Opposing the Equal Rights Amendment was a job, nothing more. The arguments she carefully honed each shared that they were posed in heavily charged emotional terms, threatening dire changes in the culture. In each case she made sure that the objective facts were not available to legislators actually making the decision to vote for or against the ERA. That has remained her strategy ever since.
It is true that Phyllis Schlafly was personally responsible for the derailing of the ERA; what was missed was the fact that the ERA was needed to make the torturous process of trying to simulate equality through the intrusion of government at all levels unnecessary.
In vilifying the women she dismissed as 'feminists' Schlafly ignored for her own benefit the generations of women who had endured a reality that refused them the rights that preexist all government, as promised in America's Mission Statement, the Declaration of Independence.
Schlafly understood what she was doing and for whom she worked. That work made her wealthy and fed the hunger for prestige in her. We all paid. The time has come to see her for what she is and deliver justice. Women, right and left, want to leave a better world for all of our children. Let's come together and make it happen despite the Schlaflys.
1 | 2
