Phyllis Schlafly dead at 92

“Phyllis Schlafly spent an astounding 70 years in public service of her fellow Americans,” said the Eagle Forum in a statement. “Her focus from her earliest days until her final ones was protecting the family, which she understood as the building block of life.

… She had a pie smashed into her face and pig’s blood thrown on her, and feminist Betty Friedan once told Schlafly: “I’d like to burn you at the stake.” She was chastised in a 1970s “Doonesbury” a framed copy of which hung on her office wall.

“What I am defending is the real rights of women,” Schlafly said at the time. “A woman should have the right to be in the home as a wife and mother.”

Thirty-five states ratified the (Equal Rights) amendment, three short of the necessary 38. Schlafly said amendment supporters couldn’t prove it was needed.

“They were never able to show women would get any benefit out of it,” she told the Associated Press in 2007. “It (the U.S. Constitution) is already sex-neutral. Women already have all the rights that men have.”