From Adele Stan, Alternet, 4 years ago (heavily chopped up - click on link to see the full version):

"Let me tell you, I worked my way through college and got my college degree at a great university, Washington University of St. Louis, in 1944 -- no discrimination of any kind," Schlafly said. "I then went to the Harvard Graduate School and competed with all of the guys -- no discrimination whatsoever -- got my Harvard degree in 1945. And my mother got her bachelor's degree at a great co-ed university in 1920. So all those opportunities were out there before you all were born, and the feminists had absolutely nothing to do with it."

In truth, Schlafly would have been barred from entry to Harvard's undergraduate programs in 1945, as well as from its law school. And while she studied with the men (Harvard, under pressure from feminists, had just begun admitting women to some of its graduate programs), her degree was conferred not by Harvard, but by the women's college with which it was affiliated, Radcliffe. Schlafly also failed to mention that at the time her mother earned her degree, the 19th Amendment to the Constitution, which -- thanks to the efforts of first-wave feminists -- granted women the right to vote, had not yet been ratified.

Origins of the War on Women

In 1980, the year in which Schlafly and her allies in the New Right took over the GOP, the Republican Party removed its last plank supporting the Equal Rights Amendment from its platform. It was an abrupt about-face for the Party of Lincoln, whose previous first lady, Betty Ford, was an unabashed supporter of the ERA, women's rights and reproductive choice, and who appeared on the stage with Rosalyn Carter and Lady Bird Johnson at the 1977 National Women's Conference in Houston to join her name to a feminist agenda. Without mentioning Ford, Schlafly groused to her G.W. audience that one goal of the conference, "taxpayer-funded daycare for all children," was designed by feminists to deprive women of the choice to raise their own children. Another goal, she complained, was the implementation of "the whole gay-rights agenda," along with "government-funded abortions" and the ERA.

The Equal Rights Amendment had been passed by Congress in 1972, and would battle its way through through the ratification process over the course of the ensuing decade, with Schlafly leading opponents in state after state. The text of the amendment was simple: "Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex." In the end, the amendment fell three states short of ratification, defeated in the legislatures of Southern states.

Schlafly's tactics were modeled, according to Republican political consultant Tanya Melich, on the moral panic and fear-mongering claims that shaped Southern opposition to desegregation. Schlafly contended that the ERA would mandate "homosexual marriage" and unisex bathrooms. Additionally, great umbrage was taken at the likely possibility that the amendment would send women into combat. 

While Viguerie, Weyrich and Phillips are widely credited with creating the religious right as a political force, it was really Schlafly who got the ball rolling with the founding of her organization, Stop ERA, according to Melich. Beginning in 1972, Schlafly, a conservative Roman Catholic, "recruited fundamentalist and evangelical women, some of them John Birch Society members," to take part in her anti-ERA organizing workshops. Writes Melich:

[I]t was Schlafly, with her authoritarian leadership and expert grassroots organizing, who made the Religious Right a political player...

It was Schlafly, first of the Goldwater and then the New Right team, who unearthed the political gold of misogyny. It was Schlafly who translated fear of women's liberation into a political force in the Republican party and thereby extended the foundation of the Republican southern strategy. Now not only did the strategy flourish on the backlash of the civil rights movement, but it was broadened to include a backlash against the women's movement, too.

"We're Winning"

Schlafly's fight against women's rights didn't end with the demise of the ERA. She remained an ardent foe of abortion, and in 1996, having won control of the Republican Party platform thanks to a deal made with the insurgent candidate Patrick J. Buchanan, whose campaign she co-chaired, she and right-wing allies fought off an attempt by presidential nominee Bob Dole to return more tolerant language on abortion to the party platform, which in 1992 was changed to a no-exceptions stance against all abortion. Schlafly threatened a floor fight if Dole so much as allowed an exception for victims of rape or incest, and the nominee relented. And so the GOP abortion plank has remained ever since.

In 2011, according to the Center for Reproductive Rights, some 600 pieces of anti-choice legislation were introduced in legislative bodies throughout the United States. Contraception, too, came under fire, as Republicans sought, and often succeeded, in cutting off government funding to women's health clinics such as those run by Planned Parenthood. These actions are the natural legacy of actions by Schlafly and her allies on the right, and she came to G.W. to crow about it, even as she denied any GOP assault on women's rights.

Just during the first quarter of 2011, according to the New York Times, "a record 127 restrictions were passed by at least one house of the [state] legislatures." So far this year, the Times reports, "75 bills placing restrictions on abortion have passed at least one legislative chamber, which is more than normally pass in an election year, according to a tally by the Guttmacher Institute, a research organization."

"We are winning the abortion fight," Schlafly said. "Really, all the Republicans who were elected in 2010 are pro-life, including all of the women. And we're winning that fight, especially with young people." While much of what Schlafly said over the course of the evening was misleading or patently false, these statements are not. A 2009 study by Gallup found a 9-point increase since the 1990s among respondents 18-29 years of age who said abortion should be illegal in all circumstances.

Predictably, Schlafly characterized the requirement, under the new healthcare law, that insurance plans cover contraception as an assault on religious liberty -- one she said that Obama made over the objections of his best political advisers because of pressure from feminists.....

Yeah, quite a piece of work. Shame she didn't live to see The Donald enact all her favored policies - he's lost a kindred spirit, another master of ribald dogmatism and self-promotion combined with innate misogyny.