What Mrs America gets right and what it gets wrong about 70s feminism
Mrs America gives Phyllis Schlafly a depth in fiction that was lacking in history but Shirley Chisholm is refreshingly portrayed as more than just a martyr
The real hero of Mrs America, the new FX miniseries chronicling the early 1970s political battle over the Equal Rights Amendment, is Phyllis Schlafly. Schlafly, the conservative movement leader who led the antifeminist backlash against the amendment, styled herself a housewife and mother of six, but really she was an educated, driven and ambitious professional political operator, skilled in forging alliances among unlikely counterparts and manipulating the motivations of others toward her own ends.
In the miniseries, a slick, beautifully shot portrait of 1970s America, she is played by Cate Blanchett, who masterfully shows Schlafly finding an outlet for her own frustrated political ambitions in the anti-ERA fight, and rising from a
