Phyllis Shlafly, the towering figure of anti-feminist conservative politics, has passed away at 91 years old.
Here’s a good obit from the L.A. Times:
Phyllis Schlafly, the political activist who galvanized grass-roots conservatives in the 1970s to help defeat the Equal Rights Amendment and effectively push the Republican Party to the right in ensuing decades, has died. She was 92.
Known as “the first lady of anti-feminism,” Schlafly died Monday of natural causes. Her death was confirmed by Ryan Hite, a spokesman for the St. Louis-based Eagle Forum. Hite said Schlafly was in the presence of family when she died at her home there.
Schlafly had been a standard bearer for the conservative branch of the Republican Party for decades, writing the influential book “A Choice Not an Echo” to help Barry Goldwater secure his party’s presidential nomination in 1964.
Beginning in 1972, she led opposition to the ERA — a 52-word constitutional measure that guaranteed equal rights under the law regardless of gender — arguing that it would mark the end of the traditional family.
And,
“Phyllis Schlafly courageously and single-handedly took on the issue of the Equal Rights Amendment when no one else in the country was opposing it,” James C. Dobson, chairman and founder of Focus on the Family, told the St. Louis Dispatch in 2005. “In so doing, she essentially launched the pro-family, pro-life movement.”
Her calmly expressed, unshakable conviction that the amendment was a threat to a woman’s financial security and traditional motherhood drove pro-ERA audiences crazy.
“The only way to debate Phyllis Schlafly is to jump up and down and shout ‘Liar, liar, liar!’” one feminist told Newsweek in 1977. (The magazine branded her “the first lady of anti-feminism” in 1979.)
May she rest in peace.