Mrs. America

A new star-studded — 17 stars, including Cate Blanchett, Rose Byrne, Tracy Ullman, Elizabeth Banks, Jeanne Tripplehorn, Margo Martindale, Niecy Nash, James Marsden — streaming series about Phyllis Schlafly and her successful campaign to defeat the Equal Rights Amendment, was released on FX on Hulu this month. As it did in 2017 with its earlier signature (and feminist) series The Handmaid’s Tale, Hulu released the first 3 episodes on one day as a 3 part premier.

The series accurately presents Schlafly as a frustrated foreign policy expert who shifts to organizing around women’s issues when she is passed over by other Republicans working on the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty. However, according to Schlafly’s chief academic biographer, Donald Critchlow, many of the other scenes and vignettes in the series are pure fiction.

Mrs. America was created by Dahvi Waller, who studied history as an undergraduate at Princeton and then worked on several popular, critically acclaimed, and/or award winning TV shows including Desperate Housewives and Mad Men. Waller credits her interest in the project with her childhood family dinners, a kind of pre-SiriusXM Alter family politics where political campaigns replaced sports as the topic of conversation. Her father, Professor Harold Waller, who recently retired from teaching political science at Canada’s McGill University, gave a campus publication a going-away interview where he defined his political commitments as centrist. Ms. Waller is quoted in the Daily Beast on part of her interest in Schlafly: “…I would argue that we need to understand what her appeal was to so many women and why so many women were willing to go to legislatures and bake bread and go to the Republican Convention and fight to take it over to help us do a better job at moving forward… I think if we don’t understand her appeal and how she tapped into anxiety among a fairly large group of women, we won’t really understand how to get through to those women today.” “Us,” “we” and “them” — “those women.” (How did “they” manage to beat Hillary?)

Waller told Esquire she was aiming for complexity and nuance as a way to understand “those women” — but she’s also noted that her “middle way” “centrist” presentation of the women campaigning for and against the Equal Rights Amendment is good publicity for the series as it stirs up more buzz, as both conservatives and feminists complain about how they are portrayed.

She actually achieves more complexity and nuance than I thought this limited series might have before I watched the first three episodes released April 15. But a lot of the “nuance” is just emphasizing how Waller thinks Phyllis Schlafly (played by Blanchett), while being a political tactician of the first order — she figured out how to get women who were busy being full-time mothers to leave home and be political activists — was allegedly also a victim of sexism, including a supposedly handsy and adulterous Congressman Phil Crane (played by Marsden). In Waller’s telling Schlafly is really a more opportunistic Jeanne Kirkpatrick, just a few years too early and a credential or two short, an expert on foreign policy whose fellow Goldwaterites never give her enough credit or attention — or campaign funding — until she makes women’s and family life issues — and organizing and turning out the vote of female “deplorables” — her wheelhouse. The complexity is noticing that there were black people and white racists in American history. Waller’s version of history draws a parallel between Gloria Steinem, Bella Abzug and other white feminists selling out blacks like Presidential candidate Shirley Chisholm, in order to try to gain power in the Democratic Party establishment (feel the Bern!), and Schlafly allegedly overlooking blatant racism from some of the southern (of course) chapter leaders of STOP ERA in order to build a national organization.

Like a lot of FX fare (and premium cable generally) Mrs. America is what Waller describes as “an immersive period drama,” and it derives much of its allure from tapping into nostalgia for the costumes and above all the superior soundtracks of previous decades. The FX hit Pose does this by mining Motown, disco, and Madonna. Mrs. America does it by tapping the R&B, female singer songwriters, and anti-war folk rock of the 60s and 70s.

In Pose though, only one “side” is being presented, that of transgender, transsexual, and gay people, mainly black and Latino, battling the AIDS crisis.

In Mrs. America there are two sides: the feminists, proponents of legalizing abortion and passing the ERA — Bella Abzug (Martindale), Betty Freidan (Ullman), and Gloria Steinem (Byrne) — and the anti-feminists, Phyllis Schlafly and her supporters who believe passing the ERA would mandate that women be conscripted into the military, the ending of dower rights and other rights of married women during a divorce, and the imposition of single sex bathrooms.

The opening credits of Mrs. America feature drawings of cool 70s stereotypes, women and men sporting miniskirts, platform shoes, bell bottom pants, Afros, psychedelic colors. The attractive images of the feminist side.

There is no parallel attractive imagery for the anti-feminist side in the opening credits. And in the episodes there are no loving and beautiful children and families, just kids underfoot making demands and elderly parents living in squalor.

The musical score for Mrs. America is all 60s and 70s music about peace and love. The best of that music.

There is no music for the anti-feminist side whatever that might be (patriotic, liturgical, classical, country western). You wait until episode 3 to get an ironical presentation of Anita Bryant’s 1973 recording of suffragette and abolitionst Julia Ward Howe’s “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”

The introductory scene of Mrs. America is Cate Blanchett in a stars and stripes bikini portraying Schlafly walking on a runway for a fundraiser for her fellow Goldwaterite, the late Illinois GOP Congressman Phil Crane. This is one of many, usually salacious and/or degrading scenes in Mrs. America that Schlafly’s chief biographer says are completely fabricated.

But there is no scene of Gloria Steinem going undercover, as a young eager journalist, as a Playboy bunny.

Congressman Crane is portrayed as handsy with Schlafly. But a young Gary Hart appears in episode 3, portrayed as manipulative and a backstabber, but none of the men interacting with the feminists seem to have any of the issues later to emerge about the Kennedys, Clintons, Weiners, or Joe Biden.

Phyllis Schlafly, with a career as a political organizer, lecturer, and author and the mother of 6 children, is shown submitting, while sweaty and exhausted, after a one day trip to Washington, D.C. and back, to the sexual demands of the husband who supports her financially.

Gloria Steinem has sex with her hot young African American lover in hotel rooms with a minibar and room and maid service.

It’s a pretty show.

But in the structure of the debate inside its own dramatic narrative, it isn’t exactly showing a respect for equality.