Phyllis Schlafly Turns 90 Today
August 15, 2014
By Jeff Lipkes



Very few individuals who were not politicians or generals have had a major impact on American political history. Phyllis Schlafly is one of the exceptions. Twice. In 1964, she helped launch the grass-roots conservative movement that flourishes today, transformed by the internet, and in 1972 she inaugurated what came to be called “social conservatism.”

More than any other individual, she was responsible for the nomination of Barry Goldwater, and thus, indirectly, Ronald Reagan. And virtually single-handedly, she defeated the so-called Equal Rights Amendment

Schlafly was born 90 years ago today in St. Louis, the daughter of John and Odile Stewart. Her father was a machinist who was unemployed through most of the Great Depression. But the Stewarts were not Democrats. “We left the party under Grover Cleveland,” Schlafly says. Her mother worked as a librarian and teacher to support the family, and Schlafly put herself through college (Washington University, where she was elected to Phi Beta Kappa) working in a munitions plant during the war, test-firing .30 and .50 caliber rifles and machine guns 48 hours a week.

Her becoming a political activist was entirely fortuitous, she says.

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She was frustrated, though, that the party’s Presidential nominees were invariably selected by a handful of “king-makers.” They didn’t share the convictions of the rank-and-file, nor aggressively attack the opposition where it was vulnerable. Frequently, they were not even Republicans: Hoover, Wilkie, Eisenhower. She was particularly irked by the way Robert Taft was shunted aside in 1952.

In 1964, she was dismayed to see that once again an East Coast liberal, Nelson Rockefeller, was about to be crowned by the party’s establishment. In a white heat, Schlafly wrote A Choice, Not an Echo, had it privately printed, and began selling copies from her garage.

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