On Phyllis Schlafly, w/ Schlafly’s Biographer (1981, Doubleday), Carol Felsenthal, Author of “The Sweetheart of the Silent Majority” (TRP Ep. 143)
She’s had access to such luminaries as President Bill Clinton and the Washington Post’s Kay Graham for her biographies of them, but her very first book was on the woman that seemed to split the country in half, Phyllis Schlafly. Schlafly is most notorious (or famous, depending) for nearly single-handedly stopping the Equal Rights Amendment from most certainly being ratified in my lifetime. How she did that — and the fact that it is probably only her that could have done something like that — is an issue in American Politics not many understand. Though it seems you have to at some point grapple with it.
But Schlafly was sui generis in every rich nuance of the term. She was more comfortable debating detente with the Soviets and nuclear throw weights. She had a lot of kids, was a serious Catholic, and went to Law School in her fifties. She homeschooled all of her children up to a certain age, taught them all how to read herself, wrote books that were self-published and sold millions of copies, spoke all around the country, sometimes multiple times in one day, traveled hundreds of thousands of miles, and yet answered her own telephone.
One could make the argument that she was the most important woman in American Politics in the latter half of the twentieth century — perhaps the entire twentieth century.
Is this real ? Her critics thought she was a phony. And she had millions of critics.
My recent thoughts about this topic began in Scottsdale , Arizona, in 2023 at a used bookstore. In the section called “Conservativism,” I found a copy of Carol Felsenthal’s 1981 Doubleday biography of Schlafly . The book is called “The Sweetheart of the Silent Majority: The Biography of Phyllis Schalfly” by Carol Felsenthal. It began with a story that Schlafly gave her biographer the cold shoulder because of something very critical that Felsenthal had written about Schlafly years prior. Yet this copy had of all things Phyllis Schlafly’s signature on it, inscribed for a couple , with best wishes.
Now Schalfly had not signed most of the books she herself had written — copies in the many, many millions. To think that she had signed this one written by someone whom she herself had dissed at some point for being highly critical. This, I had to see.
So I reached out to Carol while reading it, and made the offer that she could easily refuse.
But she didn’t. And we ended up talking for 2 hours about Phyllis Schlafly and Carol’s life as a biographer and a writer.
Here’s an example of the writing she has done for Chicago Magazine, a quite moving piece she did about her brother, an obituary of sorts, the man who had done the title sequences for such famous films as Superman (1978), Alien (1979), and The Untouchables (1987), who had recently died : https://www.chicagomag.com/arts-culture/June-2018/On-the-Life-and-Death-of-My-Brother-Dickie/
The Republican Professor is a pro-understanding-correctly-Phyllis Schlafly podcast.
Therefore, welcome, Mrs. Carol Felsenthal, 1981 Doubleday biographer of Phyllis Schlafly.
The Republican Professor is produced and hosted by Dr. Lucas J. Mather, Ph.D.
Warmly,
Lucas J. Mather, Ph.D.
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