‘Phyllis Schlafly had a wonderful talent for driving men and women — especially women of a rigid political bent — mad.” So began the obituary for Schlafly by the editors of National Review upon her death nine years ago. That is why the inclusion of such a barbed piece about our organization’s founder in the magazine’s 70th anniversary issue is so odd. The other articles in this issue celebrate the thinkers and activists of the conservative movement. Why the animus toward Phyllis Schlafly?
In the piece on Phyllis Schlafly, “The Rise of a Populist Influencer in the Age of Print Media,” Rachel Lu calls Schlafly “mean-spirited and conspiratorial” and claims she wrote “shameless propaganda.” She alludes to the subject when she writes “shills and sophists will always be with us.” These charges draw from the same illogical hostility toward my mother that so many feminists of the 20th century harbored.
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