Mrs. America, Four Years Later
Bella is the best character.
April 2020. My suicidal thoughts returned as the global lockdown only compounded all the melancholy of the past year. Then the ad came on Fox TV.
It was set in the seventies. Feminists are yelling. Ladies are making speeches. Rose Bryne in aviator glasses, Elizabeth Banks in wigs, Uzo Aduba as a headmistress/church lady, and Tracy Ullman as a Jewish hag all yelling “This is how we will support” – “Support”- Support” - “Support” - “Support”…
And there’s the title character, Cate Blanchett in Thatcherite outfit, exclaiming a different word “Defeat! The Equal Rights Amendment”.
It’s one against at least seven, but you know the Hollywood law of 1 > myriad, whether 1 is the hero or the villain. Never mind being Hela, Blanchett seems to be cast as a housewife Thanos here, holding her own against the feminists. Oh my, this was going to be big.
Being a male feminist is very suspicious and I understand it’s not a respectable term at all. But feminism remains my favorite topic to this day, and my Twitter is still very much feminist Twitter. It might do with attending a formerly all-girls school for 14 years, having almost a dozen aunts, and my uncanny abilities to join anything women-dominated: Legion of Mary, Media Studies, International Relations, anime club, English teaching, and Choice.
Fox gave me that treat, Avengers: Infinity War but with real feminists and anti-feminists from the 1970s. Websites went on with their preview – the Equal Rights Amendment was a real proposal backed by the pantheon of second-generation feminists – Gloria Steinem, Shirley Chisholm, and Betty Friedan. It would give equal rights between men and women as a constitutional amendment. Approved by President Nixon, it needed the approval of 38 states (76%).
This is a story of how one woman, Phyllis Schlafly, shot down a constitutional amendment. Schlafly was also a real figure and just died in 2016, her last public appearance was the endorsement of Donald Trump. It was a hateful act for feminists, but she succeeded on that front, beating Steinem and the millennial feminists.
The episodes are titled after the given names of the central characters (including a city and three men), and we begin with “Phyllis”. The first episode is written by Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck (Captain Marvel, you could imagine how excited I was) and directed by Dahvi Waller (Mad Men), so that’s what Mrs. America is about – MCU x Mad Men.
It argues that Phyllis is surrounded by sexist, rapey Republican men like her husband Fred and Phil Crane (of the Crane brothers, the Republican Kennedys). Her real passion is international security, especially the détente between Washington D.C. and Moscow, but the men sideline her, including her hero, Barry Goldwater. While watching a pro-ERA demonstration, she sees her market. Something the boys won’t touch. The episode ends with the confident feminists dismissing her newsletter, The Phyllis Schlafly Report.
The second episode focuses on the leader of the feminists, Gloria Steinem. The series makes her a flawed and indecisive heroine. She looks for consensus and cooperation while dating a black man, the attorney and businessman Franklin Thomas (the series hints the fact that Thomas left his wife following an interview with Steinem, represented by his disapproving black son). Gloria’s episode ends with her reason to fight: Taking an illegal abortion in London before her work in India in the 1950s, she advocates abortion because she wants to be free of any family tie, unlike Phyllis.
The series picks up with “Shirley”. Shirley Chisholm, the first black female presidential nominee. Popular with white college students, Shirley knows that black men don’t support her. Steinem also hesitates to back her because she wants George McGovern to win and legalize abortion.
The Jewish/white woman ends up betraying Shirley and asks for forgiveness, and the wise and strong black woman speaks to the camera about how the fight goes on. You’d know all future awards were reserved for Aduba instead of Bryne or Phyllis’ fictional henchwoman, Sarah Paulson’s Alice Macray.
By the third episode various websites (I was away from Twitter during the pandemic) had kept viewers updated with soundtrack listings, recaps, and backstories. I’ve set up my wiki describing the characters and events depicted. Everyone kept the score, and Phyllis won with Nixon’s reelection but was also taken aback by the verdict of Roe vs. Wade.
Enter Betty Friedan, the hag feminist. I read The Feminine Mystique (prescribed by Kate Manne’s father), so this is a familiar name. She remains TV-famous for her book and her National Organization for Women (NOW) and is more aggressive than Phyllis. Fred Schlafly teaches Phyllis to use that aggressiveness to undo the insecure, secretly normal (and homophobic) Betty.
