By Andy Schlafly & Nancy Thorner -
The star-studded production of “Mrs. America,” a new miniseries about Phyllis Schlafly and her defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970s, is the talk of television. Multiple Emmy awards are expected for this production about real-life personalities still familiar to many.
The visuals are stunning in this 9-part series to debut on the subscriber-based Hulu network on April 15. A second glance is needed at the images to determine if it is of a performer, or an actual photo of the historical figure, because the actresses are made up to look so similar to the real McCoys.
But Phyllis’s family was never consulted for this production, and the script is as shallow as a college skit. The content relies on hackneyed stereotypes that have no basis in truth about Phyllis or her family.
Falsehoods are glaring. It portrays Phyllis as wearing only a wedding band as a married man might, but not an engagement ring as Phyllis and traditional women always did.
One might infer from that and other parts of this script-as-told-by-liberals that Phyllis aspired to be a man, to succeed in a man’s world. Yet nothing would be further from the truth, as she opposed every attempt to make women more like men, or to secure slots for women in jobs traditionally held by men.
Cate Blanchett is cast well as Phyllis, featuring her trademark hairdo and similar facial features. The two-time Academy Award winner was also executive producer of this made-for-television series, bringing an uncommonly high level of talent to the small screen.
Usually the career path of performers is to excel on television with the hope of one day making the leap to Hollywood. Oscar winners rarely go in the opposite direction, from movies to television, but Blanchett agreed to do that for this once-in-a-lifetime role of Phyllis Schlafly.
The Australian Blanchett said she did not know who Phyllis was until she saw her endorse Donald Trump in March 2016, which propelled Trump to victory in the pivotal Missouri primary. When she passed away in 2016, news articles appeared worldwide indicating that she had many followers across the oceans, too, but apparently not Blanchett.
Her supporting cast are dead ringers for Phyllis' political adversaries: Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, and Bella Abzug with her famous hats, and more.
But as fine an actress as Blanchett is, she fails to capture the feminine grace and charm which Phyllis maintained amid the fiercest of conflicts. She would often debate a nasty feminist in front of a hostile crowd of a thousand college students, and then enjoy a casual dinner afterwards as though nothing had happened.
Blanchett’s approach is a forced grin, but with Phyllis her smile was never forced or mean. She was a genuinely happy person, not because her life was easy, but because she was accomplishing what she understood to be better for our country.
The script, written by the Canadian Davhi Waller, acknowledges the immense talents of Phyllis to organize and lead. Waller has said that Phyllis “ was an incredibly effective grassroots organizer, and she was able to mobilize women. That was her superpower.”
But otherwise the script misses opportunities for its talented cast. With rich history available for this drama, it is disappointing that it instead resorts to stereotypical, completely fictional gender role-playing which everyone has seen on television before.
Completely false scenes of the husband commanding the wife, in this case Fred Schlafly supposedly domineering over Phyllis, are as old as Archie Bunker’s tiresome dialog in the sitcom “All in the Family” from the 70s. It was a joke, and everyone understood it as joke, when Phyllis would start a debate by thanking her husband for supposedly allowing her to attend.
A scene where Phyllis supposedly attended an insiders’ meeting with Barry Goldwater and other male politicians, who told her to take notes for the men, is another eye-roller. Goldwater himself was an outsider politically even in the Republican Party, and Phyllis neither mentioned any such incident nor would she have likely been offended by anything similar.
Then there is the entirely fictional “best friend” of Phyllis who is played by a talented actress but has no historical legitimacy. Why such prominence is given in a fact-based miniseries to a purely fanciful character is mystifying, and detracts from its value.
But the script nailed it by confirming that the Equal Rights Amendment died 40 years ago, and some liberals are unhappy about that because they want to pretend that ERA can be ratified today by Congress extending the deadline. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg agrees with Phyllis on this, however, telling the ERA proponents to start over.
"Mrs. America" gets a “C” for resorting to fictional stereotypes rather than trying harder to portray the sweet, engaging Phyllis.
