The Republican Party shifted not to the Right, the traditional direction of individual rights, small government, and low taxes, but to burgeoning Federalism that used government as the accepted means for coercing personal behavior. Phyllis helped create that shift; she profited and gloried in her success.
When an intelligent, articulate woman undertakes a clear agenda that in no way conforms to her stated goals it is well to take the irrefutable actions as leading straight to the truth of the matter.
Schlafly herself came from a home where her mother, Odile Dodge, the daughter of the moderately successful attorney, worked as a librarian and a school teacher to support her own family and that of her parents. Schlafly herself was forced, due to the family's financial straits, to begin working early to put herself through college.
Why would Schlafly work to deny to other women the opportunities she took for herself?
The obvious is that this strategy made possible a prominence and prosperity that otherwise would have been impossible. Schlafly was motived by a fierce desire for money and social prominence that also propelled her into the Daughter's of the American Revolution.
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.
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