Schlafly was beautiful, brilliant, unconventional, hated by her enemies. She may be better than most anyone today. Still, for all her greatness, Schlafly was fighting a rear-guard action that ultimately failed as it took too much for granted to work in her own time (and in ours). Hers was the work of the positive world when women were generally more conservative than men. She lived long enough to recognize that her own project had failed.

Feminism is among modernity’s most successful social movements. Feminists pretend to promote choice, but feminist laws and culture really cultivate a particular kind of womanly character, one economically and emotionally independent of men, family, tradition, and marriage. Feminism’s successes pose an acute challenge. Can feminism, which points women away from the family, and a family-centered society coexist?

Conservatives and Christians have been dealing with this challenge for generations, with only limited and short-lived successes. As feminism determines society’s understanding of an honorable woman, opponents of feminism become by definition anti-woman. Prudence seems to demand accommodation to powerful, widely-held social opinions, but accommodation brings social decay. Resistance, on the other hand, means political oblivion.

One method of accommodation is the “who stole feminism” gambit, to borrow the title from a 1995 book by Christiana Hoff Sommers. “Who Stole Feminism” critics oppose the latest, apparently extreme feminist or gender reform in the name of a supposedly true, more moderate, more pro-family feminist path that once existed or could.

In the beginning, they say, feminists embraced salutary goals like increased female opportunity that would not compromise family life or the sexual dance. Later, however, “radical feminists” warred against men or undermined family life or promoted abortion or transgenderism. Such critics of feminism often disagree about what the good feminism represented, why and when things went sideways, and how to bring back the better brand. But they never disclaim the mantle of feminism: Early feminism, real feminism good; later feminism not good.

Another option is opposition, where the risk is political oblivion. The most successful and famous anti-feminist of the past sixty years is Phyllis Schlafly. Schlafly, who died in 2016, is justly considered the most successful organizer in the modern conservative movement. Her successful opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) in the 1970s and 1980s also made her, in the words of her daughter-in-law and co-author, Suzanne Venker, “the premier anti-feminist of the twentieth century.”

Schlafly rejects the “Who Stole Feminism” gambit. When asked later in life whether feminism made any positive contributions to American life, Schlafly only saw debits: “No. I think it’s made women unhappy and it’s made them believe that we live in a discriminatory and unjust society, and that they should look to government to solve their problems.” To read Schlafly’s works (as I have the past year) is to hear nary a nice word about feminism (though a fairer disputer thinks Schlafly is a feminist herself).

The woman was a force of nature, such that her legacy guides, inspires, and intimidates opponents of feminism today. Giants walked on the earth then! Helen Andrews took to the New York Times to explain why the next Phyllis Schlafly has not yet arisen. Rebekah Curtis has given “5 Reasons there is no Phyllis Schlafly 2.0” today.

Schlafly was beautiful, brilliant, unconventional, hated by her enemies. She may be better than most anyone today. Still, for all her greatness, Schlafly was fighting a rear-guard action that ultimately failed as it took too much for granted to work in her own time (and in ours). Hers was the work of the positive world when women were generally more conservative than men. She lived long enough to recognize that her own project had failed.

Schlafly launched her campaign against the ERA with a 1972 essay, “What’s Wrong with ‘Equal Rights’ for Women?” Women’s liberation, she wrote, represented a “total assault on the role of the American woman as wife and mother, and on the family as a basic unit of society.”

Yet “equal rights” already had a basis in American law and culture as Schlafly rose to oppose it. Schlafly accepted earlier feminist reforms and then gave them a most conservative spin. The suffragettes, she concluded, were “family-oriented women who had no desire to eradicate the female nature.” The Equal Pay Act of 1963 accomplished “equal pay for equal work,” which, she said, no one opposes. (Advocates of the family wage do oppose it.) She favored including sex as a protected category in the 1964 Civil Rights Act, though she thought that sex is not the same as race, that the law should allow for reasonable distinctions between the sexes, and that the civil rights framework was destroying male-only spaces.

The ERA’s more radical emphasis on equal rights, she worried, would destroy sex-role realism, the key to healthy family life.

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