still, Schlafly was confident. “I knew from the start that I had found enough seriously wrong with E.R.A. to stop it, or at least stall it, for an awfully long time,” she would later say.

stop era—the acronym stood for Stop Taking Our Privileges—initially drew its support from the same network of conservative women who had helped Schlafly distribute “A Choice Not an Echo.” Soon the movement began to grow, according to Critchlow, mainly by involving young women—a large proportion of them Evangelical Christians—who had never before been involved in politics. (When the Supreme Court handed down Roe v. Wade, in January, 1973, the battle over the E.R.A. quickly became entangled with the fight over abortion rights.) In surveys, a remarkable ninety-eight per cent of E.R.A. opponents claimed church membership, as compared with thirty-one per cent of E.R.A. supporters.

Schlafly served as the public face of stop era and, just as significant, as the behind-the-scenes strategist. She organized “training conferences” where she instructed her followers on how to hold press conferences, run phone banks, and infiltrate pro-E.R.A. organizations. She advised stop era members on everything from the best way to hold a fund-raiser—give a brunch, avoid serving alcohol—to the proper attire for a TV appearance: “Always wear a scarf around your neck even if you have a short neck.” Schlafly herself was unfailingly well groomed and cheerful, even when taunting her opponents. One of her favorite tactics was to upstage pro-E.R.A. forces at their own rallies. Another was to perform satirical ditties, like this one, written shortly after Playboy donated five thousand dollars to a pro-E.R.A. group:

Here comes Playboy cottontail

Hopping down the bunny trail,

Trying to buy votes for E.R.A.

Telling every girl and boy,

You can only have your joy,

By becoming gender-free or gay.

“First of all, I want to thank my husband, Fred, for letting me come,” Schlafly announced at a rally in Houston. “I always like to say that, because it makes the libs so mad.”

Ah yes, it makes the libs so mad. Translate that into Latin and you have an epitaph for a republic.

Schlafly herself had six kids in the midst of her campaigns against the communist and feminist threats: indeed she still had four children at home when she launched her ultimately successful anti-ERA campaign, more than 20 years into her career as an activist.

Encountering that particular biographical detail caused me to experience my own epiphany, which is that Phyllis Schlafly’s almost literal doppelganger replaced Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the Supreme Court in October of 2020.