Love her or hate her, you probably don’t know as much about Phyllis Schlafly as you think.
She’s known among liberals as an “anti-feminist feminist,” the religious conservative who helped stop the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment and criticized the second-wave feminism of the 1960s. To conservatives, Schlafly was the activist who led the charge against social liberalism and abortion on demand.
She was neither a retrogressive villain nor a consummate “hero,” as President Trump proclaimed at her funeral in 2016. At least both sides can agree on this: Schlafly was a tremendously influential activist.
Without Schlafly, the ERA probably would have passed, according to historian Donald Critchlow, a Katzin Family Foundation professor at Arizona State University and author of Phyllis Schlafly and Grassroots Conservatism. Critchlow said Schlafly was able to galvanize diverse interest groups under a single cause: Stop the ERA.
Approved by Congress in 1972, the ERA had one goal: “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.”
But Schlafly worried that rather than ensure gender equality, which was already protected under the 14th Amendment, the ERA would eliminate distinctions between the sexes to the extent that women could be drafted into the military, suffer disadvantages in divorce (no alimony, less custody), and more.
“She warned that the ERA amendment was so loosely worded that it would be translated by the courts to allow abortion on demand and same-sex marriages,” Critchlow told the Washington Examiner.
The ERA seemed on track for ratification by 38 states before the 1979 deadline until Schlafly, to whom Betty Friedan said, “I’d like to burn you at the stake,” galvanized supporters across the country to lobby against the ERA.
The amendment is back in the news now, as it has been passed by a 38th state, Virginia, but cannot make it into the Constitution without a legal battle. That’s all thanks to Schlafly.
Because of the polarizing nature of her activism, Schlafly’s beliefs have been reduced to caricature since the day she began campaigning against the ERA. Her opponents complained that Schlafly was a hypocrite, a woman who preached that women ought to stay in the home while spending much of her time outside of her own. But Schlafly didn’t believe a woman’s place was in the kitchen.
“The difference was that Phyllis believed that if you were a mother, your first responsibility should be to your children,” Critchlow said.
An upcoming TV show about Schlafly, snarkily titled Mrs. America, seems as if it will handle Schlafly and her legacy with a similar surface-level treatment. Starring Cate Blanchett as Schlafly, the show portrays her as cold, calculated, and holier-than-thou.
It seems “reminiscent of how she was being caricatured by her opponents in the 1970s,” Critchlow said.
A scene in which Schlafly fights with her husband, for example, would never have happened in real life. When Critchlow was writing Schlafly’s biography, he said, he had full access to her archives, financial records, correspondence, and family letters. From what he heard and read from her family, such a fight was ludicrous.
“I have let you run around this country with your cause!” Schlafly’s husband shouts on the TV show. But Fred Schlafly “never yelled at his wife,” Critchlow said, calling the scene “so inaccurate, it’s absolutely shocking.”
Mrs. America also strips Schlafly of her humor. Schlafly was famous for saying at the beginning of rallies, “I want to thank my husband, Fred, for letting me come here.”
When Critchlow asked Schlafly about the comment, he said, she told him “she just did it to bug the feminists.”
If Schlafly was so frosty and ill-humored, how could she have become so popular among conservatives? “Looking at that preview,” Critchlow said, it’s hard to have “any sense of why she was idolized by tens of thousands of women.”
The show does get one thing right, though.
“This fight is not about equality,” Schlafly says in the trailer. “It’s about power.”
That’s exactly how Schlafly saw the battle over the ERA. “What Phyllis saw was it was an attempt by the Left to gain more power on every level through ERA,” Critchlow says. “Her complaint was that ‘equality,’ as defined by the amendment, which was loosely worded, was actually vague.”
Schlafly was no boilerplate Republican, either. Critchlow argued that Schlafly would not have claimed the term, but she was a populist. She was pro-labor union and anti-elite.
Mrs. America will likely portray Schlafly unfairly, just as her opponents have done since she first entered the spotlight. One hopes it will “spark conversation,” as co-star Sarah Paulson has said. But, if the show won’t explore Schlafly in her entirety, not just through her nonpolitically correct beliefs, those conversations won’t go far.
If Schlafly were still alive today, though, she’d be able to handle it. As Critchlow says, “She had thick skin.”
