Mrs. America
Mrs. America, a nine-part dramatization of the battle over the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) now streaming on FX/Hulu, portrays many of the leading figures of second-wave feminism and their anti-feminist opponents. The action begins in 1971 when the ERA, first drafted by suffragist Alice Paul in 1923, passes the House (354-23), and sails through the Senate the next year (84-8). Both Republican and Democratic feminists in the National Women’s Political Caucus are confident it will be ratified by at least thirty-eight states within seven years. [1]
Then Phyllis Schlafly, a conservative Republican from Alton, Illinois, begins to mobilize housewives with a red stop sign, STOP-ERA, Stop Taking Our Privileges. Glorifying the white male-headed family, celebrating the unpaid homemaker in a Christian home full of modern appliances, she wields slogans like “pro-marriage,” “pro-family,” “pro-life,” and “pro-America” to reshape politics. Her group defends the ideal of the man earning a family wage to support a house and a stay-at-home wife. A militant anti-Communist, Schlafly views a national child care bill as a plot to place children in the care of the state.
Mrs. America is not a documentary, so it includes fictional characters “invented for creative and storyline purposes.” Created by Dahvi Waller, the show takes place between 1971 and 1982, when Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, and Ronald Reagan occupied the White House. Sets include offices in the West Wing as well as more ordinary workplaces, hotels, and homes in New York and Washington. Many episodes are named for individual women: Phyllis, Gloria, Shirley, Betty, Jill, Bella. Phyllis’s pastel pink skirt suits, Bella’s wide-brimmed hats and Gloria’s aviator glasses help identify these icons, along with perfectly dated wardrobes to remind us that half a century ago, professional attire meant suits or dresses, heels, makeup, and hair coaxed with rollers and spray. The narrative climaxes with “Houston,” the city where two conferences take place in 1977, one feminist, another anti-feminist. It concludes with “Reagan.” Slate has published Cornelia Channing’s nine reports on the balance of history and fiction in the series.
“The suburban ideal Schlafly promoted was the postwar dream, a happily married white Christian couple tucked into a tract house where the husband took the decisions.”
Played by Cate Blanchett, Phyllis Schlafly dominates the show, allied with conservative activists Lottie Beth Hobbs of WWWW (Women Who Want to be Women), and Rosemary Thomson of the Citizens’ Review Committee. Some of these “pro-family” women lobby state legislators, delivering homemade bread and jam as evidence of their skilled labor. Headquartered in Schlafly’s residence, a vast half-timbered neo-Tudor house in suburban St. Louis, the group gains traction by linking opposition to the ERA with opposition to abortion and gay rights. After Roe v. Wade legalizes abortion in 1973, Schlafly, a conservative Catholic and mother of six, reaches out to Catholics, Orthodox Jews, evangelical Protestants, and Mormons, disparate congregations that agree on little but the subservience of women. Buses of church women begin to roll.
Six feminists supporting ERA appear in the series: Gloria Steinem, Shirley Chisholm, Betty Friedan, Brenda Feigen Fasteau, Jill Ruckelshaus, and Bella Abzug. Busy with individual careers, they fail to recognize the threat Schlafly embodies until it is too late. Ruckelshaus, a Ford appointee, represents Republican women who have worked for the ERA for decades. Abzug and Chisholm, Democratic Congresswomen from New York, navigate politics in Washington, as Chisholm runs a presidential campaign and Abzug tries for the Senate. Feigen Fasteau is a lawyer with the ACLU; Steinem, the founder of Ms. magazine. Friedan, author and founder of NOW, attacks her allies, Steinem and Abzug, as well as their common enemy, Schlafly. Controversy is rife.
