The real Gloria Steinem recently criticized Mrs. America. She argued that the show misses the mark in its depiction of Phyllis Schlafly as the biggest obstacle to passing the ERA, rather than blaming the more pernicious and powerful forces at play. Steinem characterized this as part and parcel with a longstanding ploy to set women against one another, rather than address the real obstacles and causes behind the systemic hardships they face.
In a strange way, I think Mrs. America, or at least its finale, agrees with her. As the show’s done so often, “Reagan” contrasts the fictionalized Gloria Steinem, Bella Abzug, and the rest of the women’s liberation movement on the one hand, with Schlafly and her acolytes on the other. Both hold lavish events. Both continue the fight over the ERA. And both, most notably, vie for the ear of those gunning for the Oval Office.
But in the end, both sides collect nominal wins while ultimately losing, having only truly succeeded in thwarting one another.
Their methods differ considerably, though. Schlafly’s story here is one of discarding and betraying almost everyone who supported her, particularly her fellow women, in order to reach the halls of Presidential power. Steinem’s is one of her and other women standing in solidarity with their pioneering pal against a President trying to chasten and punish them for challenging his authority.
That makes for quite a contrast. It’s heartbreaking to see the normally unflappable Abzug appear genuinely wounded when she learns that Carter fired her from his Advisory Commission before even meeting with her. It’s encouraging, in an equal and opposite way, to see Steinem, Jill Ruckelshaus, and others hand in their resignations to Carter’s hatchet man (who squeezed out Midge, no less) rather than succeed Bella as the head of the Commission. Their stand aligns with Mrs. America’s clear values — that sticking to your core beliefs and backing your allies is the right thing to do, even when it’s not politically expedient.
Anytime so many major characters are smiling halfway through a finale can only mean good things to come!
Their stand also runs entirely counter Phyllis’s approach in this episode, as she holds court over her grand funeral for the ERA. When she speaks up to thank the person who made all of this possible and supported her from the beginning, she credits her husband, while Alice, her actual faithful lieutenant, looks on despondently. Phyllis spotlights her children as her life’s work, but doesn’t offer a kind word to the sister-in-law who spent more time raising them than she did. She applauds the successes of the movement she spearheaded, but says nothing about the black housekeeper who baked so many of her ERA pies and pastries.
I’ve written before that Mrs. America is a show built on irony, and this episode takes that idea to its natural end point. As a writer for the Tribune calls out, Phyllis claims to be fighting for a woman’s right to stay in the home, but takes the bar exam and plans to work outside of it. She proudly and publicly thanks her husband for his permission and support, but makes decisions for herself that entirely contradict his wants and wishes. She champions women’s role as mothers but leaves relatives and employees to look after her kids while she hits the campaign trail. She even shirks the task of picking up her daughter, forcing her housekeeper to do it at the expense of her own children, because the nominal Schlafly matriarch wants to attend a political event to boost her profile. The Phyllis Schlafly of Mrs. America is a woman who puts domesticity on a pedestal and yet leapt off it a long time ago.
Her sins aren’t just limited to hypocrisy, though. They extend to disloyalty, to opportunism, to sacrificing one’s principles, both professed and genuine, in the name of claiming the seat at the table Phyllis was denied when this whole crusade started. She won’t endorse old friend Phil Crane, or even hold off on endorsing another Presidential candidate, because she doesn’t think he’s the right horse to back. She’ll supersede her husband’s judgment on which candidate to support and when, because she thinks an early thumbs up for Reagan will grant her entry into his administration. She’ll step over Rosemary and let Pamela blame herself for her husband’s abuse, because Phyllis wants her grunts in line. Nothing and no one is sacred if they stand in the way of her personal achievement.
Of course, that’s the beauty of the show wrapping up the anti-ERA half of this story — it’s always been focused on Phyllis, keeping her a consistent presence no matter who else stepped into the spotlight for a given episode. So it’s easier to resolve the story of that counter-movement by closing out Phyllis’s personal narrative. The problem is that it’s much harder to accomplish that on the other side of the ERA equation since, by design, there were several more centers of gravity beyond Gloria Steinem, Phyllis’s erstwhile counterweight, in the series.
Wins up. Fins up.
