“Mrs. America,” a nine-part biopic on Eagle Forum founder Phyllis Schlafly and her philosophical opposites in the 1970s feminist movement, ended last week on Walt Disney’s FX Channel. Depressingly, the show never got down to the religious convictions that drove this cultural pioneer.
I last wrote about the show here in the hopes that this infotainment extravaganza might get better. It did not. You could see this in the shows. You could see this in news coverage of the series.
Instead, this media event became a lesson on how blue-staters (and I live in one such locale) perceive the universe. Conservative — and usually religious — characters were one-dimensional jerks while the folks on the left were interesting, complex people with much inner turmoil. The latter group was always true to their nobler selves whereas Schlafly was never true to anything except her own scheming self.
As I watched episodes week by week, I was surprised that conservative and religious-market media — Catholic media, for example — weren’t tracking this rewrite of history, despite accusations being lobbed at Schlafly such as her being in bed with the Ku Klux Klan.
Never mind that even Slate said evidence was sketchy at best that Schlafly colluded with that group. The Klan was anti-Catholic and Schlafly was Catholic. But let’s not let the facts get in our way, in a series that many news outlets took seriously as a commentary on that era.
The real heroes of the show were the founding members of the National Women’s Political Caucus such as U.S. Reps. Bella Abzug and Shirley Chisholm, author Betty Friedan, Republican operative Jill Ruckelshaus and Gloria Steinem, co-founder of Ms. Magazine. Their beliefs and assumptions — including an unstinting advocacy on behalf of abortion — are never questioned, whereas Schlafly is continually portrayed as a racist who specializes in weird put-downs of her black housekeepers. Has anyone offered on-the-record, journalism-level proof that there incidents ever happened?
Schlafly does have a biographer, David Critchlow, but no one checked with him before airing the show. Here’s what he told The Federalist about all the factual errors in the series.
The show took such liberties with reality that even the Los Angeles Times ran fact-checker pieces after each episode explaining what was made up and what was true.
For instance, although episode seven shows Schlafly and her namesake daughter Phyllis, aka, Liza, disagreeing, the truth was otherwise. As the Times noted:
The writers of “Mrs. America” seem to have taken some creative license when it comes to their depiction of Schlafly family dynamics.
Liza, formerly known as Phyllis and the fourth of the six Schlafly children, did change her name while attending Princeton in the late ‘70s — the height of the pitched ERA debate. But there is not a tremendous amount of evidence suggesting she and her mother disagreed politically.
For the most part, the show’s depiction of the feminists very much squared with reality. As for Schlafly, not so much.
Episode six had more religious content in it than anything else in the show, but that serving was paltry all the same. Near the end, we see inside the cell of a confessional where Schlafly is confessing to her priest that her son is a gay “pervert.” She wonders what she did to cause this and why God is afflicting her with this, of all problems.
In the same episode, Schlafly meets up with Lottie Beth Hobbs, the evangelical Protestant founder of a group that opposes homosexuality and abortion. She’s a member of the Church of Christ, but the show doesn’t go into such factual distinctions.
Hobbs unkindly ribs Schlafly for her Catholic views but Schlafly swallows the insults for the chance to get her hands on Hobbs’ mailing list. This is the first time the series covers the merger of Catholic and Protestants for a common cause and how Schlafly pioneered the idea, which was radical back then. She was ahead of her time in working with Latter-day Saints.
About the LDS connection, here’s an interesting tidbit from Benjamin Park, assistant prof of history at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Texas:
But I just wanted to say a few words about Schlafly’s importance to the history of modern Mormon conservatism. It is well known that a number of LDS leaders were both sympathetic to and involved with the rise of the Religious Right…
The ERA, which seemed destined to passage during the early 1970s, ended up losing in the wake of an immense conservative backlash that was driven by prominent members of the Religious Right, especially Schlafly who was the most vocal spokeswoman. Mormon leaders spoke out against the amendment as well, and volunteers from local congregations were bused out to conventions and rallies to assure its demise. …
Adding that the anti-ERA movement provided a venue for LDS women to enter politics:
In a sense, Schlafly provided a model through which Mormon women could engage — and influence! — the partisan world while retaining their conservative, domestic credentials.
