I don’t know much about Phyllis Schlafly.
Let me tell how little I know about her.
Look, this is a blog. It’s not an academic text. It’s not teaching work. It is a personal blog written from a personal perspective and part of why it’s written the way it is is because it’s all responding to the way my brain works and the way I feel. Right now, I am not feeling in a way I consider great, because I am trying to write other, much harder things.
And it’s not like I don’t do research for these posts but it’s much more effort and the big long ones tend to come after I’ve done a dive on something and go ‘oh shit I need to share this story and I have a fun way to tell it.’ Realistically speaking I’m a cuter wikipedia. I don’t stop doing things because it’d be too hard but I do things in a way that makes the difficulty, y’know, something I can route around. To do a good thorough job on an article, I have to do a good thorough job of the research, and sometimes I’ll just stop doing that. Difficulty means the task gets postponed, and that means sometimes…
Sometimes I’ll just want to bring up someone and not do a ton of research. I’m going to take the easy route. And mostly this is about expressing a sentiment about someone who utterly sucks and sucks in almost every way someone can suck and only one of the few most vicious and beautiful people I know will ever be able to share in that very personal feeling of being victimised by a woman who never knew either of us existed. It’s trauma, but think of the content.
And if you know me, you know how reluctant I am to, even of worthy targets go ‘hey, this woman or otherwise marginalised person sucks’ because there are always better targets, and better people for taking those shots.
Anyway, Phyllis Schlafly died in 2016 and I wish it was earlier and worse.
Phyllis Schlafly is a woman who came into my life again and again in stages, and those stages were always somehow, worse than the last one. I grew up in a fundamentalist Christian cult with ideas of actual supernatural evil, exclusivity of the elect, a fundamentally corrupt neutral world, a positive vision of corporal punishment and antifeminism as standard, background radiation, to the point where the people who got out of those spaces with me wouldn’t necessarily even realise those were the ideas we espoused until called upon to look back on them. If I tell you this woman was ‘significant’ to that culture, then, it should be a warning to you about how much she sucks.
Wait, I should probably give you a super-quick mention of who she was and what she did. Phyllis Schlafly was a vicious campaigner against the legal protection of equal rights for women, the decriminilisation of abortion and language services being made available in other languages than English. She was a woman who was willing to stand up and say ‘I, a woman, do not want the right to vote, nor equal pay.’ You might have heard the type referred to as a ‘pick me girl’, and thought they were modern phenomena brought on by the attention brain rot of Tiktok and Youtube.
Nope. You could make a good living doing it back in the 1970s. Hell, you can trace a very real thread from Phyllis Schlafly being a lady who sucked ass and the consolidation of the LGBT lobby as a single political entity to stop her efforts from squashing all of us separately. And yay, that’s cool and all but also it’s a silver lining around a fucking hammer used to hurt us.
Anyway, yeah, people around me invoked Phyllis Schlafly.
But the thing is, almost nobody around me who was doing it was related to her.
She was present as a positive reference. I cannot attach the name to historical quotes – because these were sermons and references made by pastors and preachers while I lay on the floor doodling on paper – but I remember hearing, in the eighties and nineties, voices talking about how Phyllis Schlafly had done ‘great work.’ There were quotes of her. The reason she stood out to me at the time was that she was a woman – women in our church weren’t quoted much. Fanny Crosby got a look-in and sometimes we’d make up quotes from Helen Keller, but usually, women were there to be objects of our stories. They didn’t get quoted from the pulpit.
I saw her name in the foreword of a book I remembered reading, too.
Wait fuck I’m doing it! I’m looking shit up and I’m going to check up on the timeline of events and hang on when did this event happen?
The thing is, I think, is that in the context of the christian shithead dominionist people, the real arseholes of arseholes space, Schlafly had power. She was a rock star. If you invoked her, you showed where you were, and the fact she was able to be the shittiest of anti-women crusaders so much so that we were quoting a woman from the pulpit is a sign of how bad she was and how bad she had to be. Like, we did have a pastor get up and point out women weren’t allowed to speak ‘during Church,’ which wew.
Schlafly was the light we pointed at… and she cast out around us. People invoked her to show how legit they were. The homeschooling movement loved Schlafly, they loved her ideas because they were afraid of things like what if a homosexual teaches your child math. I don’t have the books, I can’t back this up, but it’s my memory that Donald Ray Howard – the founder of the Accelerated Christian Education system – loved Schlafly, but I can’t find any proof at all that she even cared he existed.
And that’s the thing that’s weird about it. I don’t know anyone around me who shook the hand, but everyone wanted to say they shook the hand that shook the hand. There was a respect for this amazing awful woman, an invocation of how important she was, and yet nobody interacted with her when they invoked her. It isn’t like we needed her around, we just needed her to have been there, to have done it, to have been the woman who hated women enough to say it aloud. Once she did that, well…
She was just another object in the story.
Christ, what was I doing with this. This is tricks month, not dread month. What’s the puzzle, what’s the surprise, what’s the flicked-out-trick that makes this card change colour and become happy or engaging or maybe at least funny.
Oh that’s right.
Phyllis Schlafly stopped a constitutional amendment. Her failson is the guy who founded Conservapedia and spends his days moderating the comments of homeschooled teenagers who are trying their best to fanfic up a new translation of the Bible, and she spent the last of her days being mocked and ridiculed by the patriot fringe she had helped inspire because she wasn’t weird enough for us. By the time I was out of the cult, the people I grew up with were calling her liberal.