Hello, I'm Adrienne Dole.

And I'm Weirrhodd again.

Whether we like it or not, we're in bid with the right.

So, Adrian, today, we're talking about one of the biggest forces in 20th century American conservatism. A person whose influence on their Republican Party laid the groundwork for the presidencies of Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump, who brought once fringe conspiratorial reactionary thought into the mainstream, who laid the blueprint for the Christian right, defeated a constitutional amendment for women's equality, and built the institutional mechanisms that continue to harness misogyny as one of the most potent forces in American political life.

And so I ask you, my friend, what do you know about Phyllis Schlafly?

Yeah, so first of, I know that she was played by none other

than Kate Blanchett, and so that's always who I'll be picturing. I also should mention that

in preparation for this episode, you did most of the research, or did all the research. I did

delve into the archives and wanted to get a sense of this person as well. And I basically came

away with questions that I think I'll be posing to you today. I know she was a right-wing

operative. She sort of comes out of the far-right, really bircher wing of the Republican Party, and I think

is instrumental in engineering the takeover from

the more Rockefeller wing of the party in the 60s, it seems to me. She's a big Goldwater

person and helps mainstream far-right republicanism. And then, of course, she becomes most

important, almost well-known and most Cape Blanchett played through her work defeating the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970s, which had been basically all but certain to be ratified when she began her campaign against it in, I want to say, in 1971, is that right?

Yes, 1979.

And which was formally defeated in the 1980s. Basically after Schlafly, I mean, the way the show Miss America kind of makes it sound like

single-handedly radicalized the country against it. Yeah, she is all but single-handedly responsible for why we do not have the ERA.

And just so our listeners know, Adrian, do you want to like give us a spiel on what the ERA was?

Right, especially for our non-American listeners.

The ERA, the Equal Rights Amendment, was proposed in 1923 by Alice Paul, essentially as a follow-up and an enforcement mechanism

for the 19th Amendment, right, which granted white women the right to vote. So it's a little bit

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