In her 2006 book, Women Who Make the World Worse (and How Their Radical Feminist Assault Is Ruining Our Schools, Families, Military, and Sports), the late Kate O’Beirne wrote, “There is no monolithic women’s vote, and there is no monolithic women’s agenda. There haven’t been since feminists lost their most cherished aim twenty-five years ago. The Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) was defeated when a truth squad, composed largely of women led by Phyllis Schlafly, exposed the threat it posed.”
The bitterness that remains from that historic defeat is on full display in Mrs. America, Hulu’s new nine-part miniseries (beginning April 15) that highlights the 1970s battle over the ERA with the feminist movement (referred to at the time as the “women’s liberation movement”) on one side and Schlafly, the conservative activist who, as it happens, is my mother’s sister, on the other.
I have no doubt the series, which boasts an impressive cast, is well-acted. The producers have already released several trailers and many clips that demonstrate as much. I wish I could say that’s a good thing, but a strong Hollywood drama can do considerable damage if the messaging is fraudulent. That is certainly the case here.
Schlafly was no doubt the most divisive (indeed, hated) woman in America in the 1970s — much like President Trump (who attended Phyllis’s funeral in 2016) is today. Now that she is gone, feminists are exacting their revenge. Mrs. America may be peppered with historical facts, but the caricature of Schlafly is pure propaganda.
I continue to be amazed at the number of reviews in which the reviewer has been so easily deceived. In the Wall Street Journal, John Anderson describes Phyllis’s life as “one of thwarted ambition, gender bias and burdens caused by the very standards she wants to uphold,” but that Phyllis “doesn’t see it, or chooses not to, blinded as she is by her resentments and the calcifying rage.”
What a strikingly false claim.
Phyllis was many things, but being blinded by resentment and rage doesn’t even make the list. On the contrary, it is feminists who are mired in resentment and rage. Betty Friedan, for instance, once told Phyllis she’d like to “burn her at the stake.” In contrast, when Phyllis had a pie thrown in her face, she said she wished it would have been a cherry pie, her favorite flavor.
It was Phyllis’s lack of rage and resentment that agitated feminists so much. They couldn’t wear her down, and it made them mad with fury.
In another review, this time in the Boston Globe, Matthew Gilbert writes that “there are countless micro- and macro-aggressions chronicled in Mrs. America, not least of all toward Schlafly.” Her husband Fred, he writes, “reveals the insecurity of a man whose wife has great interpersonal power.”
This couldn’t be more wrong. Fred’s and Phyllis’s marriage was, by all accounts, a marriage of equals — and in fact there were zero bad feelings on Fred’s part about Phyllis’s work. On the contrary, he relished in her successes. He embodied the very attitude feminists claim all husbands should harbor toward their strong and successful wives.
And then there’s that scene: the one that shows Fred “forcing himself on [Phyllis] sexually after she’s had a long and frustrating day,” writes David Zurawik in the Baltimore Sun. It is preposterous, and just plain cruel, to suggest Fred would force himself on Phyllis. But concocting this storyline was pivotal for Hollywood to drive home the idea that prior to the 1970s feminist movement, husbands raped their wives with impunity — and that Phyllis was blind to her own oppression.
Zurawik also writes that Phyllis thought “she’d made it to the inner circle of Republican political power as part of a meeting with Senator Barry Goldwater and other men in Washington, only to be asked to serve as a note taker for the meeting.” Again, this never happened.
These fictional accounts of Phyllis Schlafly and the ERA are critical for feminists to try and convince America that prior to the feminist movement, women were viewed as “less than” men and that Phyllis was a “monster” and a “villain,” as Sonia Saraiya writes in Vanity Fair, for commandeering the defeat of the ERA.
And, by the way, why would someone, let alone a woman, oppose the ERA? There was a time, believe it or not, when Phyllis thought the same thing. Then, she looked into it. She studied it from every angle, as only Phyllis would do. While the rest of us enjoy reading a juicy novel or going to the movies or going out to dinner with friends, Phyllis studied and worked. She didn’t eat or sleep much, and she definitely didn’t play. All she did in her spare time was work, and that work would almost always unearth data to which most people would otherwise not be privy.
The ERA is a perfect example. Here is a transcript of Phyllis explaining why she opposed the ERA. And here is the remarkable, behind-the-scenes true account of its defeat — one that’s decidedly different from the story you’re told in Mrs. America.
Naturally, I couldn’t help but wonder where the creators of Mrs. America got their material, so I did some sleuthing. Turns out their source was Carol Felsenthal, who wrote a biography of Phyllis in 1981 (I remember her coming to my home to interview my mother when I was 12) and apparently signed a contract with the producers to answer questions about Phyllis from “the writers’ room” about, among other things, Phyllis’s wardrobe, personal tastes, her relationship with her husband Fred, and the ERA.
Felsenthal had a complicated relationship with Phyllis in that she loathed her politics — Felsenthal is a self-described feminist — but liked her as a person. In a 2016 article, written just after Phyllis died, Felsenthal wrote, “I knew her on and off for the last 39 years, and when I was in her company, say doing an interview over lunch, I found her hard to hate. (My warm feelings would evaporate as soon as I saw her on television inveighing against the ERA.)”
Foolishly, Felsenthal gave the show’s producers the information they wanted and assumed they wouldn’t twist it to fit their agenda. For example, Felsenthal told John Flattery, who plays Fred in the series, how “remarkably supportive Fred was of Phyllis’s work.” Somehow, that got turned into Fred being a rapist.
What Mrs. America demonstrates to those of us who see through it is simple. Now that Phyllis is dead, as is her husband, feminists can rewrite history to their heart’s content, and few will stop them, in part because so few people alive today know the truth. Meanwhile, those of us who do stare in disbelief at the fact that people believe the tales Hollywood tells. Most people take it at face value. They honestly believe Mrs. America is a bona fide documentary.
Still, there’s something satisfying about being on the other end — knowing the truth and being able to separate the personal from the political, something feminists are unable to do. On the contrary, their favorite phrase in the 1970s was “the personal is political.” They encouraged women (and still do) to blame social structures for whatever personal hardships they face. They call that empowering, but it’s just the opposite. It creates a culture of victims.
In fact, that’s the irony of Phyllis Schlafly, a.k.a. “Mrs. America.” No matter what you think of her personally, her greatest legacy is that she actually did empower women by insisting that women are not victims by default. She would repeatedly say (and forthrightly believed) that women can do whatever they set their minds to, that nothing and no one is holding them back from whatever it is they want to think or do.
No one, that is, except feminists.
Suzanne Venker (@SuzanneVenker) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. She’s the author of five books and a relationship coach, as well as host of The Suzanne Venker Show. Her website is www.suzannevenker.com.
