These activities “unleashed an intense and seemingly irrepressible culture war” during the volatile 70s and early 80s. ĭuring the 20th century, including during her anti-ERA campaign, Schlafly was able to spread and implement her policies through her personal activities such as radio broadcasts, interviews on public television, circulation of her monthly newsletter, and organization and mobilization of churches and local communities. Schlafly’s policies were in dispute with those of feminists like Betty Friedan for instance, Schlafly argued that the ERA was “a direct threat to the protection that mothers and working women enjoyed in American society”. Schlafly’s social policies, especially those towards women, were largely formed during her crucial years as one of the main leaders of the anti-ERA opposition front. She continues to hold these views and seeks, with the Eagle Forum’s help, to implement them as social policy today. During the 70s, while Schlafly worked against the Equal Rights Amendment and pro-ERA feminists, she formed a definitive stance on women’s rights in direct opposition to feminist views of the time. According to feminist Rosalind Pollack Petchesky, “The New Right,” which includes Phyllis Schlafly and her political group the Eagle Forum, “must be understood as a response to feminist ideas and to their strong impact, in the1970s, on popular consciousness”.
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