Mrs. America and the Messiness of History

The Hulu series shows that history is rarely as clean-cut as many of us might wish.

When I heard that Cate Blanchett was going to be playing Phyllis Schlafly, one of the most notorious voices of the conservative movement and one of those responsible for keeping the ERA from getting enough votes to pass, I was a little concerned. I am a devout admirer of Blanchett’s, and I worried both that the series was going to make her an object of sympathy and that she was going to dominate the entire story to the exclusion of everyone else.

To some extent, my fears were justified. Blanchett, unsurprisingly, is simply radiant as Schlafly. It’s not just that she has managed to capture the mannerisms of this woman, but that she makes her explicable, rendering all of her contradictions visible for those of us in the audience who don’t really know her as anything else than as the nemesis of progressive values. For make no mistake, Schlafly was a hypocrite, using all of her considerable influence and her public persona to vilify the very women who were working to make such a public position possible. And the series, while focusing a great deal on her actions and her mentality, is a far cry from a hagiography. Again and again, we see Phyllis subjected to the very forces that she works so indefatigably to…