Phyllis Schlafly, whose grass-roots campaigns against communism, abortion and the defeated US equal rights amendment (ERA) galvanized conservatives for almost two generations and helped reshape US politics, died on Monday. She was 92.
Her death was confirmed by the Eagle Forum, an organization she founded in 1975.
In her time, Schlafly was one of the most polarizing figures in US public life.
Richard Viguerie, who masterminded the use of direct mail to finance right-wing causes, called her “the first lady of the conservative movement.”
Feminist leader and author Betty Friedan compared her to a religious heretic, telling her in a debate that she should burn at the stake for opposing the amendment.
Friedan called Schlafly an “Aunt Tom.”
Schlafly became a forceful conservative voice in the 1950s, when she joined the movement against international communism. In the 1960s, with her popular self-published book A Choice, Not an Echo — which sold more than 3 million copies — and a growing group of followers, she gave critical support to the presidential ambitions of then-US senator Barry Goldwater, who went on to lead the Republican Party and planted the seeds of a conservative revival that would flower with the rise of former US president Ronald Reagan.
In the 1970s, Schlafly’s campaign against the amendment played a large part in its undoing. The amendment would have expanded women’s rights by barring any gender-based distinctions in federal and state laws, and it was within hailing distance of becoming the law of the land: Both houses of Congress had passed it by a vote of more than 90 percent, and 35 state legislatures — only three shy of the number required for adoption — had approved it.
Schlafly drove her antagonists to distraction, though they suspected that her biting language was calculated precisely to provoke their outrage.
She said that “sexual harassment on the job is not a problem for virtuous women” and that “sex-education classes are like in-home sales parties for abortions.”
She called the atom bomb “a marvelous gift that was given to our country by a wise God.”
When Freidan, during a debate at Indiana University in 1973, recommended that she burn at the stake, Schlafly replied that she was pleased Friedan had said that because the comment had made it plain just how intolerant “intemperate, agitating proponents of the ERA” were.
In 2010 she said of gay couples: “Nobody’s stopping them from shacking up. The problem is that they are trying to make us respect them, and that’s an interference with what we believe.”
Schlafly maintained an energetic pace into advanced age. In 2011 she spoke out for “shotgun marriages” as the solution to unwanted pregnancies.
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