MRS. AMERICA

I have been watching Mrs. America on Hulu, and when I say watching, I mean watching all of the available episodes in a day and then setting calendar alerts for new episodes. Besides the incredible sets, clothing, and casting, I think what kept me more emotionally invested than any other show I’ve watched in quarantine was that Mrs. America is based on completely true events.  Watching this show as a young American woman felt not just like a fun way to pass time, but like I was learning critical information about my own status in this country, and my own history.  

Mrs. America follows the events and individuals involved in the struggle to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970s. This means not only following the narrative of Gloria Steinem, Betty Friedan, and other feminists pushing to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment, but also those fighting against it. The first episode is dedicated to Phyllis Schlafly, known as one of the primary organizers fighting against the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment, mobilizing housewives across the country in her organization STOP (Stop Taking Our Privilege). By exploring Schlafly and her supporters in such a deep, complex, way, the show brings light to deeper issues. By commencing the entire series with Phyllis, a woman who has run for congress, who is highly educated on national defense and politics, but is against the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment, this series forces you to think about the sinister and underlying ways in which women are taught it is within their best interest to restrict their opportunities and separate themselves from men. One episode in, Phyllis, her housewife friends, and STOP are shown protesting at the capital with a voiceover of Gloria Steinem (played by Rose Byrne) stating: “ Men had finally found the best smokescreen for their chauvinism: women.” These women have been brainwashed to believe that if they don’t play the game, they will lose the love and protection of men. Throughout the series, you see the women of STOP constantly downplaying their accomplishments, living in inequitable marriages, and insisting that American women are the most privileged population on the planet. Phyllis Schlafly assists men with their campaigns, helps Goldwater with national defense policies, and blames secretaries for the sexual harassment they experience in the capitol. No matter how much Schlafly defends men, she is not fully invited into the fold.  Jill Ruckleshaus, a Republican woman member of the women’s caucus working to ratify the ERA, tells Schlafly, “you can prop yourself up on the shoulders of men, but remember they’re looking up your skirt.”

Mrs America illustrates the ways in which false information prevailed in the interest of limiting women’s professional and political equality. STOP existed on the premise that the Equal Rights Amendment could eliminate the rights of housewives to alimony and child support and could even allow women to be drafted. However, there is no provision in the law that ensures alimony or child support for women. It becomes abundantly clear that women are unprotected under the law in a myriad of ways. After her divorce, Betty Freidan is unprotected legally from keeping the assets she acquired from the success of her book The Feminine Mystique. The secretaries sexually assaulted by congressman on Capitol Hill are unprotected. As I dove deeper into the women who belong to STOP/Eagle Forum/other organizations in the fight against ratifying the ERA, Schlafly and the other women and housewives advocating against their own legal equality don’t necessarily have a concern about protecting women. One of the women who Schlafly partners with before the National Women’s Convention in Houston is not only anti-choice and anti-ERA, but even expresses that she is against having shelters for “battered women.”

 I felt pity for Schlafly and the fellow women working against women’s rights throughout the show. They tried so hard to preserve what they thought of as the model American family, make sure their husbands and men in power kept their place as superior, and kept insisting that they were not “working women,” even though they were fundraising, traveling, and lobbying like any other politically active professional woman. These women put in so much effort to limit their opportunity, to offend other women, to support men, but I knew the men in their lives would never support or respect them as much in return. Schlafly spends her life educating herself on national defense, counseling powerful congressmen on their own defense knowledge, and in a scene where she is about to meet with multiple powerful politicians, they are laughing as they tell her that the best way to shut up a secretary is to “stick it in their mouth.”

This article was written by Emily Blake. She is the Editor-in-Chief of WednesdayZine.com