Instead of taking on Catholics and the Latter-day Saints, the series kept attacking evangelicals, down to showing one carrying a Confederate flag during one of their marches. Are we sure they did that? Outlets like The Ringer breathlessly talked about the series creator’s “commitment to fidelity” and as well as the show’s “authenticity,” but as the weeks wore on, it was clear that only one side was portrayed accurately.
Plus, there was a double standard. When Schlafly had to compromise with conniving, sexually abusive congressmen in part six to get support for her anti-ERA push, she was portrayed as a sellout. But when Bella Abzug refused to defend secretaries who were being sexually harassed, she was portrayed as pragmatic.
“Mrs. America” aired on Hulu. Elsewhere on that channel was the film “Notorious RBG” about U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. What a contrast! The movie/hagiography displays an astute, cultured, pioneering Columbia Law School grad whose courageous legal decisions changed American history. Schlafly is never portrayed in similar terms even though she, like Ginsburg, seized her moment in changing American society.
“Mrs. America” hit the gutter in the last episode by linking Schlafly and her efforts with the Trump campaign and those despised evangelicals. Vulture, a site that took endless potshots at conservative women during the show’s nine-week run, performed a three-way marriage with Schlafly, Trump and — you guessed it — evangelicals.
Repeatedly, the justification of everything that Phyllis and her fellow conservatives are doing is framed within the context of religion. “After years of being ostracized and discounted, religious voices are being heard in the political arena,” Rosemary tells Alice, explaining why their movement is even more important than it was in the beginning.
“We are winning because we have God on our side,” Phyllis proclaims in her nauseating gala keynote speech, delivered in a dress that makes her appear to have angel’s wings. Even after Phyllis forgets to pick up her daughter from college because she’s so preoccupied with what is, contrary to her own rhetoric, absolutely a career outside of the home, Phyllis tells her daughter that must do her work because “she was anointed by God.”
That sounded so familiar for some reason … oh, right. That’s why.
By the way, the daughter incident never happened, according to this video.
Elle magazine was the only publication I found that interviewed Anne Schlafly Cori, Schlafly’s daughter, mid-way through the series, to see if the show even approached reality.
It didn’t.
Schlafly Cori said she emailed producers after FX announced the new series in 2018 in the hope of participating in some capacity, but never got a response. Mrs. America creator Dahvi Waller told Vanity Fair that’s because she felt opening a line of communication would make the show’s writers “beholden to [that person’s] version of events.”
To Schlafly Cori, it felt like a slap in the face. “It was obvious they were not interested in the family’s point of view,” she said. “They already had the show sketched out, and they weren’t interested in the facts getting in the way of their portrayal.”
She also thought the show failed to highlight her mother’s religiosity, which she called the “bedrock” of her stances against abortion and same-sex marriage, despite her son John being gay.
The son was eventually outed by Queer Week in 1992.
Schlafly Cori said it was never a point of contention in their family.
“I didn’t see any tension between my mother and John growing up,” she said. “Certainly my mother was a devout Catholic. Her religion was very important to her. She very firmly believed that sex should be between a man and a woman within marriage. That was the life she lived. And she lived the Catholic doctrine.”
I’m guessing the series didn’t have a religion adviser on set, as none of the faith mentions and portrayals ring true. They are artifices set up a straw men to portray a slanted reality that doesn’t mesh with the way the characters really lived.
How should a devout Catholic family been portrayed in the 1970s, an era where the Catholic Church was undergoing immense change? There was the echoes of Vatican II, the rise of liberation theology and a surging charismatic movement, all within its ranks. Any researcher could have found that.
But FX chose to stay in the fantasy realm. Schlafly built a coalition of conservative Christian women, a group previously unknown in politics, into a fighting machine that derailed the ERA as it stood three states away from ratification. The pros at FX were more interested in fiction.
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