Phyllis Schlafly Launches STOP ERA Campaign, Pioneering Anti-Feminist Infrastructure

Phyllis Schlafly launches her STOP ERA campaign with an article titled ‘What’s Wrong with Equal Rights for Women?’ published in her February 1972 newsletter, fundamentally reshaping American conservative politics and pioneering the anti-feminist movement. After being asked to debate a feminist on the ERA at the end of 1971, Schlafly recognizes the political potential of opposing the amendment. In October 1972, she formally organizes STOP ERA—an acronym for ‘Stop Taking Our Privileges’—becoming its national chairwoman. The timing is critical: Congress had sent the ERA to the states on March 22, 1972, and when Schlafly begins her campaign, 28 of the required 38 states had already ratified the amendment, making its passage seem inevitable. Schlafly’s political genius lies in her prescient understanding that religious conservatives—Catholics, evangelicals, Mormons, and Orthodox Jews—could abandon their longstanding separatist ways and unite on behalf of shared political goals. The STOP ERA campaign becomes the vehicle for building this unprecedented ecumenical coalition, with Schlafly inspiring tens of thousands of conservative Catholic, Mormon, and evangelical women to their first political efforts. This grassroots organizing demonstrates that social issues, particularly those framed around ‘family values,’ can mobilize conservative religious women as a powerful political force. The campaign’s infrastructure and coalition-building methods become templates for future Religious Right organizing and establish Schlafly as a founding architect of the modern conservative movement.