Phyllis Schlafly’s Lasting Legacy in Defeating the E.R.A.

Schlafly used the "big lie" technique long before Donald Trump came along. She knew that repeating any statement nonstop makes it "true" and that appealing to the emotions with wild accusations and declarations renders logical and detailed responses impotent. Ironically, feminist leaders could have ridiculed her with the same or similar statements used during the 19th and early 20th centuries against female suffrage and the 19th Amendment. Giving women the vote was also supposed to destroy marriage, motherhood and other horrible things. Unfortunately, no one thought of that.

The bedrock of Schlafly's activism is actually her (and many other peoples') opposition to abortion. The ERA, if it had been enacted would probably void any and all laws attempting to limit access to abortion -- and let's not forget -- contraception. Schlafly had plenty of support much which gradually eroded. However it is disappointing to realize that so many people - especially women - believed her essentially deceitful message.

Take Comfort in knowing she will be remembered in American History but not kindly.

How did Phyllis Schlafly's "activism" influence my life?
As a long term voting activist with three daughters and an infant granddaughter, my mother and grandmother, who pushed for women's equality; I am sad to admit my activism had no influence on my daughters. Even their Father the second strongest supporter in our family jumped on the soap box for equal rights. Many times we had them attend women rights meetings and emailed them articles proving the need for equal rights. I can't begin to count the dinner debates we had over the issue. After many years of debates they STILL clung to the idea women didn't need a constitutional amendment for the ERA.
Then they went to college and continued to believe that there isn't a need to have a constitutional amendment for equal rights because "we have those rights without it". That was, before they had to battle the insurance companies for family planning rights or until they were passed up for jobs, or promotions and raises because a man was competing for it. I won't EVEN start to discuss the sexual discrimination or sexual harassment that our girls and their friends experienced on numerous jobs, even in high school. Then our oldest daughter had a baby and she had to fight for longer maternity leave than 6 weeks, because she couldn't get good childcare. NOW all 3 "GET IT".
Thanks to Phyllis Schlafly's anti-ERA campaign, all American women STILL are battling discrimination issues my grandmother did a hundred years ago.

She did not defeat the ERA alone -- she had much help in,that regard. Wimen earn approximately .75 for every dollar paid to a male. Big business knows this all too well. athey were more than happy to bankroll Phyllis and her friends. Another legacy -- which is far more tragic -- is the half empty Masses and abakndoned seminaries she left behind. She probably closed more Catholic Churches than Martin Luther himself.

When my mother headed up the pro-ERA lobby at the Ga State Capital in Atlanta in the early 70s, Phylis Shafley came to Atlanta with her entourage. When Ms. Shafley saw my mother, then a women in her early 50s with a large 'Pass ERA' button on her sweater, Shafley said to her "you ERA women just hate men". At that my mother, then a widow with 6 children, said "please tell that to my deseased husband and six healthy children".

Of course my mother, widowed at 42 with 6 children, had witnessed that even after getting her Busness Administration Bachelors at Ga. State University with honors that the only job offered to her was a secretary while men with the same degree were given management positions. She lobbied extremely hard and came within an earshot of the Ga. Assembly passing the ERA, but Shafley and her 'unisex bathrroms', 'topless teenagers', and 'lesbian men-haters' ruled the day.

40 years later my mother at 96 sees this same tactic in Trump to make people hate again and stop progress.

Phyllis Schlafly, never once in her 92 years, ever brought up the fact that it was The United States, in writing the Constitution for Japan after World War 2, that made the females of that country absolutely and utterly equal.

Utterly. Totally. Absolutely.
She never once brought up that our government had ALREADY passed an Equal Rights Amendment..... just on another country, not this country.

She knew. She just kept her mouth shut on it.
How would it look if she'd brought it up?
It would undermine all of her blather, her misdirection, her favorite talking points. Bathrooms! she cried out, echoing Jerry Falwell, The women will want to use unisex bathrooms!

