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Phyllis schlafly feminist fantasies5/28/2023 Schlafly became a household name in the early 1970s when she launched STOP-ERA, the anti-feminist organization formed to prevent ratification of the gender-equality amendment. As she grew in influence, it was exactly the activist framework pioneered by feminists that she used in her long, and ultimately unsuccessful, efforts to stop them. “I consider you an Aunt Tom,” National Organization for Women founder and writer Betty Friedan famously told Schlafly in a 1973 debate, repurposing an expression for racial betrayal and leveling it against a woman who used her public stature to argue for the continued confinement of women to the domestic sphere.īut perhaps the great irony of the most famous anti-feminist icon in recent history is that Schlafly couldn’t have done it without feminism. She fought for what she called the “rights of the wife” against the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970s, which would have guaranteed equal rights to women in the Constitution, but herself was an accomplished activist and writer with a law degree. The life of conservative icon Phyllis Schlafly, who died on Monday at age 92, is riddled with ironies. She is an assistant professor at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center and co-host of the Past Present podcast. Nicole Hemmer is author of Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics.
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