Phyllis Schlafly, a political force who fought against the feminist causes and helped pave the way for today’s thriving conservatism movement, died Monday (Sept. 5, 2016) at her home in Ladue.

For decades she was a political icon, often a polarizing one, using her Eagle Forum — a Clayton-based national organization of volunteers she called her army — to rally against the Equal Rights Amendment and abortion.

Ed Martin, current president of the Eagle Forum and spokesman for Mrs. Schlafly, said she had some health issues over the last month or two, “A lot of it having to do with being 92.”

Martin said he visited with Mrs. Schlafly on Friday and Saturday. By late Saturday, the family had gathered, he said, and was with her at the time of her death.

“We’re very sad. But she’s had a wonderful life, a full life,” he said.

Martin was on his way to New York when reached by phone Monday evening. He said he had an appearance scheduled Tuesday morning to discuss the book Mrs. Schalfly, he and Brett M. Decker authored, “The Conservative Case for Trump.”

“America has lost a great stateswoman, and we at Eagle Forum and among the conservative movement have lost a beloved friend and mentor,” said Eunie Smith, first vice president of the Eagle Forum, which was founded in 1972, in a statement released Monday evening. “I have personally lost a dear friend of over 40 years.”

Phyllis Schlafly liked to say that she never held a paying job after she married.

That fit with her image as an anti-feminist. But it didn’t tell the whole story of the woman from St. Louis who never held public office but is regarded as a key player in modern feminism.

Before Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann, there was Phyllis Schlafly.

Mrs. Schlafly fought feminists and three presidents to bring the Equal Rights Movement to a screeching halt. During the 1950s and ’60s she helped build the anti-Communist movement in the United States.

She was a pioneer in the anti-abortion movement and helped send Ronald Reagan to the White House.

If Mrs. Schlafly’s glory days seemed decades behind her, conservative audiences didn’t seem to care. She drew standing ovations in recent years with her star power, and introduced Donald Trump at a rally in St. Louis in March. She also attended the Republican National Convention in July.

She spread her philosophy through her five-day-a-week radio commentaries, her weekly syndicated newspaper column, and 27 books, the Eagle Forum said.

Since 1967, she wrote a monthly newsletter, The Phyllis Schlafly Report. The Eagle Forum she founded soon opened an office on Capitol Hill in Washington.

All of that may sound like more than a full-time job. But Mrs. Schlafly told the Post-Dispatch in 2011 that, “I am a volunteer — I don’t take a cent” for heading her nonprofit organization and a related think tank, the Eagle Forum Education & Legal Defense Fund.

She said she hadn’t earned a living or “held a job since I got married” more than six decades ago.

She explained that her husband was a successful lawyer “and he left me some money to live on.”

From child rearing to politics

Phyllis McAlpin Stewart was born in St. Louis.

Her mother, the daughter of a prominent attorney, was the librarian at the St. Louis Art Museum for 25 years. She was the major support of the family after her husband, a machinist and salesman, lost his job in the Depression.

Young Phyllis attended Hamilton Elementary School where she learned to write in fourth grade by composing a one-paragraph essay every day. She graduated first in her class at the Sacred Heart Academy middle and high school known as City House.

Mrs. Schlafly paid her way through Washington University working at what was described as the world’s largest ammunition plant, the old Small Arms Plant at Goodfellow and Natural Bridge.

She tested .30 and .50 caliber ammunition and worked nights photographing tracer bullets in flight and inspecting misfires.

She was the fifth generation of her family to attend Washington University and earned her political science degree in 1944 with honors, in just three years.

She saved enough money from her wartime job to attend Harvard Graduate School, where she earned a master’s degree. She later returned to Washington University where she earned a law degree in 1978.

“Those feminists who think they opened up college for all the women — that’s ridiculous,” she told the newspaper. “I didn’t have any trouble competing against all the boys.”

She met Fred Schlafly in March 1949, and they married in October at the Cathedral Basilica. They moved to Alton, where he practiced law.

For 25 years, she was a homemaker, raising six children.

Using a phonetics book, she taught them all to read before they entered school. Three became lawyers, one a physician, another a Ph.D. mathematician and one a businesswoman.

By the time she had grandchildren, the phonetics book was out of print, so she wrote her own.