Odd. Why wouldn't I want to use a unisex-bathroom?

And, don't forget: At the same time 'where would the little women pee?' was the big issue, that was the same time that Reaganomics was touting "The Trickle-Down Theory of Economics", the ultimate urinating on the heads of poor women AND poor men.

Equal Rights?
Phyliss knew very well that this nation was fully capable of passing an ERA for the women of this country.
She knew because she saw it done after WW2.

Phyliss made a lot of money in her life, got decades of glorious praise, power up the wazoo.
She got all that by keeping her pointy-toed high-heels on the throats of other women.

Her legacy will be that of Jim Crow, another artful legal creation of the rightists, conservatives, religionists, sexists, misogynists, racists and backers of Trump.

Pass the ERA, now!

Just as a single talented individual can help create great good (MLK) a person can inflict great suffering . We sometimes forget the great talent of those who hurt their society.

"Do as I say and not as I do." Mrs. Schafly wanted to be the only empowered woman. It's kind of like J. Edgar Hoover wanted to be the only power-sanctioned gay man, and so on.
Authoritarians are NOT what this country needs.

She was a traitor to all of us women.
I never could understand then or now why a woman would oppose equal rights for women. The 1964 civil rights act exempted elected officials so congressmen could discriminate. Women who sabotage other women are the worst. Look at the women who don't want a woman president. It's still a man's world out there.

From LGBT rights to the Lilly Ledbetter Act, woman have continued the fight to attain recognition, respect, equality. From my perspective it is unfathomable that the ERA amendment didn't pass, and still to this day has not. One can only wonder what the political, social, and industrial/business sectors would be like today if it had, for this fight for equality, in a country based on human rights and dignity and the pursuit of happiness, continues.

And yet women's pursuit of education and career never stopped their calling to nurture and take care of the home, the family. Sales and ratings for such media as Martha Stewart's Living were likely at record levels. Entertaining, Cosmopolitan, "Shape", all were still big hits. Superwomen they have been called, especially in the 90s, which we now know does not exist. But from it I've seen more equality emerge in the home, more sharing of responsibility, more unity.

Yet, and in all due respect, we must recognize even to this day that sweeping change rarely happens. If it does people are left behind and who will compensate for this injustice.

The fight for ERA may be a dim memory. Maybe in part because women are still too busy fighting for their rights, not so much as a movement as isolated within their own situation. What would happen if we had similar unity for ERA. What will happen in this next election; who will fill the seat on the Supreme Court -- for that has been the primary recourse to continue the fight for equality.

It's remarkable how indifferent we humans are to things that may affect others deeply but don't affect us. Equally, it's remarkable how quickly, indignantly and passionately we engage with issues that directly threaten our safety, way of life, comfort or pocket book.

If all the women, old men and children, and in particular the rich of both sexes, had had to go off to fight in all the wars we have ever fought, to kill and be killed, to return home maimed and permanently damaged, how many wars would we have entered?

When my kids were still infants, I was up all night every night seeing to their needs, and still cycling ten miles off to work in the morning, in the dark through the wind and the rain while heavy trucks thundered past me inches from my back wheel, spraying me as they went. But give me that any time rather than having to pull out and fix a clogged and broken gear box in the middle of the desert in 120 degrees in the shade, a thousand miles from the nearest town.

After a few years towards the beginning of their marriage, after their children were born, my mother and maternal grandmother never worked again full-time. Poor them? Hardly. They were lucratively supported by their husbands. They had a gardener and a cleaner. The only thing they had to, because cooks were hard to come by even back then, was to cook the evening meal. Moreover, even this they hated and resented.

Legacy? Is that what it's called? As in John Wilkes Booth's legacy?

What colossal arrogance to destroy an opportunity for protect women's right to choose what was best for themselves, and guarantee their freedom from discrimination. How ironic that people who scream loudest about personal freedom and individual responsibility strive to institutionalize conformity with people like themselves. I personally feel that Schlafly's soul will be attracted to the absence of love and light. Shoo Phyllis. May the immense evil you've created guide you on your way.

