Mrs. America: Striking Biopic on Key Feminist Chapter Says Goodbye to an ERA

By Liam Lacey

Rating: B

In the United States in the early 1970s, a handful of determined women formed a grassroots movement that helped shape the political world we live in today. Some of them, like Gloria Steinem, Bella Abzug, and Betty Friedan, were the leaders of feminism’s second wave. Others were like Illinois mother-of-six Phyllis Schlafly, played by Cate Blanchett as the central character in the new nine-episode series, Mrs. America. The first three episodes are currently available on FX Canada and for rent on iTunes.

Mrs. America was created by Canadian television writer and producer Dahvi Waller, known for her award-winning work on Mad Men. Like that show, Mrs. America is impeccably produced, a retrospective reverie of the style and mores, focusing on the contrast between characters’ public personas and public lives. The show feels expensive, stuffed with major actors in secondary roles. Schlafly’s Illinois group includes actors we would expect to be leads anywhere else: Sarah Paulson, Jeanne Tripplehorn, and Melanie Lynskey.

A parallel set of stories, set around the evolution of the women’s movement in New York and Washington, features performances from figures once everywhere, now in history books and memories. There’s Rose Byrne as Steinem, resented for her celebrity, struggling between mission and self-doubt. Margo Martindale as the blunt Abzug, Tracey Ullman as the abrasive Friedan, and Uzo Aduba (Orange is the New Black) as Shirley Chisholm, the black Democratic congresswoman and presidential candidate.

We get tastes of the personality clashes and competing agendas of the burgeoning movement, distilled down to a few moments and key conversations. (For a fuller picture of the era, I recommend Mary Dore’s 2014 documentary, She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry on Amazon Prime Video).

Given this chance to virtually mingle with these history-making characters, it’s exasperating that the series focuses so much on Schlafly. No doubt she changed history, setting the terms of the ongoing red-state/blue-state culture wars. But even with the distance of 50 years, her offensive rhetoric can give you hives.

It’s already a compliment to Schlafly to have her played by Blanchett who, in every screen moment, projects the two qualities that make for successful politicians and speedboats: buoyancy and a rigid shell. We first see Phyllis mid-forties, smiling or perhaps baring her teeth, posed in a two-piece bathing suit at a charitable beauty contest.

A succession of encounters with various men, patronizing or tolerating her, gives her the ammunition for her later crusade of outrage. Her older husband, Fred (Mad Men’s John Slattery) is indulgent… as long as his wife’s political activities don’t take her out of the house too much.

But when she returns exhausted from a trip, she tries to avoid sex before submitting to him. Her feminist resentment finds an anti-feminist outlet. By attacking advocates of the new Equal Rights Amendment, which has passed in both Houses and on its way to ratification at a state level, she gains the attention of conservative men. “Some women like to blame sexism for their failures instead of admitting they didn’t try hard enough,” she explains.

Meanwhile, she crafts a resonant message for fellow middle-class women, habituated to condescension from men but outraged when it came from other women.

“What I am against,” she says on the show, “is a small Northeastern group of establishment liberals putting down homemakers. The libbers love to say that they’re dedicated to choice, but if you dare to choose the path of full-time mother, if you don’t feel enslaved, you’re just dumb and unenlightened.”

Mrs. America may eventually show us our anti-heroine achieving a tragic moment of awareness, with all the poignancy Blanchett can bring to the moment. But let’s be real here: Schlafly’s last book, published in 2016 after her death at 92, was entitled The Conservative Case for Donald Trump.

Mrs. America. Created by Dahvi Waller. Starring Cate Blanchett, Rose Byrne, Margo Martindale, Uzo Aduba, Sarah Paulson, Elizabeth Banks, Tracey Ullman, John Slattery, Jeanne Tripplehorn, and Melanie Lynskey. Available on FX Canada or for rent on iTunes.