‘Mrs. America’ tells the story of the women’s movement from the dark side of the Force
‘MRS. AMERICA,’ FX’s invigorating, infuriating and only faintly inspiring dramatic miniseries about the nearpassage of the Equal Rights Amendment, tries to accomplish a lot of things at once. For any viewer under the age of about 40, it’s meant to be a compelling recap of the women’s liberation movement of the 1970s, as seen mostly through the rise of a conservative backlash that very nearly stamped out feminism in mainstream politics. That’s a lot of territory to cover in nine episodes.
For others old enough to remember the events it portrays, the series can be viewed as another admirable effort by the makers of prestige TV to dive back into contemporary history and resurface with the sort of bold, contextually fresh pearl of hindsight that only time and creativity can provide.
That also means ‘Mrs. America’ will probably soon join the ranks of “The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story” and “Chernobyl” in the sometimes grueling process of being fact-checked as it airs. Brace yourselves for the scholarly op-eds and expert essays that will tendentiously remind us that what we’re seeing in ‘ Mrs. America’ is a distorted version of truth - never mind that the series is quite upfront about that, in boilerplate text preceding each episode. For narrative purposes, some characters are real, a few fictional, and whole swaths of dialogue have been imagined.
This cycle, in which a big TV series induces everything from thoughtful analysis to dreary displays of nitpicking, has perhaps taken the place of well-taught American history courses. Such shows deliver heightened versions of actual events; the experts predictably get in a lather over it. Still, if ‘Mrs. America’ sends people to Wikipedia to learn more about, say, Shirley Chisholm (the nation’s first black woman to serve in Congress and run for president), then I’m all for it.
Where I’m less enthused is when such shows start to mimic the dull structure of Wikipedia entries, which can easily happen. In telling this story of liberation, I’m fine with the liberties ‘Mrs. America’ rightly takes. For those of us who’ve come simply to watch a TV show, the news is essentially good, with a pace and story momentum that is often surprising, enlightening and satisfyingly saucy.
Created and co-written by Dhavi Waller (whose resume includes work on AMC’s ‘Mad Men’ and ‘Halt and Catch Fire’), ‘Mrs. America’ is ingeniously structured around its perceived villain, the late right-wing activist Phyllis Schlafly, played with a commanding and deliciously precise steeliness by Cate Blanchett.
She’s an Illinois wife and mother, powerfully intelligent, who at first scratches her itch for politics by championing Barry Goldwater and writing occasionally about the Communist threat and endorsing nuclear armament. She made an unsuccessful run for Congress, all with the ‘permission,’ she always notes, of her attorney husband, Fred (John Slattery).
A PTA friend (Sarah Paulson as the fictional “Alice Macray”) helps turn Phyllis’s laserlike attention, in 1971, to the emerging effort to pass an Equal Rights Amendment, which would constitutionally ban sex discrimination. Phyllis immediately finds great pleasure in repeatedly pressing the hot button of gender politics, riling up her sister homemakers into a counter-liberation movement with fears of unisex bathrooms and women being drafted into war. This brings Phyllis her first, addictive taste of liberal tears and gives her the attention she clearly craves.
There’s no mistaking that ‘Mrs. America’ is Schlafly’s show (and boldly so), giving her everything she lacked as a media caricature: shape, complexity and even some empathy for her personal struggles and her own experiences (whether she acknowledges them or not) of being discriminated against as a woman. Blanchett turns someone many people would like to forget into someone who is wickedly unforgettable.
Yuck, is one understandable reaction, but you also have to admit: It’s much more interesting to figure out what made Phyllis tick than watch nine episodes of veneration for the women’s rights movement.
‘Mrs. America’ brings plenty of that, especially in the second half of the series, but who can resist such a consistent malevolence? It’s as if all nine
“Star Wars” movies really had been about Darth Vader, instead of just being ostensibly so.
On that note, in the first three episodes, the supposed heroes of this story seem to get the shorter shrift.
The titles of most of the episodes bear the first names of women who each played key roles in a national culture clash, starting with ‘Phyllis’ and moving on to ‘ Gloria’ (Steinem, played by Rose Byrne), along with ‘Shirley’ (Chisholm, played by Uzo Aduba), ‘Betty’ (Friedan, played by Tracey Ullman), ‘ Bella’ (Abzug, played by Margo Martindale), and ‘ Jill’ (Ruckelshaus, played by Elizabeth Banks), but the story never drifts too far away from Phyllis and her massing army of conservative support.
Her efforts eventually lead her to ally, warily at first, with religious firebrands and white supremacists, forming a new strain of right-wing Republicanism that, arguably, won the day.
(And still wins it. Schlafly’s last book, ‘The Conservative Case for Trump,’ came out just after she died in 2016.)
Yet ‘Mrs. America’ isn’t spun as a total tragedy. Though Byrne’s take on Steinem unfortunately never amounts to much more than the hairstyle and tinted eyewear (as Waller and company depict the feminist icon as an aloof political operative, preferring instead to view her work as a long run against 10,000 years of patriarchy), both Martindale and Ullman are terrifically strong as Abzug and Friedan, two legends of the movement, summoning a complicated friendship that encompasses rivalry, disdain and fierce devotion. Aduba, too, brings a graceful and aching depth to her portrayal of Chisholm. Along the way, the women’s liberation movement endures fractious arguments over race and sexual orientation, thoughtfully recounted here and still very much germane.
So, too, Schlafly finds division in her ranks. Paulson delivers yet another knockout performance — this time a subtle, slowly burning one - as the composite character, Alice, whom Phyllis sends to Houston to represent the anti-ERA stance at Abzug’s 1977 National Women’s Conference.
There, among 20,000 or so feminists, Alice experiences an almost-epiphany, heavily emphasizing “Mrs. America’s” central theme: Even the conservative women who said they didn’t want to work were all working tirelessly, at cross purposes, in a male-dominated world that never gave them their full due, and still doesn’t.