The Republican gals were sweet, like a sister or a favorite cousin. I would never consider doing anything disrespectful toward them because they were respectable ladies. This was 1974 and the state I was attending college (Idaho) had just been one of those stampeded into passing the ERA but, thanks to Phyllis Schlafly and the girls I met in that organization, they were in the process of rescinding it.
The people in charge were telling them they couldn't rescind it. Now, my political IQ then was a lot lower than it is now, so I thought "Wait a minute! We rescinded and repealed prohibition, didn't we?" I wrote an editorial, which my daughter discovered over 30 years later while working on the newspaper in the same university.
I thought it was pretty good for a college sophomore and it got me burned in effigy outside the campus newspaper office by some of the same women who I'd met at the Young Democrats recruiting meetings just a week or two earlier. A month or so later, the Mormon Church came out against it as well and, since their members make up somewhere between a quarter and a third of the Idaho electorate, that pretty much made rescinding it a done deal.
Phyllis Schlafly and her army of housewives and the nicer college girls has stopped the stampede. It is a moment in history, although a few more years would pass before it finally died, that I will never forget.
She was a friend of Free Republic and attended our Managers Banquet in DC. I last spoke with her in the pre-Banquet hotel cocktail room where she quietly charmed and impressed everyone in the room.
She was a great American.
Leni