ST. LOUIS (AP) – Outspoken conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly, who helped defeat the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970s and founded the Eagle Forum political group, has died at age 92.
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“Phyllis Schlafly spent an astounding 70 years in public service of her fellow Americans”, the Eagle Forum said in a statement.
The reputed “Darling of the Silent Majority” looked at her support for Trump as her final political legacy to turn around America, especially on the issues of immigration, trade deals and judicial nominations. Reportedly, not long afterward, her own daughter tried to have her removed from her position of power in the Eagle Forum. “During the 1950s and ’60s she helped build the anti-Communist movement in the United States”, reported the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
She earned a bachelor of arts degree in 1944 at Washington University in St. Louis and a master’s degree in government from Harvard in 1945. She was named one of the 100 most important women of the 20th century by the Ladies’ Home Journal. However, President Ronald Reagan, who took up the conservative torch for his former mentor, praised her campaign against ERA as “brilliant” and called Schalfly “an example to all those who would struggle for an America that is prosperous and free”. Funeral arrangements are still pending.
Schlafly’s backing of Trump came at some cost, however.
The Eagle Forum said Mrs Schlafly was survived by her six children, 16 grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.
Schlafly was a lawyer and was appointed to the Commission on the Bicentennial of the U.S. Constitution, by President Reagan where she served from 1985 to 1991. Her family, friends, and staff will miss her. Many will write that she nearly singlehandedly defeated the Equal Rights Amendment, while not discussing that her objections were to a law that had the potential to weaken women’s rights.
She was disappointed that “the Republican Party, the conservative movement, even the Democratic Party and the churches” hadn’t done more to stop the freedom to marry.
“She was brilliant, tough, tenacious, and driven by absolute adherence to principle and not to personalities”.
Reportedly, after Phyllis Schlafly’s very public and controversial endorsement of Donald Trump, her daughter and other board members tried to stage a coup of the Missouri-based activist organization that she’d founded, including taking over control of the group’s bank accounts and other finances. He noted that she would be remembered most for her “courageous leadership in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds”.
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In recent years, Schlafly’s focus turned to what she perceived to be lost USA sovereignty as a result of runaway internationalism.
