Fact-checking Mrs. America

Waller told Variety that she and her team tried to convey complicated, messy truths about both sides of the ERA battle while giving each its due. “We really approached all of the characters, whether we agree with them or not, with compassion,” said Waller. In fact, the feminists get compassion. Schlafly gets machine-gunned.

The real Schlafly was a devout Catholic and staunch conservative from Alton, Illinois. She called politics her hobby, but that hobby involved organizing one of the most successful grassroots uprisings in history. Joseph Lelyveld, former editor for the New York Times, called her the best debater “of any gender to be found on any side of any issue anywhere.”

But this fierce polemicist was disarmingly gracious in person. Karen DeCrow, former president of the National Organization for Women, debated Schlafly more than 80 times in the 1970s. She came to admire Schlafly’s wit, keen intelligence, and good nature: “It was fun to be on the program with her. … I never found Phyllis to be unpleasant, unfriendly, or uncooperative.”

When Betty Friedan said she wanted to burn Schlafly “at the stake” or Florynce “Flo” Kennedy, a feminist lawyer, told a Miami radio station, “I just don’t see why some people don’t hit Phyllis Schlafly in the mouth,” Schlafly never complained or responded in kind. (Flo, by the way, is lionized in the series — no mention of her Schlafly comment.)

Schlafly could come off as a starchy church lady with fervent views on national security and communism. There’s plenty to parody and criticize about her politics. Waller and company chose to assassinate her character instead.

We watch their imagined Schlafly viciously humiliate her sister-in-law, sadistically force her terrified daughter into a pool, and savagely bully her only friend. (Fortunately, someone slips the friend LSD at a women’s conference, where she finds her voice at a Woody Guthrie singalong.) To symbolize the TV Schlafly’s cruel abandonment of her gay son, we see her shoot and wound a deer and then shoot it again in the head to take it out of its misery. The real-life Schlafly loved her son dearly and remained close with him until her death.

Waller assured Smithsonian Magazine that though she and her staff “took liberties” writing about Schlafly’s private conversations, “all the events depicted in Mrs. America are accurate. All the debates we show actually happened.”

That’s not true. The series includes a reenactment of a 1974 debate on NBC’s Tomorrow Show with Tom Snyder. On one side are Phyllis and her husband, Fred (John Slattery). On the other are feminist lawyer Brenda Feigen Fasteau (Ari Graynor) and her husband, Marc (Adam Brody). The fictional Phyllis seems amateurish and unprepared. When she is asked to provide a citation for a court ruling she claims hurt housewives, she invents one on the spot. Brenda goes for the kill: “No, there is no such case. … You are not really a housewife.”

None of this ever happened. Phyllis was well-prepared and was never accused of inventing a case. It was Brenda who did the inventing. She claimed that wives could not get loans from certain banks unless they could prove they had been sterilized. An incredulous Fred Schlafly asked her to name one such bank. A desperate Feigen Fasteau said, “There’s a bank in Queens — I am not going to name the name.” Snyder jumps in to point out that if there were a bank out there asking women about sterilization, it “would be a front-page story.”

Some will say it’s just Hollywood — everyone assumes it’s all made up. But liberal media are falling all over themselves to vouch for the show’s accuracy. A Slate writer fact-checked the Tomorrow Show debate and assures readers that the events depicted in the episode “actually happened.“ According to Joanna Robinson, a Vanity Fair senior writer: “There really is almost nothing in this show that hasn’t been meticulously fact-checked or sourced to reality.”

Viewers come away from Mrs. America thinking that the ERA failed because Schlafly and her army of deplorables defeated it through lies. But that’s not the real story.

The series doctors the debate on the Tomorrow Show, but it leaves out a far more consequential 1973 confrontation between Schlafly and NOW Vice President Ann Scott on William Buckley Jr.’s Firing Line. Buckley begins by reading the ERA: “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged … on account of sex.” And then, he says what must have been on many viewers’ minds: “That does not sound particularly subversive.”

Schlafly explained that the amendment was about not women’s rights but rather imposing a controversial agenda on an unsuspecting nation. She pointed out that the amendment could be used to forbid all forms of so-called gender “segregation,” including single-sex schools. It could also subject young women to the military draft.

Instead of disputing Schlafly’s predictions, Scott argued that they were desirable and long overdue. “There is no question that if the Equal Rights Amendment is passed that women would become subject to the draft,” she said. “But if women are to be citizens, and citizens are to be subject to the draft, then women should take the responsibilities as well as the rights of citizenship.”

As the Harvard political scientist Jane Mansbridge explains in her meticulously researched Why We Lost the ERA, the ERA lost because its supporters would not compromise. They believed, says Mansbridge, that “the ERA would require the military to send women draftees into combat on the same basis as men.” They did so, she says, “because their ideology called for full equality with men, not for equality with exceptions.” Schlafly was able to organize her historic grassroots campaigns not by misrepresenting the ERA feminists but by quoting them.

To its credit, Mrs. America hints that the feminists were out of step with the country. We hear Gloria Steinem describing housewives as “brainwashed.” Friedan warns that if they want to gain supporters, they probably shouldn’t be saying that “marriage is prostitution and that alimony is war reparations.” When the pro-ERA Republican feminist Jill Ruckelshaus (Elizabeth Banks) tells the group, “We do not want housewives thinking we are against them,” Feigen Fasteau shoots back, “We are against them.”

And while the show attempts to discredit, pathologize, and vilify Schlafly, it can’t help but swoon over her. She’s the most interesting character and manages to steal every scene. The Hollywood Reporter compared the fictionalized Schlafly to Walter White in Breaking Bad — a “villain whose cunning, ambition and even troll-ish wit we can’t help admiring.”

One of the show’s best scenes shows an elegant Schlafly gliding into a smoke-filled room at the 1976 Republican convention to negotiate with Ronald Reagan’s top advisers. They want her mailing list; she wants Reagan to commit to taking the ERA out of the party platform. The men are skeptical. Why risk alienating potential delegates over some anodyne women’s amendment? They humor and patronize her. A few insult her. Schlafly is gracious, accommodating, ladylike — but you see her formidable mind at work. A little smile comes over her face. Those men have no idea whom they are dealing with. They fade into the background, and as the camera closes in on Schlafly, Lesley Gore’s 1964 proto-feminist anthem “You Don’t Own Me” begins to play.

That’s the newly liberated woman of the 1970s announcing her independence from both overbearing men and disdainful feminists. It may be faux history, but it’s the closest Mrs. America comes to telling the truth about why the ERA failed.

Christina Hoff Sommers is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. She is the author of several books, including Who Stole Feminism? and The War Against Boys. She also hosts a video blog, The Factual Feminist, and co-hosts The Femsplainers. Follow her @Chsommers.