We’re Living in Phyllis Schlafly’s America

The other great irony of Schlafly is that she died in September 2016, two months before Donald Trump, a leader anointed in her image, beat the first female candidate for president of the United States. Like it or loathe it, the new Hulu series Mrs. America makes clear, we are living in a moment that Schlafly begot. From dirty tricks to media manipulation, brazen lies about crowd sizes to the weaponization of privilege, her ghost is everywhere, and it may never be banished.

Mrs. America is maybe the first great television series of 2020, a project that manages to capture the complicated essence of real characters while telling a story at both micro and macro levels. Perhaps predictably, the show divided people before it debuted: One of Schlafly’s daughters disavowed its portrayal of her mother, while some critics argued that it was too flattering a portrait. On its face, the nine-part show from Dahvi Waller (Mad Men) is about the years-long fight over the passage of the ERA, a window into second-wave feminism that sweeps activists such as Gloria Steinem (played by Rose Byrne), Betty Friedan (Tracey Ullman), Shirley Chisholm (Uzo Aduba), and Bella Abzug (Margo Martindale) into Schlafly’s orbit. Most characters are based on real women, although some are composites or fictional creations. But it’s Schlafly, played as an elegant coil of wound ambition by Cate Blanchett, who turns Mrs. America from a starry historical miniseries into a stunning explainer on the poisoning of national politics. “The person that everybody’s paying attention to always wins,” Schlafly explains in one scene, as neat a distillation of the Trump era as might be imaginable.

Waller’s series resists flashbacks and heavy exposition; its characters reveal who they are by what they say and do in the moment, and the rest is up to viewers’ interpretation. The show opens on Schlafly, who is posing in an American-flag bikini at a fundraiser to reelect Representative Phil Crane (played by a pleasantly oily James Marsden). From the beginning, there’s a discernible disconnect between Schlafly’s public face and the private mechanics of her mind, but it’s not one that seems to ultimately deter her. “Don’t forget to smile,” Crane tells her, as he hosts her on a local cable talk show. “Smile, with teeth.” A flicker of irritation passes over Schlafly’s face, until she swiftly replaces it with a broad, telegenic grin.

Schlafly was always a strange candidate for the leader of an anti-feminist revolution. During the Great Depression, when her father lost his job, her mother, who had two degrees, worked as a teacher and a librarian to support the family. Schlafly herself graduated college at 19 and alternated classes during World War II with working as a ballistics gunner at a munitions factory. When she married her husband, the 15-years-older lawyer Fred Schlafly (played in the series by John Slattery), she promised to cherish him, but not to obey, her New York Times obituary revealed. By 1971, when the series begins, she had worked for the American Enterprise Institute, positioned herself as a national-security expert and strident anti-communist, made a failed run for the House of Representatives, and published five books, including a best-selling manifesto for Barry Goldwater that challenged the Republican establishment and helped Goldwater secure the GOP nomination for the presidency in 1964.

In the first episode, Blanchett’s Schlafly is at the beauty salon when her friend Alice (Sarah Paulson) brings up the ERA. “Oh, I don’t know what all the fuss is about,” Schlafly sighs dismissively. “There are so many more pressing issues, like national security.” But this is a question of national security, Alice argues: If women are equal to men, then they can be drafted, and everyone’s daughters can be shipped off to Vietnam. Schlafly gives short shrift to the idea. But weeks later, when she flies to Washington, D.C., for a meeting with senators about national security and the Strategic Arms Limitations Talks, and her expertise is ignored as she’s asked to take notes, she spots an opening. “The women I know are terrified,” she tells the assembled men, who suddenly aren’t so eager to talk over an avatar of the 40 million housewives whom they need, in one congressman’s words, to “stop clucking and get out the vote.”