Conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly died Monday at age 92 in her St. Louis, Missouri, home with her family by her side.
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Throughout her political career, Schlafly-who rain for Congress several times and employed a full-time nanny to watch her children while she was away campaigning-maintained a contentious relationship with feminists, who loved to point out the irony of Schlafly, a full-time career woman, declaring that “a woman’s place is in the home”.
Conservatives loved her. She spoke her mind and defended traditional values.
The Eagle Forum pushes for low taxes, a strong military, and English-only education.
Schlafly rose to prominence in the early 1960s after publishing a sort of manifesto for the right called “A Choice Not an Echo”, which boosted conservative icon Arizona Sen.
Schlafly, who proudly declared herself a “housewife” despite passing the IL bar in 1978, first entered the public realm in which she thought women like herself didn’t belong in the 1950s, when she campaigned against the threat of global Communism.
The Eagle Forum, the conservative, pro-family organization that Schlafly founded in 1972, praised her decades of public service in a statement posted to its website. (She beat a mainstream Republican opponent in a primary upset but lost the general.) She was an obsessive anti-communist, concerned above all with national security.
She was considered an anti-feminist and she enjoyed ribbing the feminist movement.
She once said that she “had done it all – just not all at once”.
“Knowing how at odds same-sex marriage is with our legal and cultural traditions, we should not be surprised that some homosexual activists are trying to get rid of marriage all together”, Schlafly said in 2014. Gays are not denied any human rights.
“I was able to speak with her by phone only a few weeks ago, and she sounded as resilient as ever”, Donald Trump said in a statement.
“Schlafly not only helped the Republican Party become pro-life in the 1980s, but spent the remainder of her life ensuring it remained so”, said a September 6 statement by Tom McClusky, vice president of government affairs for the March for Life Education & Defense Fund. Opponents cited her marriage to John Fred Schlafly Jr., a wealthy IL lawyer who died in 1993, as the reason she had opportunity to inveigh against liberal and feminist causes. In a 1988 interview with the Catholic Times, the newspaper of the Diocese of Springfield, Ill., she said that if sexism was a sin, as one draft declared, the bishops would have to acknowledge the church has exploited and oppressed women – and that notion was “ridiculous”. She earned a bachelor of arts degree from Washington University, a masters in political science from Radcliffe College, and a law degree from Washington University. “Phyllis lent us her unyielding but gracious voice to answer and outsmart the radical left”. “The more influential she became, the worse off America became”, Alan Wolfe wrote for The New Republic in 2005.
“Brilliant, fearless and nobody’s fool, Mrs. Schlafly was a fierce defender of the rights of the unborn and other dignity of life causes”, Hawkins told BP in written comments.
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In addition to her six children, Schlafly is survived by 16 grandchildren and three great-grandchildren. “I was honored to spend time with her during this campaign”.
