Phyllis Stewart Schlafly (b. 1924) did not invent the practice we now call “trolling.” (Richard Nixon had been pretty good at it since the 1940s.) She just lowered it to unprecedented depths of perfection. In 1975, in response to complaints from conservatives about the ideological uniformity of Illinois’s Commission on the Status of Women, the governor appointed her to the body, which at that point had unanimously supported passage of the Equal Rights Amendment. Schlafly began publicly referring to it as the “SOW Commission.” When others took offense, she affected surprise: that—Status of Women—was its acronym, after all. And besides, “these women who are complaining are the same ones who call men chauvinist pigs.”