During the federally funded National Women’s Conference in Houston in 1977, all the pro-ERA forces unite. Lady Bird Johnson, Betty Ford, and Rosalyn Carter stand with them, but Schlafly and Hobbs fill another Houston arena with a “Pro-Life, Pro-Family Rally,” where anti-ERA demonstrators claim a national majority, what the Rev. Jerry Falwell will soon call a “moral majority.” The ERA has been approved by thirty-five states, but thirty-eight are needed. In 1981 Reagan takes office, and when the deadline to ratify expires in 1982, Schlafly has won her battle. As Marjorie J. Spruill concludes in Divided We Stand, a definitive history of this era, Schlafly shifted the shape of both parties for decades to come by forging a new Republican conservative movement of women and right-wing religious groups united against the ERA and abortion.[2]
Figure 1. Activist Phyllis Schlafly wearing a "Stop ERA" badge, demonstrating with other women against the Equal Rights Amendment in front of the White House, Washington, D.C., February 4, 1977. Photograph by Warren K. Leffler. Source: Library of Congress (Wikimedia Commons).
Mrs. America conveys Schlafly’s charisma, but it does not explore the importance of either suburban houses or household labor to her win. Had feminists recognized all women as valued workers and softened their critique of the single-family home as “a comfortable concentration camp” (Friedan’s phrase), the outcome might have been different. The suburban ideal Schlafly promoted was the postwar dream, a happily married white Christian couple tucked into a tract house where the husband took the decisions. Nostalgia made her campaign more effective in the 1970s and early 1980s as wages stalled, housing was less affordable, and many women had to enter paid work while continuing unpaid labor at home. Two jobs rather than one—what sociologist Arlie Hochschild called the “second shift”—meant housewives had a lot to lose.
“2020 is the hundredth anniversary of women’s suffrage in the U.S., an anniversary we can all celebrate, yet feminists still have some distance to go in winning all women’s votes for equal citizenship.”
Schlafly exploited women’s anxiety by arguing millions of housewives deserved to retain the “privilege” of economic security in exchange for a lifetime of nurturing. To her credit, she insisted that “work” meant essential human labor, not just paid employment. She complained that homemakers’ economic contributions were not recognized in GDP, emphasized ways that income tax policy disadvantaged housewives, criticized legislation that might have altered a widow’s ability to collect Social Security because she hadn’t held a paid job, and argued that housewives should be able to contribute to IRA’s at a rate equal to employed women.[3] Had second-wave activists remembered the earlier material feminists who wanted economic recognition for nurturing work, including Melusina Fay Peirce, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Ethel Puffer Howes, they might have seen the importance of this issue, but many thought the “politics of housework” meant getting men to do dishes.
Mrs. America engages the political debates of the 1970s with snappy dialogue and good acting. Running for almost seven hours, it would have benefited from more context as women’s history. Schlafly was not the first woman to make a successful public career as a writer and lecturer who celebrated the male-headed family and the modest house. (Think of Catharine Beecher promoting The American Woman’s Home in 1869.) But Schlafly was the first to draw multiple religious denominations into a public politics of gender and sexuality, teaching other Republican candidates to crusade as “pro-family,” “pro-life,” and “pro-America.” Active in right-wing politics from the 1950s on, her most surprising victory was not defeating the ERA, but electing Trump. The Conservative Case for Trump, Schlafly’s co-authored book endorsing him in 2016, enabled Trump to win the votes of 62 per cent of white women without college degrees.[4] 2020 is the hundredth anniversary of women’s suffrage in the U.S., an anniversary we can all celebrate, yet feminists still have some distance to go in winning all women’s votes for equal citizenship.
NOTES
[1] In recent years, three states have ratified. For more on the history and current status of the ERA, see equalrightsamendment.org.
[2] Marjorie J. Spruill, Divided We Stand: The Battle Over Women’s Rights and Family Values That Polarized American Politics (New York: Bloomsbury, 2017), 314.
[3] Phyllis Schlafly, Feminist Fantasies, foreword by Ann Coulter (Dallas: Spence Publishing Company, 2003). See “Social Security is Pro-Woman,” 93-97; “Two Faces of Marriage Tax Reform,” 239-241; “What Government Should Do for Mothers,” 214-216.
[4] For the election statistics see Spruill, 343.
