Phyllis Schlafly's good fight against the ERA

Phyllis Schlafly, the longtime conservative activist and author who died earlier this week, famously led the fight against the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970s. The amendment said that neither the federal government nor any state could abridge or deny any right on the basis of sex, and its ratification seemed like a lock. Both parties supported it, and it passed the Senate in 1972 with 84 votes.

Then came Schlafly, who organized a small army of traditionalist women to defeat it.

Her argument was that however unobjectionable most people found the amendment’s language, judges would use it to push through policies many of those same people would dislike. If the military draft ever returned, the amendment would mean that women had to be subject to it. Supporters of the right to abortion that the Supreme Court had recently pretended to find in the Constitution would use the ERA to strengthen their case, too.