Conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly dies at age 92

Phyllis Schlafly, who waged a successful campaign against the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to the Constitution in the 1970s, died this afternoon of cancer at her house in St. Louis. She was 92.

Schlafly led the campaign against the ERA at a time when, as she said, “we had no Rush Limbaughs, no Fox News, no ‘no-spin zone’ to challenge the need for the amendment. We had no internet, no e-mail, no fax machines to help rally an opposition.”

The ERA stated, “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.” Introduced in Congress at the time of the women’s suffrage movement, the amendment sat in committee for 50 years until the National Organization for Women stormed Congress and demanded a vote. Overwhelmingly approved, its ratification by the states seemed inevitable.

Schlafly launched her opposition with the article “What’s Wrong with Equal Rights for Women?” That was the first of nearly 100 articles and 41 state hearing testimonies exposing potential bad effects of the amendment.

Proponents characterized the ERA as an equal employment measure, but Schlafly called the ERA “a total assault on the role of the American woman as wife and mother and on the family as the basic unit of society.” She saw “no more satisfying or more creative career for a woman than marriage and motherhood” and praised the opportunity of American women to have those satisfactions and still pursue a second career “to suit our intellectual, cultural, or financial tastes or needs.” A constitutional lawyer who grew up Roman Catholic in St. Louis, Schlafly was a prolific author, radio commentator, and conservative activist. She and her husband of 44 years, John Fred Schlafly Jr., who died in 1993, had six children and more than a dozen grandchildren.