Her political career dates to 1946 as campaign manager for a successful Republican Congressional candidate in St. Louis. She ran for Congress twice in Illinois, in 1952 and 1972, but lost.

Starting in 1956, she became an elected delegate to eight Republican National Conventions and an alternate to three more.

In the 1950s, she wrote about the dangers of Communism and served as national defense chairman of the Daughters of the American Revolution. She estimated she started 5,000 study groups on Communism.

She helped found the anti-Communist Cardinal Mindszenty Foundation in 1956. It still operates out of an office in Mrs. Schlafly’s wood-lined Clayton headquarters.

In 1964, her first book, “A Choice Not an Echo” sold three million copies. It attacked the ‘small group of secret kingmakers” of the eastern elite of the Republican Party for its influence on presidential nominations.

Her book helped Barry Goldwater win the nomination, but he then lost in a landslide by incumbent President Lyndon Johnson.

Opposing the ERA

Mrs. Schlafly was best known for her outspoken opposition to the ERA, which she claimed would lead to women being drafted into the armed forces and to unisex bathrooms.

She led her pro-family movement in a 10-year battle to kill the ERA. In 1972, when she got involved, 28 of the necessary 38 states had already ratified the amendment.

“All the politicians were for it,” she recalled. But “we were smarter than the feminists.”

Thirty-five states adopted the amendment, three states short of ratification.

During the 1980s, Mrs. Schlafly helped defeat a push for a Constitutional Convention.

She defeated the ERA again in 1983 after 53 senators voted to reintroduce it.

Mrs. Schlafly called them “wimps.” She sent each one a quiche — custard in pastry that she said “real men” don’t eat.

She claimed credit for inventing the pro-family movement, first to stop the ERA, then to lead the battle to make the Republican Party anti-abortion by inserting a pro-life plank into each presidential platform since 1976.

Mrs. Schlafly credited the improvement in women’s lives during recent decades to the invention of the clothes dryer, paper diapers and other labor-saving devices.

In a college speech in 2007, she said, “By getting married, the woman has consented to sex, and I don’t think you can call it rape.”

Critics complained that while she was advocating being a mother and a wife, she herself was a lawyer, editor, author, speaker and political activist.

She replied that women can have it all — but not all at once. She said she got into politics after raising her children.

Broad influence

Reagan credited Mrs. Schlafly with helping create the political climate that sent him to Washington as president.

“She’s darn effective,” he wrote in his diary.

In 2008, hundreds of students at Washington University protested by silently turning their backs on Mrs. Schlafly when she received an honorary degree.

Mrs. Schlafly called them “a bunch of losers.”

She opposed same-sex marriage and civil unions. In 1992, a magazine outed her oldest son, John, as gay. Mrs. Schlafly acknowledged he was gay but insisted that he shared her views.

Another son, Andrew, founded Conservapedia as a conservative alternative to Wikipedia, which he said was too liberal.

He compiled news items from conservative Internet sites and sent them to his mother daily.

Mrs. Schlafly said that was how she kept up on the news and got column ideas for her columns. She said she didn’t read newspapers or magazines and watched TV — always Fox News — only while using an exercise machine at her office.

In recent months, Schlafly’s support of Trump reportedly caused some problems within the Eagle Forum, although that was disputed by a board member.

And power struggles within the organization prompted lawsuits in state and federal court this year.

Mrs. Schlafly’s husband died in 1993. She is survived by six children, 16 grandchildren and three great-grandchildren. She is also the aunt by marriage of Thomas Schlafly, co-founder of the Saint Louis Brewery.

In August, she lost her bid to block the trademark for the Schlafly beer name. She had argued that the brewery, co-founded by Tom Schlafly, shouldn’t be able to trademark a name that she made famous, and worried that the average consumer would think the name was associated with her.

She also raised the opposition of some religious adherents to alcohol.

But the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office sided with the brewery, which applied for the trademark in 2012.

Martin told the Post-Dispatch Monday that the Schlafly family was still working on funeral arrangements.

Martin said that Schlafly was “adamant to me and a few other key people we’ve got keep the work that she was doing going.”

“Why would you take any time off?” she asked recently, he recalled.

“For now,” he said, “We’ve got November. Then going forward, we’ve got a full plate.”

Reporting by Michael Sorkin, formerly of the Post-Dispatch, and Robert Patrick, of the Post-Dispatch.