Mrs. America makes it clear: We're living in Phyllis Schlafly's America

The Atlantic

As FX on Hulu's Mrs. America reveals, conservative activist Schlafly's most enduring legacy is today's "poisoned well of national politics," says Sophie Gilbert, adding: "It’s Schlafly, played as an elegant coil of wound ambition by Cate Blanchett, who turns Mrs. America from a starry historical miniseries into a stunning explainer on the poisoning of national politics." Gilbert adds: "Like it or loathe it, the new Hulu series Mrs. America makes clear, we are living in a moment that Schlafly begot. From dirty tricks to media manipulation, brazen lies about crowd sizes to the weaponization of privilege, her ghost is everywhere, and it may never be banished." Mrs. America illuminates how simple it is to spark conflict, and how much trickier a task it is to bring people together, says Gilbert. "What Schlafly tapped into before anyone else, the show suggests, was the power of a certain kind of polemic," says Gilbert. "Stoking resentment against a so-called group of privileged snobs who threaten the authentic American way of life is easy. So is provoking judgment by making people feel judged. From the first episode on, Schlafly evolves into a strikingly sophisticated peddler of outrage before anyone has calculated its potential. When put on the spot, she brazenly lies; when challenged, she smoothly changes the subject. She’s a master of messaging whose first anti-ERA campaign involves giving homemade bread and jam to male congressmen with a card celebrating traditional gender roles."

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• Cate Blanchett's Phyllis Schlafly is the best character on TV right now: "If Cate Blanchett in a sensible cardigan delivering a forced smile that barely disguises boiling rage isn’t an event then, frankly, I don’t know what is," says Kevin Fallon. "The series, which premiered this week on FX on Hulu (in other words, you can watch it now on Hulu), is both a television capital-‘E’ Event in the grand, traditional sense, but also one that, by nature of its subject matter (women!!!), we could only imagine existing now that Hollywood has started coming around to the reality that people do actually want to hear stories about and which impact half of the human population.  The ambition of Mrs. America makes it an event. The pedigree makes it an event. The time in history that it dramatizes makes it an event. The Cate Blanchett of it all... that makes it an Event. That Mrs. America feels important is because it is."
• Uzo Aduba, who plays Shirley Chisholm worked with creator Dahvi Waller, to ensure Mrs. America's accuracy: "Anything anybody said that was a fact or direct quote, or sounded like it could be a direct quote, (Waller) wanted to be sure that those words were actually the words," says Aduba. "She was really particular about that sort of stuff because the history is still alive. You want to make sure that it's really rooted in something and not surface and not too many liberties were taken. These are real women, and it was a real fight."