Phyllis Schlafly and Grassroots Conservatism: A
Woman’s Crusade
by Donald T. Critchlow
(Princeton University Press, 438 pages, $29.95)
“I’d like to burn you at the stake!” growled Betty Friedan at
Phyllis Schlafly during a public debate over the Equal Rights
Amendment (ERA) at Illinois State University in 1973. Friedan and
other feminists were unnerved by Schlafly. She was as sophisticated
and accomplished as they were, but profoundly antifeminist. They
tried everything to pass ERA and defeat Schlafly, from bribing
state legislators to using witchcraft, but to no avail.
For decades, academic historians failed to take Schlafly, and
other conservative Republican grassroots activists like her,
seriously. They preferred to crank out works on their heroes of the
grassroots left, whom they considered the vanguard of history. But
when the right failed to follow its Communist nemesis onto the ash
heap of history, and actually proceeded to elect a lasting
congressional majority and another two-term president, liberal
academics were compelled to notice.
In Phyllis Schlafly and Grassroots Conservatism, Donald
T. Critchlow uses the career of the woman feminists love to hate as
a lens through which to examine the neglected history of grassroots
conservatism in postwar America. Critchlow combines scholarly rigor
with fine prose to produce the best book ever written on this
subject.
Critchlow’s study succeeds in part because he has no obvious
antipathy toward his subject and avoids the methodological errors
of other historians. He does not attribute the activities of
grassroots conservatives to racism, status anxiety, or paranoia. He
doesn’t conflate conservatism with the KKK or the militia movement.
Rather, he takes the political beliefs that motivated Schlafly and
her followers seriously, placing them in the tradition of the
Midwestern Old Right: religious, suspicious of big government, and
wary of entanglements abroad.
She and other conservative GOP activists, explains Critchlow,
descend from the tradition of civic republicanism that dates back
to the 18th century, a tradition that identifies the health of
republican government with the virtue of private individuals and
families, of which women are the special guardians.
Critchlow wisely admonishes students of the postwar right not to
look at its political ascent as inevitable. There were many points
at which the conservative movement could have slipped off its
upward path. Critchlow reminds us that conservative intellectuals
did not simply plant the seed from which the grassroots grew, as
the story usually goes, but watched the grassroots sprout up
simultaneously and independently.
The intellectuals and activists then came together. Schlafly was
a central figure in uniting these two indispensable components of
the movement. By writing, speaking, and organizing seminars, she
brought ideas to the activists.
Most historians trace the shifting of the cultural divide in
America among Protestants, Catholics, and Jews to the '60s
revolution from which a new division between secularists and
religious believers sprang. But Critchlow discovered that this
realignment began much earlier in the grassroots anti-Communist
movement. Like conservative intellectuals, grassroots conservatives
were willing to look beyond their theological differences because
of their shared commitment to fighting Communism. The intellectuals
and activists of the right viewed the Cold War as a titanic
struggle between good and evil through which all political events
were interpreted.
Loosely united at first, conservative intellectuals and
activists were tightly bound together by the 1964 presidential
campaign of Barry Goldwater. In the campaign, Schlafly displayed
her trademark talent for combining principled idealism with
practical political activity. Her book A Choice, Not an
Echo made Schlafly a figure of national prominence by selling
3.5 million copies and by helping Goldwater secure the GOP
nomination from Establishment “kingmakers.”
While Schlafly’s book made her a heroine to conservatives,
reports Critchlow, it also aroused anger from liberal Republicans,
who, with the connivance of the RNC, stole the presidency of the
National Federation of Republican Women from her in 1967. But by
then Schlafly had built an army of conservative women activists who
would march with her in the battle for which she became most
famous.
THE EQUAL RIGHTS AMENDMENT had been endorsed in the Republican and
Democratic party platforms since the 1940s. ERA sounded innocuous,
stating simply that “Equality of rights under the law shall not be
denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account
of sex.” In 1972, both houses of Congress passed it, rejecting
amendments that would have formally recognized traditional
protections women have received from the law. They gave the states
seven years to ratify it. Within a year, 30 states had done so,
leaving supporters eight more state legislatures to convince.
Schlafly argued that once ERA was the law of the land, feminists
would use federal courts to implement their agenda, which included
abortion on demand, women in combat, and homosexual marriage. In
1973, Roe v. Wade gave her claim added urgency and
credibility.
She organized women at the grassroots to “STOP ERA” and
succeeded because the feminists lacked a comparable organization
and relied on an expensive media campaign. The feminists got
Congress to unconstitutionally extend the deadline to pass ERA
until 1982, but desperation made them use increasingly extreme
tactics that backfired.
By 1982, the political landscape had changed dramatically. ERA
was dead, and the activists opposed to it were going strong. They
remained active in the GOP and had found a potent issue in the
left’s undemocratic use of the Supreme Court to engineer social
change.
Donald Critchlow’s political biography of Phyllis Schlafly is a
useful corrective to most other histories of grassroots
conservatism and closes the gap between historiography on feminists
and their numerous opponents from their own sex. Let us hope that
more historians emulate Critchlow, and that more women emerge to
emulate Schlafly.
