SCHLAFLY, Phyllis Stewart

(b. 15 August 1924 in St. Louis, Missouri), conservative political activist and author who rose in the ranks from local political agitator to influential player in national campaigns, where she brought the agenda of social conservatives to national attention as part of a resurgent New Right.

Schlafly is the elder of two children of John Bruce Stewart, a salesman, engineer, and staunch Republican, and Odile Dodge, a librarian. Schlafly attended mostly public schools until seventh grade, when she enrolled in the Sisters of the Sacred Heart's City House where she learned French, Latin, proper etiquette, and discipline in a challenging and academically rigorous environment. She earned her B.A. degree from St. Louis's Washington University in 1944, an education she financed by working forty-eight hours a week in a World War II ordnance plant, where she fired machine guns at night. Upon graduation she rejected a fellowship from Columbia University for a smaller stipend from Radcliffe College, Harvard University's sister school for women. Earning a M.A. degree in political science in 1945, she chose not to continue toward a Ph.D. but rather to move to Washington, D.C., where her interest in political science could take a more activist approach. Soon disillusioned by the size and scope of the federal government, Schlafly returned to St. Louis in l946, where she ran the congressional campaign of a local Republican, Claude Bakewell, who beat the New Deal incumbent John Sullivan in an upset victory. On 20 October 1949 she married Fred Schlafly, a successful lawyer and political conservative; they have six children.

After marrying and moving to Alton, Illinois, Schlafly continued to immerse herself in civic and community organizations. In 1952 she ran for U.S. Congress from the Twenty-fourth Illinois District, a heavily Democratic county in which no woman had ever been a political candidate. In a campaign in which the press condescendingly focused almost exclusively on her gender, Schlafly won the April Republican primary but lost the election. She served as a 1956 delegate to the Republican National Convention, where she pledged her support to the reelection of Dwight D. Eisenhower and Richard M. Nixon, although she was sorry that Robert Taft had not earned the nomination four years earlier. Throughout the decade, Schlafly's anticommunist zeal intensified, although the 1950s were a mere prologue for what was to come. Schlafly's popularity and influence grew apace during the next two decades as she gained national notoriety.

In 1960 Schlafly attended the Republican National Convention as an alternate delegate pledged to Nixon. As president of the Illinois Federation of Republican Women (1956–1964) in the state hosting the convention, Schlafly picked Arizona senator Barry Goldwater as the keynote speaker at a convention luncheon honoring the fiftieth state, Hawaii. Disappointed by Nixon's compromises with the Republican Party's more liberal, Northeastern wing, Schlafly sought in Goldwater an unapologetic conservative to head the ticket in 1964. Getting the Grand Old Party (GOP) to agree that the Arizona senator represented the future for Republicans posed a major challenge. Seeking to bolster his chances, Schlafly wrote her first book, a history of Republican National Conventions entitled A Choice Not an Echo (1964). She began with the assertion, "Since 1936 the Republican presidential nominee has been selected by a small group of secret kingmakers who are the most powerful opinion makers in the world." In 1964, she argued, the kingmakers must be repudiated. "The Republican Party has one obvious, logical, deserving, winning candidate," Schlafly continued, Barry Goldwater, a candidate who "combines the integrity of Robert A. Taft, with the glamour of Dwight Eisenhower." The book, published and distributed by Schlafly, sold millions of copies (she claims that it is one of the ten best-selling conservative books of all time). More importantly, it helped invigorate the conservative wing of the GOP and paved the way for Goldwater's nomination. Shortly thereafter, more books followed on anti-communism and U.S. foreign policy, which demanded that policy makers take an uncompromising, unapologetic, hard line against the Soviet Union. Schlafly wrote twenty books on topics such as politics, education, gender studies, and foreign policy.

In 1967 Schlafly herself became the victim of the king-makers. She had hoped to be elected president of the National Federation of Republican Women (NFRW) but was opposed by party leaders who, responding to Goldwater's embarrassing defeat, hoped to purge uncompromising ideologues from leadership. They built a strong anti-Schlafly movement, and, most likely with the help of rigged voting machines, ensured her defeat in the first-ever NFRW election. Disappointed, Schlafly returned to Alton, where in 1967 she began printing the Phyllis Schlafly Report, a monthly newsletter for her grassroots supporters around the country, which kept them abreast of current political events and encouraged them to become politically active. In 1968 she attended the GOP convention again, as a Nixon delegate. Running for Congress again in 1970, she was defeated—a defeat that ushered in a new phase of her career as the nation's foremost antifeminist.

Joining the battle over the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), Schlafly devoted her superb organizing and speaking skills to STOP-ERA, a lobbying group that she organized to defeat ratification. Mobilizing thousands of traditionally apolitical women through her newsletter and, later, her national volunteer organization, the Eagle Forum (founded in 1975), she worked tirelessly and ultimately successfully to bury the amendment. Schlafly also earned a law degree from the Washington University Law School in 1978 and has continued to speak out on numerous issues such as foreign policy, education, immigration, and "family values."

Schlafly's life is emblematic of many trends in post-war, twentieth-century politics. A devout Catholic and a devoted mother, few would have guessed during the 1950s that she would become an influential conservative leader. Helping bring Goldwater to the front of the GOP in 1964, Schlafly contributed to both the GOP's shift to the right and to the political and ideological realignment that characterized U.S. politics in subsequent decades. A brilliant populist, she serves as the champion of those women who believe the two sexes are fundamentally different and that feminism is a threat to the norms and values that lend meaning to their lives. And as a beneficiary of the long tradition of progressive women leaders who created the space in American society that allowed her to emerge as a public figure, Schlafly used that space to argue that women's skills are best used in their traditional role as nurturer rather than achiever. Yet she has refused to set such limits on her own ambitions and abilities as she has embraced the causes in which she believes. Despite major ideological differences, Schlafly's own life represents a model of the growth, empowerment, and possibilities that feminists sought for all women.

Biographies of Schlafly include Carol Felsenthal, The Sweetheart of the Silent Majority: The Biography of Phyllis Schlafly (1981), and Peter N. Caroll, Famous in America: The Passion to Succeed (1985). Biographical information is also in Kevin Markey, 100 Most Important Women of the 20^thCentury (1998). On Schlafly and the ERA see Jane Sherron DeHart and Donald G. Mathews, Sex, Gender, and the Politics of ERA: A State and the Nation (1990). Articles about Schlafly are in Rolling Stone (26 Nov. 1981), Ms. (Jan. 1982) and (Sept. 1982), and the National Review (19 Oct. 1992).

Matthew A. Sutton