What Phyllis Schlafly Believed

Phyllis Schlafly, who died yesterday at the age of 92, will long be remembered as one of the most politically consequential figures of her time. A tireless critic of feminism, she is best known for her successful campaign to block passage of the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970s. Through her many books, speaking engagements, newspaper columns, and near constant public writing for her monthly newsletter published by the organization she founded (the Eagle Forum), her impact was far wider than the ERA, as she helped shape vast numbers of conservative Americans’ views on everything from abortion and school prayer to racial inequality (she opposed civil rights reforms), the purported cause of sex scandals on college campuses (too many female students), and the evils, as she saw them, of Islam. She also persuaded countless numbers to reject the political “kingmakers” in the Republican Party—those northeastern elites who, she argued in her 1964 book A Choice Not an Echo and forever afterward, had unfairly picked Republican nominees for generations, rather than letting the grassroots choose their candidate. Most recently, she was vocal in her fervent support of one such grassroots contender, Donald Trump.