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