Phyllis’ nemesis comes as Brenda Feigen, who lawyers Phyllis on live TV and gives Mrs. America her first defeat. It’s a bittersweet victory for Brenda and her husband Marc Feigen-Fasteau (their double-barreled surname was progressive) as a pregnant Brenda has cheated experimented with another woman. A chastised Phyllis enters law school to open a path to D.C. while Fred is quite happy with St. Louis.
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One thing Democrats have told the world over the last decade is there is no good Republican. All of them are evil. Republicans who are gay and of color are evil too. Episode 6 is about the good Republican, Jill Ruckelshaus. She’s for ERA, abortion (pro-choice, sorry), and responsible budget. The bridge builder reaches Phyllis and warns her that men will always objectify them.
And men will always betray them. Bill Ruckelshaus, a martyr, and survivor of the Watergate Scandal passed for Bob Dole as the Vice President nominee of Gerald Ford. Phyllis, meanwhile, is also disappointed that her candidate Ronald Reagan lost the Republican National Convention – she distrusts Ford’s men Cheney and Rumsfeld.
Jill talks about being the “Party of Lincoln”, perhaps a modern invocation of the anti-Trump the Lincoln Project – supposedly the good Republicans who have gone nowhere. As Jill warns, Phyllis, the mother of six, sits uneasily among sleazy men to the tune of Leslie Gore’s “You Don’t Own Me”.
Episode 7, “Bella”, is my favorite episode. It starts in style with a socialist, disguising as a waiter, pies Phyllis in the face to the tune of “Blitzkrieg Bop” (we’re in the second half of the 1970s). The sight of Blanchett spending the whole hour with an eyepatch is hilarious, and Bella Abzug (at least how she’s portrayed here) is my favorite feminist. More level-headed and well-dressed than Betty, but more down to Earth than Gloria.
Gloria herself is portrayed as a more bumbling, vain, if not hypocritical superstar feminist as the years gone by. She’s done with Franklin, she’s clueless about what the black and lesbian feminists need and want, and she goes for the “Let’s close our eyes and picture our perfect vision” thing. This episode supposedly sets the epic battle between the feminists and the anti-feminists (which have included many Judeo-Christian organizations and even the KKK) at the 1977 National Women’s Conference.
Which makes “Houston” a total letdown. This episode focuses on Alice and her Damascene conversion, as she goes into a wild trip of “The feminists are fine” and “The conservatives are awful”. The songs for this episode are socialist Americana, from “This Land is Your Land” to “We Shall Overcome”. Brenda makes her last appearance to talk about being a businesswoman, and if you must know, in 1990 she became the producer of the very Republican Navy SEALS.
Finally, “Reagan” premiered on 27 May 2020. ERA expires without the required ratification – notably from Illinois, Virginia, and Nevada - and Phyllis celebrates her victory, still betting on Reagan despite another uneasy advance from Crane. The feminists are in tatters and parting ways. Steinem vows to fight on even though she never faces Phyllis face to face throughout the series and history.
The final reviews, out of safety or misperception, missed another part of Phyllis’ motivation. She hates Jews. She talks about the alliance between Kissinger, Steinem, and Abzug as the reason for the horrible 1970s, from détente to ERA. It is a quick moment but it is there. Ronald Reagan calls her to say that he cannot recruit her because of her reputation, and Fred puts her in place by asking her when dinner (dinner is always at six). Mrs. America ends her story by slicing apples slowly, in real-time.
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I spent mid-2020 refining my wiki on Mrs. America to learn their histories more. Why half of the feminists featured here are Jewish? What are their backgrounds? What are their origin stories? What about Phyllis and other real conservative women of the decade? What about her children (who were fighting each other after her death)? What are the stories of the songs and what do they represent?
Many of the feminists were Jews because of their alienation in midcentury America. Steinem was raised by her depressed German mother before being an idealist intercontinental nomad (and unwittingly used by the CIA) before becoming a journalist in the sixties. Friedan was a longtime Marxist, motivated by antisemitism in Illinois. Abzug was a socialist Zionist, which seemed like a contradiction but has boomed after 7 October.
On the other hand, examining the biography of Phyllis Schlafly drew me to her American isolationism or non-interventionism. Donald Trump might have been the first president in almost a century to practice this policy, which seems sensible: America doesn’t have to get tied down in foreign wars and Americans don’t have to be afraid of their security.