Despite having lived through those years, I had not realized the damage done by this single woman. Surely, historians will always describe her influence. Only time will tell how far she set back the cause of women's rightful equality. She belongs among the evil characters of the twentieth century, and young women today should learn of how much this one woman harmed them.

She was an ideological monster. Who cares about the “disgruntled, unhappy women" that she left in her misogynist wake? What did she say about women serving in the military before her death? Was she still against them receiving combat pay despite their sacrifices? Hadn't she woken up yet to the new world where women work work in so many fields except that they remain second-class citizens? Had she seen her nightmare come true?

Schlafly's actions were the moral and political equivalent of reversing abolition or legalizing child labor. She was what many folks blessed with common sense classify as a "book idiot." Schlafly and her followers temporarily blocked women's de facto and de jure equality in the U.S. and, therefore, in the world, but she and her benighted minions did not destroy the dream. There are worldwide movements afoot, even in the misogynist Islamic world, to recognize that the intellectual, spiritual, physical, social, and emotional enslavement of women wastes 50% of humanity. Liberty should be defined from the bottom up, not from the top down.

“I think she’s (Schlafly) probably the best political organizer we’ve seen in American history,” Rick Perlstein, an author who has chronicled the American right, told Retro Report."

Better than say Martin Luther King? Hardly.

she was out of time and lived too long. Women and what they can accomplish have long ago surpassed the limitations she would put on them. It is funny too since she never followed her dictates to other women.

Anne-Marie nails it in her comments below. I can only add that history is on the side of the Progressives and society usually solves its problems. As Ann-Marie says, "we are moving in the right direction."

Schlafly won the battle, but thankfully, is still losing the war. She was a classic authoritarian conservative who made rules for others that she defied herself, by becoming an attorney, a political activist, and a candidate for office. Naturally I have no way of knowing what was truly in her heart, but I suspect that, like many pols she saw an opportunity for her own advancement and seized it. In the end I think all she won was a minor footnote in history.

I remember traditional women saying "Well, what am I going to do if this passes? I don't have a college education...." Change is understandably scary and Schlafly capitalized on the fear.

How fitting that Schlafly's last interview was with "Retro" Report. The name says it all. She was a hypocrite. No friend to women.

A woman who could not have done the damage she did without a rich husband.

Phyllis Schlafly was an intelligent, professionally accomplished, and hard working woman in a man's world. She ran for office but was not elected. She worked hard to be respected at the top levels of public policy, but she couldn't seem to break through. Finally, in opposing feminism and the ERA, Phyllis Schlafly began to get traction to make a name for herself, and she kept pursuing it. Unfortunately, her new soapbox employed the same mid-twentieth-century sexism that had held her back from achieving her own dreams, but this time she used it herself as a tool against other women. Lasting legacy, indeed.

It's partly a generational thing. I have somewhere a letter my mother wrote in which she says, "The ERA failed, thank God." She was a smart, academically oriented woman who, like much of her generation, left work when she got married (she had to, in 1946 her employer did not employ married women who were to be supported by their husbands), had three kids and was what used to be called a housewife, now a stay-at-home-mom. She did, much later, get a bachelors and a masters, but for her own enjoyment. She never re-entered the workforce.

My guess is that her opposition to the ERA was two-fold. In part, the scare was that it would make legal things which many of her generation either did not understand (homosexual relationships) or found foreign and immoral (abortion - then a 'back alley' procedure having nothing to do with happily married women who had much wanted children).

The other piece is that women's lib in general suggested a path not taken or available to women like her, perhaps suggesting to them that they had missed out on something...

The fact that much of what the anti-ERA crowd feared has been enacted nonetheless shows, in a way, that it was not needed. Time and changes in society took its place. Women have not yet attained full equality, but the world continues to evolve. The process is more piecemeal, but we are moving in the right direction.