In 1944 she earned her master’s degree in political science from Radcliffe College, now known as Harvard University. Schlafly framed abortion as a moral and cultural issue in a strategic attempt to grow the Republican Party she maintained that abortion was about protecting the unborn which helped her grow in popularity among religious groups and conservatives who soon mobilized to fight against the procedure. One of those conservative strategists was a woman named Phyllis Schlafly, a grassroots activist, attorney, author, and paleoconservative, who slowly grew eminence through her belief in Christian values, nationalism, and her opposition to the feminist movement. The drastically polarized sentiments seen in the abortion debate today can be attributed to conservative political strategists and grassroots activists who engineered the issue of abortion to be a partisan one. are more specifically concerned with protecting marriage - in part from the damage done by state ERAs.The emergence of a debate over abortion arose in the 1970s, which triggered a decades-long political realignment that shifted the axis of the two parties’ coalitions more along lines of cultural attitudes than socio-economic interests. Nowadays, Eagle Forum is content that the Equal Rights Amendment is dead as a viable national movement, despite Ted Kennedy's hopes (the ERA is his bill in the Senate) for its revival.

Cole remembers, 'One of the things I learned from watching Phyllis is that you always have to think like a chess player when dealing with the radical feminists.' Sheila Cole, now a senior House staffer, wasn't alive yet when Schlafly was first taking on the ERA, but worked with Schlafly as executive director of Eagle Forum in the late 1990s. House of Representatives and in the Senate. As late as last year, the ERA was reintroduced in both the U.S. The Schlafly-was-right point about the ERA and marriage is worth noting - not just for historical-accuracy reasons but because the Left keeps trying to revive the old loser.

Critchlow recalls in Phyllis Schlafly and Grassroots Conservatism, Schlafly replied, 'I'm glad you said that because it just shows the intemperate nature of proponents of the ERA.' For Schlafly, Friedan's fury came in handy. 'Hey, Phyllis, your sheet is showing,' a Doonesbury cartoon 'joked.' Famously, during a debate at Illinois State University in 1973, the late feminist mother Betty Friedan angrily declared, 'I consider you a traitor to your sex, an Aunt Tom.' Friedan said that she wanted to burn Schlafly at the stake. Agree or disagree with her politics, Phyllis Schlafly was right - the Hawaii supreme court was the first, in 1993, to rule that its state ERA mandated same-sex marriage.Īt the time of the big ERA fight, of course, you might have thought she was nuts.

Phyllis schlafly feminist fantasies