Elaine Donnelly

Who is Elaine Donnelly?

Elaine Donnelly is an American conservative activist and anti-feminist principally concerned with preserving the traditional culture of the U.S. military. She is a contributing editor at Human Events magazine. She is the founder of the Center for Military Readiness.

Elaine Chenevert Donnelly attended Schoolcraft College and the University of Detroit. She lives in Livonia, Michigan, with her husband, Terry, and is the mother of two grown daughters.

She spent several years as an activist in opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment as National Media Chair of Phyllis Schlafly's Eagle Forum and then founded the Michigan Stop-ERA Committee. She was active in Ronald Reagan's presidential campaign. She told an interviewer that her political engagement began with concern that initiatives to extend the rights of women would result in drafting women like her own daughter into the military and developed to the broader issue of women's participation in the military.

In 1984, Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger appointed her to a three-year term on the Defense Advisory Committee on Women in the Services.

In 1992, she served as a member of the Presidential Commission on the Assignment of Women in the Armed Forces, a presidential commission that considered whether women should be allowed to fly combat missions, and joined the 8 to 7 majority that opposed such an expanded role in combat for women. In 2009, she maintained that opposition when the roles available to women were expanding during combat in Afghanistan and Iraq.