ISBN: 0895268736
Godina izdanja: 1982
Jezik: Engleski
Autor: Strani

Carol Felsenthal - Phyllis Schlafly: the Sweetheart of the Silent Majority
Regnery Gateway, 1982
337 str.
meki povez
stanje: dobro

A revealing look at the private life and public convictions of Phyllis Schlafly chronicles her rise to national prominence as an archconservative and a determined opponent of the Equal Rights Amendment, gay rights, and reproductive freedom

Phyllis Schlafly was born in St. Louis. Her father, an engineer, lost his job in 1930 in the Depression and her mother worked as a librarian. After attending Catholic schools through her first year in college, Phyllis Schlafly put herself through Washington University by working full-time in a World War II defense job testing explosives. She went to Radcliffe on a fellowship for her master`s degree in government, and then took a job in Washington, D.C. with the American Enterprise Association.

Dissatisfied, she said later, with the bureaucracy of the federal government, Phyllis Schlafly returned to St. Louis to work on a Republican congressional campaign, and she worked as a bank researcher until 1949.

In October of 1949, she married Fred Schlafly, a lawyer, and together they had six children. Based in Alton, Illinois, across the river from St. Louis, Phyllis Schlafly remained active in Republican Party political work. She stressed such issues as anti-Communism and small government.

She ran unsuccessfully for a seat in Congress in 1952, the first of three such unsuccessful campaigns. In the 1950s she wrote several pamphlets about the dangers of Communism and the Soviet Union and served as national defense chairman of the Daughters of the American Revolution. She was a delegate to the Republican National Convention in 1956, supporting Eisenhower. In 1960, Schlafly was a Nixon delegate to the Republican National Convention. She was president of the Illinois Federation of Republican Women from 1956 to 1964.

In 1964, Phyllis Schlafly supported the candidacy of Barry Goldwater, and was a delegate for Goldwater at the Republican National Convention that year. Her book, A Choice Not an Echo, has been credited with helping Goldwater win the nomination. In that book, Schlafly denounced the `small group of secret kingmakers` of the Eastern elite of the party for their influence on Republican presidential nominations since 1936. Goldwater`s landslide defeat did not stop Schlafly and her allies within the party from a strategy of moving the party more to the right.

Between 1964 and 1976, Schlafly co-authored five books on defense and nuclear policy with retired Rear Admiral Chester Ward. She became increasingly critical of U.S. foreign policy as undermining American defenses against Soviet communism.

In 1967, Schlafly lost a hotly-contested election for the presidency of the National Federation of Republican Women, and she founded in that year a newsletter aimed at ultraconservative women, The Phyllis Schlafly Report.

Phyllis Schlafly promoted the Cardinal Mindszenty Foundation, which was co-founded by her sister. In 1971, Phyllis Schlafly co-wrote a book on Mindszenty, a Hungarian anti-communist priest.

By 1972, the proposed Equal Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution had been ratified quickly by 30 of the 38 states needed for adoption. In February of that year, Phyllis Schlafly took on the ERA in The Phyllis Schlafly Report, and she founded STOP-ERA to organize against ratification in the remaining states.

Her arguments against the ERA included claims that it would:

undermine traditional families
remove legal protections of wives
subject women to the military draft
remove barriers to women in combat
promote abortion on demand
open the way for `homosexual marriage`
require that public bathrooms be unisex
At the height of the anti-ERA campaign and arguing for traditional families with stay-at-home-mothers, Phyllis Schlafly returned to school herself and earned a law degree from Washington University Law School in 1978.

Phyllis Schlafly`s anti-ERA efforts were successful. After the ratification period for the ERA expired in June 1982, Phyllis Schlafly leveraged her successful organization into a multi-issue ultraconservative organization, the Eagle Forum. She worked on such `culture` issues as supporting school prayer and opposing `comparable worth` programs.

In 1992, Phyllis Schlafly was in the news because one of her sons `came out` as gay, leading to charges of hypocrisy by her critics. That same year, Schlafly was named Illinois Mother of the Year.

nonfiction