Phyllis Schlafly's influence lives on in Donald Trump's candidacy
Rest in peace, Phyllis Schlafly. I respected her for her leadership skills, even when she campaigned against almost all of the causes that I supported.
I also was often bewildered by her contradictions. In that I was not alone. Schlafly, who died Monday at age 92 in her home in St. Louis, was the quintessential anti-feminist leader in the 1970s, yet she lived a life that embodied in many ways the feminist dream.
She was a proud wife and mother but also a lawyer who built her own media empire, wrote or edited 20 books, published a monthly newsletter, wrote a syndicated newspaper column (a colleague!), produced radio commentaries, anchored a radio talk show and maintained stardom on the college lecture circuit.
To me she was the anti-feminist feminist. She founded the Eagle Forum, a potent social conservative group, denounced feminism as promoting "power for the female left" and called "oppression by the patriarchy," among other feminist arguments, a "ridiculous idea."
Yet she maintained the view that a woman's most important job was to be a wife and mother -- even as she publicly thanked her wealthy lawyer husband, Fred Schlafly, who died in 1993, for saving her from "the life of a working girl."
Instead he enabled her activism by employing a full-time housekeeper to help them to raise their six children. Nice.
Hypocritical? Of course, she believed in equal pay for equal work, she said. But she opposed the government "intrusion," in her view, that the Equal Rights Amendment would bring -- including, she argued, the drafting of women into the military.
False as I believe that argument to be, I cannot deny that Schlafly's rallying of opposition to ERA in 1972 until it died a decade later was a breathtaking demonstration of how much power one determined woman can leverage against a major cause -- and win.
The ERA merely declared that "equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex." Schlafly's campaign killed that seemingly innocuous amendment by linking it in the public mind to coed bathrooms, gay rights and the draft.
But as a politically aware African-American kid, I felt Schlafly's influence as early as 1960. She was one of the "moral conservatives" whom I saw on TV in full revolt at the Grand Old Party's convention against a civil rights plank that called for "aggressive action" against segregation and discrimination.
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