Success Quote by Phyllis Schlafly

Schlafly’s line is less an argument than a trapdoor. By declaring feminism “doomed to failure,” she turns a sprawling political movement into a doomed engineering project, then blames it for not obeying the laws of physics. The real work happens in the phrase “human nature”: a fuzzy, authoritative concept that can’t be audited, only invoked. If you disagree, you’re not debating policy; you’re denying reality.

The intent is counter-mobilization. Schlafly didn’t need to win over committed feminists; she needed to stiffen the spine of people uneasy about rapid change in the 1960s and 1970s. Her genius was to translate anxiety about shifting gender roles into a commonsense verdict: feminists aren’t just wrong, they’re unnatural. “Repeal and restructure” is loaded language from government and architecture, making feminism sound like bureaucrats trying to legislate away desire, motherhood, and family life. It frames the movement as top-down coercion rather than a push for rights and options.

Subtext: feminism threatens a social order that benefits (and flatters) women who accept traditional roles, and it threatens men who rely on those roles remaining stable. By rooting hierarchy in “nature,” Schlafly sidesteps messy questions about wages, violence, legal equality, and reproductive autonomy. The context is her STOP ERA campaign and the broader conservative realignment, when “family values” became a political technology. She sells an old arrangement as biology, then calls the challenge to it hubris. That’s why the line works: it turns a debate about power into a sermon about inevitability.