Founding Mother

BY THE TIME SHE TURNED 40, in the tumultuous political year of 1964, Phyllis Schlafly had run for Congress, become a polished political speaker and built an impressive resume in Illinois politics, written two best-sellers, been elected unanimously as vice president of the National Federation of Republican Women, and had five (of six) children. Her first book, A Choice Not an Echo, a 128-page self-published volume that attacked the liberal eastern wing of the Republican party, had sales of more than 3.5 million copies. Her second book, The Gravediggers, a wake-up call about Soviet intentions written with Rear Admiral Chester Ward, sold 2 million.

What is striking about both of these books is not their impressive sales, but the fact that neither of them, nor any of her other political work until that time, is associated with the cause for which most Americans know her–what historian and biographer Donald Critchlow calls “anti-feminism.”

Critchlow has written a fine, and long overdue, biography of this activist from Alton, Ill. He has also chronicled the rise of the modern American conservative movement after the Goldwater debacle. His is a bottom-up history of grassroots political organizing, and the role women played in it, and a top-down tale of the woman who led it.

Schlafly, like her antagonist Betty Friedan, was born in Illinois in the 1920s. Both women were raised by strong mothers who encouraged their talented daughters. Schlafly worked the night shift to pay her way through Washington University, and then went to graduate school at Radcliffe. (Years later she obtained a law degree.) Her early academic pursuits were followed by a stint at the American Enterprise Association (now Institute), where she began her real education as a political conservative.

The young Schlafly’s passions were a distrust of centralized government and political elites. Her deep Roman Catholic faith also inspired her political activity, and particularly her opposition to communism.

In 1952, at 27, she made her first of two runs for Congress against five-term incumbent Melvin Price. She was one of 29 women to run that year. In her campaign she sounded another theme that became a political touchstone for her, urging women to become active in politics because the “country would benefit if women exercised their voting rights to restore morality to our federal government.”

Schlafly was becoming well versed in many political issues, though she preferred to concentrate on defense and foreign policy. When the anti-communist fervor started to wane in the 1950s and early ’60s, she was an important leader in the conservative movement that began to coalesce around social issues. Those issues helped to revive the Republican right after Barry Goldwater’s defeat and Richard Nixon’s disgrace. The campaign against the Equal Rights Amendment was an early and consequential victory. Paradoxically, it made Schlafly, the anti-feminist, one of the most powerful women in politics.

In 1971-72, the ERA passed the House by 354-23, and the Senate by 84-8. Thirty states ratified it within a year of its passage. For most people, adoption seemed a foregone conclusion. Critchlow tells us that Schlafly had “not taken much interest in feminism” up to this point, but with her usual drive and intelligence, she entered the fray.

In 1972, in her newsletter, she laid down the principles that would guide anti-ERA forces for the next decade. She and her supporters saw it as a threat to the special legal protections that women and mothers enjoyed in society, and to traditional values. She supported legislation that would give women better employment opportunities and equal pay for equal work, and she enraged her debating partners by telling many of her audiences that her husband Fred allowed her to speak at these events.

The nastiness of that debate has much of the flavor of politics today. “I’d like to burn you at the stake,” said Betty Friedan in one encounter. But what went up in flames was the Equal Rights Amendment, a story Crithlow tells in fascinating detail. Schlafly’s role in bringing millions of voters concerned about the erosion of traditional values to Ronald Reagan cannot be underestimated.

Phyllis Schlafly’s story, and most news about women, is usually told from the feminists’ perspective in part because many writers and journalists feel more sympathetic to that view. That is changing somewhat with the work of a new generation of women, such as my estimable AEI colleague Christina Hoff Sommers and organizations such as the Independent Women’s Forum and the Women’s Freedom Network. These women and organizations engage in top-down political combat that is different in kind and tone from Schlafly’s bottom-up grassroots approach. Critchlow has left their story for another day, but he has provided a truly compelling account of the woman who began the battle.

Karlyn Bowman is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.