So beyond Bella’s firing, the show has to gesture toward her future. It needs a phone call with Shirley Chisolm to suggest what’s to come for her too. It needs one more appearance from Betty Friedan to spit out another “I Told You So” and talk about her next project. And it has to make clunky references to the futures of both the Democratic and Republican parties so that they know that we know that they know what lies ahead. These winking references do less to provide closure than they cheesily dramatize history as bullet points, rather than as fleshed out character moments for the series’s major figures.
The reverse is true for Alice, one of the few fully fictional characters on the show. Instead, after the events of “Houston”, she’s now the symbol of the own-side rebuke to Phyllis. She brings her former mentor to task over Phyllis’s treatment of Pamela, announces that she’s taken a job she finds empowering, and confesses that she never felt more invisible or scared than when she worked beneath her domineering, so-called friend. These are all encouraging notes and worthy challenges to the show’s villain protagonist, but the whole thing feels a little too pat and melodramatic.
The canniest choice in Mrs. America was to give its different characters spotlight episodes throughout and tie each to a particular historical event, giving the show enough time and space to realize each woman’s story in affecting tones. But in the finale, Mrs. America has to sprint through check-ins with each of them instead, providing rapid-fire codas that must communicate via heightened emotions and stock beats in the absence of enough time to fully explore the road ahead for each significant player in the series’s swan song.
And yet, it laudably devotes that time to dramatizing the final frame of the larger personal and cultural fight between Schlafly and Steinem as symbols for the opposing sides of this fight. And, in the end, it’s hard to know who can reasonably claim victory.
"Why yes, Mr. President. I've even thought about renaming my office The Gipperdome."
Steinem and her coalition lose the ERA fight, but the show still ends her story with a moment framed as triumphant, with her bathed in light and earning applause from admirers for her championing women’s rights. More to the point, she and her compatriots unwittingly deny Phyllis a place in the Reagan administration. They made feminism enough of a sticking point in the polls for ol’ Ronnie to where he picks a pro-ERA woman for the slot Phyllis coveted — representing the USA at the U.N. and advising the President on geopolitics and national defense. The NOW crew lost the larger fight for the ERA, but won, in a roundabout way, the fight against Phyllis.
The reverse, obviously, is also true. Phyllis defeats the ERA, declaring victory over the proposed constitutional amendment despite an extension of the deadline, and beats the “libbers” back on their chosen cause. But the show’s last bitter irony is that it was never actually about the ERA for Phyllis. Stopping the ERA was a means to an end, a way to climb the ladder in Washington. It was a ploy to allow her to tap into that mass of housewives as a political force, nominally in service of preserving their way of life but, in reality, always meant to be Phyllis’s personal springboard to greater political power.
That project fails. Reagan gives her an empty thanks for “helping him across the finish line” and tells her that she deserves a spot in his administration, but that he can’t give her one because of his “woman problem.” So she retreats, outwardly stoic but inwardly crestfallen, to the kitchen she once praised as a haven but now feels like a relegation. She slinks there to prepare dinner for her husband at the same time they always have it, donning the same sort of apron her erstwhile constituency always wears, in the same life she had before this grand project began.
Somewhere, Wes Anderson is very jealous of this cinematography.
That’s the sobering thing about the end of Mrs. America. For all the skirmishes between the “libbers” and the Eagle Forum, both seem to lose here, felled by the same institutional forces that cut across party lines and cultural divides.
Gloria spits back at Jimmy Carter’s envoy that she and her cohort will no longer be taken for granted. But Carter loses regardless, and the closing chyron declares that women never regained the political momentum they had in the early 1970s. Phyllis’s chosen candidate, the one she sold almost everyone else down the river to back, wins the 1980 election, but denies her the seat at the table she so desperately craved and scratched and clawed for.
Standing firm with your fellow sisters doesn’t grant you power or political success on Mrs. America, but neither does craven, self-centered, power-grubbing gamesmanship. The closing message of the show seems to be that whether you’re promoting women’s rights or trying to curtail them, standing by other women or stepping over them, as long as your brand is “women’s issues,” the male-dominated power structures will use you and take you for granted without giving anything in return.
So maybe the real Gloria Steinem is right. Maybe Mrs. America is a story about women fighting each other, made to turn against one another to try to promote their agendas, when the real gatekeepers and bad actors and obstacles always lay elsewhere. It’s hard to read this story as a win for anybody, no matter where they stood or what they fought for, least of all women.
