Founding mother.(Phyllis Schlafly and Grassroots Conservatism: A Woman's Crusade)(Book Review)

Phyllis Schlafly and Grassroots Conservatism: A Woman's Crusade, by Donald T. Critchlow (Princeton, 438 pp., $29.95)

DURING a 1973 debate with Phyllis Schlafly, Betty Friedan fumed, "I'd like to burn you at the stake." But Friedan's conservative witch was inflammable, and unflappable. By the time the veteran conservative organizer was leading the successful battle to kill the Equal Rights Amendment, she was immune to the rantings of an angry feminist. For over 20 years, Phyllis Schlafly had been patronized, purged, and pilloried for the causes she championed. The praise she deserves has finally arrived, in this overdue tribute to her half-century of grassroots activism.

Had Schlafly been a figure of the Left, this book extolling her remarkable achievements would join a bookcase of similar flattering portraits acknowledging her as one of the most influential Americans in the second half of the 20th century. But because her influence prevented a destructive feminist agenda from being enshrined in the Constitution, she has had to wait 50 years for this book--the work of a respectful academic who has delved into the archives to tell an important untold story.

Donald T. Critchlow, a history professor at St. Louis University, examines in the book the largely ignored role of activists in the rise of the Right. He notes that the intellectual seeds sown by conservative theorists would have perished on barren soil but for the organizers who popularized and propagated their views. "How," he asks, "had a small movement, consisting of a few conservative intellectuals and grassroots anti-Communist activists in the 1950s, become so powerful as to radically change American politics in ways arguably comparable to Jacksonian democracy in the 1830s or the Republican party in the 1860s?" He analyzes this transformative upheaval in American politics through the political career of a young housewife from Alton, Illinois.

Long before the modern women's movement, Phyllis Stewart was making her own way. She was born in St. Louis in 1924. Her mother, who had graduated from college in 1920 and went to work to help support the family during the Depression, was ambitious for her two daughters. After graduating as valedictorian from a Catholic girls' high school, Phyllis finished Washington University in three years, graduating Phi Beta Kappa while working the night shift at an ordnance plant. She earned an M.A. in political science from Radcliffe in 1945.

Back home in St. Louis--after a brief stint in Washington, D.C., as a researcher for the American Enterprise Association (now Institute)--she worked for a local bank writing speeches for its executives and making a few of her own to women (on investment and estate planning). An early press notice described the "blonde banking expert" as a "forceful speaker." In 1949, this independent young career woman met a Harvard lawyer 15 years her senior and what she described as a "happy intellectual partnership" was born. Fred and Phyllis Schlafly took an extra suitcase of books on their Mexican honeymoon before settling in Illinois.

Local Republican officials urged Fred to run for Congress in 1952. When he demurred, "I am not your guy," one of them asked, "What about Phyllis?" They had found their girl. Critchlow writes that the 28-year-old candidate brought to that race the "moral sensibility, [the] righteousness that did not allow easy compromise over principle, and [the] inner tenacity beneath [her] well-spoken words" that would characterize all of her political crusades. She ran as an "average housewife" and a dedicated anti- Communist in favor of increased defense spending and lower taxes. Although she and Eisenhower both lost in the Democratic district, Phyllis would remain the more public partner in the ...