Phyllis Schlafly's Crusade

After Richard Nixon's resignation in 1974, many predicted the Republican Party's demise. Remarkably, however, by 1980 the GOP had remade its image. For a substantial number of Americans, the Republican Party was no longer the party of big business and wealthy interests. Instead it was the "party of the little guy, the regular American Joe and his wife," in opposition to the Democratic Party of "elitists who imposed schemes of social engineering, social privilege, and special interest—all at the expense of the hard-working middle-class" (p. 214). This populist makeover has been profoundly important to the rise of the right and the transformation of American politics in the last thirty years. Key to that process, argues Donald Critchlow in this fascinating book, was the Illinois housewife, author, and grassroots organizer Phyllis Schlafly.

Curiously, most historians of the American right have slighted Schlafly's role until now. Schlafly is best known for her successful efforts to defeat ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) in the 1970s and perhaps for that reason she has received more attention from women's historians. Critchlow's interest in Schlafly lies in "what her political activities tell us about the transformation of the Republican party" from one dominated by liberals and moderates in the 1950s to one that, by the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, has become decidedly conservative (p. 4). The energy propelling that broader shift, in this telling, was to be found not so much in the pages of the National Review, but rather at the grassroots. And Schlafly, as a highly effective organizer and motivator of the grassroots, was key to that story.

The anti-ERA movement was the immediate catalyst for the Party's transformation in the seventies as it helped revitalize the badly weakened conservative faction within the GOP. Schlafly's influential role within the grassroots right, however, dated back to the 1950s and 1960s, when her speeches and articles, her involvement with numerous anticommunist organizations, her role in securing the presidential nomination for Barry Goldwater in 1964, and her co-authorship of several books on national defense slowly helped build a motivated, organized grassroots opposition to liberalism. Schlafly's famous opposition to feminism emerged later in her career, and Critchlow's long view of her activism allows us to see that work in the scope of her entire political life. (Indeed, her anti-ERA work earns only one chapter out of eleven).

Phyllis Stewart was born in St. Louis in 1924 to Catholic Republican parents who supported the ambitions of their daughters. Phyllis excelled in college and in graduate work at Radcliffe. She then went to Washington, D.C. where she worked with the newly formed American Enterprise Association. Upon returning to the Midwest, she helped produce a monthly newsletter of decidedly conservative views for customers of a St. Louis bank. Phyllis Stewart was already an articulate, committed conservative when she met her future husband, the widely read and well-connected Fred Schlafly, who shared his wife's political views.

While raising a family that would eventually grow to include six children, the Schlaflys became leaders within the Midwestern Republican right. Fred Schlafly's connections aided his wife considerably. Together they would start an anticommunist foundation, attend Republican presidential conventions, and have the ear of influential leaders on the right, first locally and then nationally. When Fred turned down the request of conservatives in his district that he run for the Republican congressional primary in 1952, it was suggested that his young wife throw her hat in the ring. Phyllis Schlafly won the primary and although she lost in the general election, the campaign allowed her to hone her gifts for organizing, public speaking, and debating that would prove so formidable to future opponents. During the campaign, she denounced Democrats for allowing communists to infiltrate the government, attacked the Korean War as unnecessary, and called for an end to the draft. Her skepticism about militarization and...