Death of an anti-feminist

Phyllis Schlafly could have been America’s number one feminist. She graduated from good universities, wrote important books on serious topics, was an outspoken orator and political organiser, didn’t let her life be defined by her husband’s career, and stood up to bitter abuse from her opponents. In reality, however, she was America’s leading anti-feminist.

Her death this week, at the age of 92, marks the passing of an organisational and publicity genius who did all she could to fight against the spirit of the age. When passage of the Equal Rights Amendment to the US constitution seemed imminent and inevitable in the mid-1970s, she created a democratic grassroots pressure group, ‘StopERA’, that managed to kill it once and for all.

She was born in St Louis and grew up a devout Catholic. During the war years she paid her way through college test-firing machine-guns. Married at the age of 24 to a 39-year-old lawyer, she raised six children but was always looking about for something to do. Thrice she ran for Congress. When the kids were all in school she put herself through law school and at once passed the bar exam.

Most popular

Harry Mount

The Odyssey is more real than we thought

She became famous in 1964 when Barry Goldwater was running for president on the Republican ticket. Then, as now, many mainstream Republicans hated the choice their party’s members had somehow made in the primaries, and anticipated a trouncing that November. Not Schlafly. Her surprise bestseller, A Choice, Not an Echo (1964), was a celebration of all that Goldwater represented, and a scorching rebuke to the Republican party’s bosses.

Schlafly had a gift for indignant rhetoric. She denounced her party’s mainstream drift over the previous 15 years. In the 1950s, she said, President Eisenhower had accepted co-existence with the Soviet Union and had failed to intervene in support of the Hungarian uprising of 1956, leaving the brave Catholic rebels to be crushed by Soviet tanks.