As of this week, Schlafly was still president. “Her focus from her earliest days until her final ones was protecting the family, which she understood as the building block of life”, the organization wrote on its website.
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That Schlafly’s last political act was supporting a candidate whose disdain for women borders on the psychotic seems appropriate, as does Trump’s statement that Schlafly was a “champion for women”.
The Phyllis Schlafly Report. She worked in a munitions plant testing machine guns while a college student during World War 2.
To conservatives, she was a breath of fresh feminine air – proof that women didn’t really want equality after all. Schlafly held a grand celebration following her victory. She was chastised in a 1970s Doonesbury comic strip – a framed copy of which hung on her office wall.
At a 1994 forum on the GOP’s platform’s treatment of life issues, Schlafly said, “The Republican Party was born on the principle that no human being should be considered the property of another”.
Thirty-five states ratified the amendment, three short of the necessary 38.
During a 1989 debate in Knoxville, Tenn., against Roe v. Wade lawyer Sarah Weddington; Schlafly said banning abortions would not be a question of governmental interference. She famously responded that, “My opponent says a woman’s place is in the home”. Schlafly had already asserted that the ERA would “interfere with the right of parents to have their children taught by teachers who respect the moral law” when Anita Bryant and California’s John Briggs began their respective campaigns.
American Conservative Union Chairman Matt Schlapp said that Schlafly, who was a former ACU board member, inspired others through her “courage and conviction”. No new states approved the ERA during this time frame. That in turn paved the way for conservatives to take control of the Republican Party. As it was, she went off to do politics. Apparently she missed the part about Marbury v. Madison.
Ralph Reed, chairman of the Faith & Freedom Coalition, who was friends with Schlafly for over 30 years, said that her influence on modern American history “is hard to overestimate”. There, with no scholarship, she paid her way with a full-time job testing ammunition on the night shift at a St. Louis ordnance plant. Her concern was that such a convention could simply re-write the Constitution in a manner more suitable to the left-wing forces that wish to strip the document of restraints on government power and its protections of American liberties.
Phyllis Schlafly was one of them. “She’ll be remembered for who she hated, not who she helped”, Mehta alleged. And thanks to her faith in America’s grass roots, we got Ronald Reagan as a two-term president and a conservatism miraculously revived from the death’s doorstep where it had resided after Barry Goldwater’s defeat in 1964 and Richard Nixon’s resignation in 1974.
During her fight against ERA, Schlafly was not only verbally attacked, she also was the victim of physical assaults, from pig’s blood being thrown on her to having a pie smashed into her face.
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Schlafly earned her law degree at age 51, graduating 27th in a class of 204.
