Phyllis Schlafly set the conservative agenda, and set back equality for women

Decades before a single school district discussed which bathroom a transgender student should use, citizens were warned that if the Equal Rights Amendment was made into law, gender-specific restrooms would be no more. Women would pee next to men.

It sounds silly but it worked. The ERA – which promises nothing more than equal rights – fell three states shy of ratification. Few things raise the hackles of ‘Murica more than where we go to eliminate.

And that? Was the genius of Phyllis Schlafly, who died on Monday at age 92. She left in her wake a scorched-earth landscape of ultra-conservative canon unhinged and unchanged by the passage of time.

{mosads}Schlafly burst onto the national scene with a 1964 book, “A Choice Not an Echo,” her plea for more conservative politics within her beloved Republican party. Barry Goldwater loved the book, and it’s tempting to wonder if Trump tore a few pages from it for his lurch to the White House.

To mark her passing, Trump tweeted an encouragement for everyone to buy Schlafly’s latest (and last, one would assume) book, “The Conservative Case for Trump,” which she co-authored.

Tell me if this sounds familiar: The system, wrote Schlafly, is rigged. Candidates are chosen behind the scenes, and those candidates emphatically do not work for you, the voter. They certainly didn’t work for Schlafly, who as a devout Roman Catholic had firm views on abortion, on LGBTQ issues, on a host of other issues which became hot bullets fired in the so-called culture wars.

Maybe that explains Schlafly’s outsized influence on American politics. She was firing those bullets before the rest of us knew there was a war.

Her 1964 book’s cover was a photo of the author, beaming beneath her perfectly coiffed hair, neck rung with a double strand of pearls. That was Schlafly’s pose through the years for multiple publications, founding of the conservative Eagle Forum, speeches, and public appearances.

Neither her hair nor her politics softened. As recently as February, she fretted in an Eagle Forum radio commentary that immigration should be stopped because foreign-born players were taking American baseball players’ jobs. The “foreign influx,” she said “might help explain why our youth is abandoning baseball.”

You can’t argue with the logic – there isn’t any – but framing a fear of immigrants in the context of our national pastime is masterful stuff. She was, in the words of The Atlantic Monthly, America’s first troll, capable of instigating passion and bringing out bodies (mostly female ones) to flood state capitols when necessary.

On sex education classes: “In-home sales parties for abortions.”

On women in combat: “Cutting edge of the feminist goal to force us into an androgynous society.”

On sexual harassment in the workplace: “Not a problem for virtuous women.”

She saved her best (or worst) for feminists who were, she believed, running counter to nature’s (and God’s) law by seeking equality. The feeling was mutual. Betty Friedan once called Schlafly an Aunt Tom and suggested she deserved being burned at the stake.

We have courts that would not allow that. We also have courts that are more conservative because of Schlafly, and modern-day candidates (including those purporting to represent the Tea Party) who cling to her party line even if they haven’t read a single word she wrote. For decades, she swayed minds by tapping into fears and though her public appearances had lessened over the last few years, her stranglehold on the Republican party never loosened. That party – and the rest of us – will be a long time undoing her damage.

Campbell is a journalist, author and distinguished lecturer in journalism at the University of New Haven. She is the author of Dating Jesus: Fundamentalism, Feminism and the American Girl and the upcoming Searching for The American Dream in Frog Hollow. Her work has appeared in the Hartford Courant, Connecticut Magazine, The New Haven Register and The Guardian. Follow her @campbellsl

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