“Mrs. America,” the current television drama on Hulu about 1970s feminism and its backlash, could easily slip in the subtitle “a precursor to the 53 percent.” The 53 percent, of course, being a reference to the white women who voted Donald Trump for president.
Since 2016, many of us have tried to make sense of how a majority of white women could vote for a man who bragged about grabbing women’s genitals and uttered other sexist remarks on and off the campaign trail. Are they voting against their interests? Are they overlooking sexism?
I say no.
“Mrs. America” helps answer those questions through the story of Phyllis Schlafly, the right-wing woman from Downstate Alton who organized against the Equal Rights Amendment.
A centerpiece of the women’s liberation movement, the ERA boasted bipartisan support. Republican President Richard Nixon supported it. Congress passed it. And polls consistently showed Americans in favor. But the ERA had to be ratified by three-fourths of the states, 38, before it could become a part of the U.S. Constitution.
“Mrs. America” serializes how momentum for the amendment’s passage was reversed via the cunning organizing of Schlafly.
To Schlafly and her white middle-class army of homemakers, women’s lib was a pejorative that undermined their roles as women destined to stay at home and take care of their husbands and children. Watch out for those radical lesbians, they warn!
Watching Schlafly, played by Cate Blanchett, spearhead a successful grassroots mission curtain-raises the way the religious right influences today’s politics. There is a clear path from President Ronald Reagan to President Donald Trump, both of whom credited Schlafly’s influence.
America’s cultural wars come alive in “Mrs. America” as the series follows how she orchestrated the ERA’s demise.
Well-to-do Schlafly had a master’s degree in government from Radcliffe and law degree from Washington University in St. Louis. A mother of six children, “Mrs. America” had a village. Her sister-in-law stepped in to help with the kids when she traveled and her black maid baked the bread that she passed out to Springfield lawmakers to sway votes.
Schlafly was a working woman who wrote books and barnstormed the country while telling other women that their job was to stay home and tend to their broods. Underneath her prim pearls and updo, Schlafly might as well been a bra-burning libber. Her contradictions glared brighter than a disco ball.
I dug up a 1977 television clip of the real Schlafly being interviewed by John Callaway on WTTW. You can hear the antipathy drip in her voice when she says “women’s liberation,” a smile plastered on her face. She characterized the movement as anti-family, saying its supporters hated men and taught women they are in serfdom.
“It is a negative view of life,” Schlafly said. “It’s the teaching of women they’ve been oppressed. It’s a chip on the shoulder attitude. They wake up in the morning thinking the cards are stacked against them.”
Women, Schlafly argued, should not need daycare because they should not work. In her world, men alone should head the household because every organization, even General Motors, has one leader at the top.
I see the white women who lined up behind Schlafly as defending their own status in this country. They were, in their own words, “protecting their way of life.” White womanhood and femininity is revered and white women historically have benefited from white supremacy. They have been heralded as virtuous and lean in the arms of white men in our racial caste system. Whiteness is aspirational for women, too.
So no, the 53% of white women who voted for Trump were not voting against their interests.
In “Mrs. America,” Schlafly brushes aside concerns about the racist rhetoric of some of her supporters, the Confederate flags seen at some of her rallies and the support she receives from the Ku Klux Klan and John Birch Society.
“Mrs. America” also brings me back to my own college journey of learning about second wave feminism in this country and black feminism. I stacked my books and anthologies, losing myself in the pages over the weekend. I look at the black help in “Mrs. America” and think about the great-grandmothers in my family who worked as domestics. I reflect on how working outside of the home wasn’t, for black women, a liberation battle. I can’t name any woman in my family who stayed home to rear children. Black women have historically worked outside the home out of necessity.
One of the books in my pile perceptively notes how black women were deeply suspicious of the new women’s movement and perceived it as a family quarrel between white men and white women.
“Mrs. America” doesn’t focus on Schlafly alone. There are episodes that revolve around the feminists Gloria Steinem, Betty Friedan and Bella Abzug and their dedication to advancing the women’s movement. Yet another episode centers on U.S. Rep. Shirley Chisolm, who ran for president in 1972. She encountered racism and sexism, from white women and black men, touching on the racial fissures in the women’s movement.
Those racial fissures still exist. Healing them is the big challenge to the women’s movement. With or without the 53 percent.
Natalie Moore is a reporter for WBEZ.org
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