All you needed to say was “Cate Blanchett as Phyllis Schlafly,” and Mrs. America was all but guaranteed a mainstream audience. The limited series, which premiered on FX in mid-April, has become a slow-burn hit, and much has been written about whether we really needed a series devoted to the emotional depths of America’s leading antifeminist. Blanchett is tremendous as Schlafly, of course. But in the end, the series suffers from the time it spends teasing out Schlafly’s character, time that it could instead have devoted to its far more engaging supporting cast.
I’m not talking about the mainstream feminists the show follows, from Rose Byrne’s groovy, long-haired Gloria Steinem to Tracey Ullman’s bitter, set-in-her-ways Betty Friedan. I longed for more of Ari Graynor’s Brenda Feigen Fasteau, Niecy Nash’s Florynce Kennedy, and Bria Henderson’s Margaret Sloan-Hunter.
Though many of these women are not exactly household names, they are all real-life historical figures with important parts in feminist history. (The writers did take some liberties: Graynor’s unexpected dalliance with a photographer played by Roberta Colindrez is one.) The real-life Brenda Feigen Fasteau was one of a handful of women in her Harvard Law class; Margaret Sloan-Hunter was a black lesbian feminist and single mother who marched with Martin Luther King Jr. and helped found Ms. Magazine. The cowboy-hat-clad lawyer Florynce Kennedy, one bit-part character who should need no introduction, was called “the biggest, loudest and, indisputably, the rudest mouth on the battleground.” Am I wrong for wishing I could trade half of Schlafly, Steinem, or Friedan’s screen time for a more substantive look at these women’s stories?
The idea of using a mainstream protagonist as a bait-and-switch to tell more diverse stories isn’t a new one in TV: That’s exactly what Orange Is the New Black creator Jenji Kohan did with preppy blonde inmate Piper Chapman, telling NPR in 2013: “In a lot of ways Piper was my Trojan Horse. You’re not going to go into a network and sell a show on really fascinating tales of black women, and Latina women, and old women and criminals. But if you take this white girl, this sort of fish out of water, and you follow her in, you can then expand your world and tell all of those other stories. But it’s a hard sell to just go in and try to sell those stories initially.”