The United States, however, couldn’t stay neutral during the Second World War, and isolationism in the early 1940s, represented by Charles Lindbergh, took a dark turn into antisemitism. After the war, the cause was taken by Robert Taft, who Phyllis endorsed as an Illinois delegate at the 1952 Republican National Convention. Alas, Taft was not just beaten in the election but also died soon. Phyllis spent her life looking for new potentials, from Goldwater to Reagan to Trump. She always disliked the liberal, interventionist Republicans, from Eisenhower to Nixon and the Bush family.
Ironically, Goldwater wanted an aggressive foreign policy against the communists and Phyllis approved it, and the same went with Reagan. My analysis is she wanted anti-communism at home and on the planet. A strong military that could scare foreign threats, and a strong, assimilated American society – as exemplified by the Catholic Swiss & Scottish Schlaflys. By the 2010s, the isolationists had become as paranoid as she was, with their belief in international conspiracies involving Jews, neoliberals, and neoconservatives.
It’s for that reason that while Uzo Udoba could win awards as the Best Supporting Actress (Critics’ Choice, American Film Institute Awards, and importantly Emmy), Cate Blanchett had to settle for nominations and a win at the Satellite Awards (along with Tracey Ullman). Blanchett herself wrote for the New York Times “I am not ‘Mrs. America’. That is the Point.”.
After all, the series was produced for an aborted Hillary era presidency, not a Trump and pandemic and Black Lives Matter era. It was enough that both Gloria Steinem and Anne Schlafly Cori (who has a Jewish husband) hate the series, the public didn’t need to hate it too for centering a Trumper. Alas, Cate Blanchett isn’t Phyllis Schlafly, but has become an anti-Zionist too just like her character – or had she?
Mrs. America also represented late-era Disney cable. Shown on Hulu (by carrying the FX label) in America, in Southeast Asia, it was shown on the women-oriented Fox Life instead of the more masculine FX. Disney began shutting down its cable networks in the 2020s, with the Southeast Asian network closed in October 2021. Life goes on in Disney+, but in flagship series like The Bear, Only Murders in the Building, and any Star Wars series an individual, not communal experience the way cable and network TV did.
Magdalene Zier agreed with me (well in my head, she doesn’t know me) that a second season of Mrs. America would be epic. The premise: Reagan has his women, Jeane Kirkpatrick and Sandra Day O’Connor, but Phyllis will continue to chase his approval in the era of personal computers and the late Cold War.
In 1981 her Eagle Forum targeted Day O’Connor, while the JD dreamed of being a Supreme Court justice herself. All while becoming a pundit for CNN before pioneering podcasts through her daily commentaries and Eagle Forum Live. In the meantime, we can keep up with Gloria and others, in a dark decade for activism, as campus was about partying and networking, and celebrities were on board with Reagan.
If there’s a third season set in the 1990s, we’d have Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the Clintons – Gloria wrote a controversial NYT article defending Bill. But never mind. Phyllis and Gloria were in their sixties in the 1990s, and The Crown teaches us that the longer it goes (and closer to our time), the worse it gets. The point of Zier’s article is to tell us what Schlafly did between Reagan and Trump.
The buzz lasted throughout the pandemic, being a prestige miniseries where nobody dies in the end and with the migration to Disney+. Feminism has transformed into something very funny too. Heterodox feminists who have had enough of the intersectionality dogma. The politically homeless, the libertarians, the Christians, and yes, the Zionists.
Meanwhile, intersectional feminism itself has become boring and too orthodox and isn’t about womanhood anymore. After Mrs. America, it seemed impossible to find a famous neo-Phyllis (Megyn Kelly? Ann Coulter? Meghan McCain?), but it was an obsolete question. Just a month later, dozens of female writers signed “A Letter on Justice and Open Debate”, and it didn’t take long for some accounts to point out “omg they are Zionists!”.
Four years on, I’m back with the feminists. Not the pro-terrorist intersectional ones, but the witty, interesting, and perceptive ones. And I don’t have to think of myself as an ally or whatever – just as an online friend, a mutual, a quality reply guy, a Samaritan.
In the end, the legacies of both Schlafly and NOW don’t make it into the 21st century, and it probably isn’t a bad thing at all.