We're Living in Phyllis Schlafly's America [View all]

[BlueMTexpat]

https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2020/04/hulu-mrs-america-phyllis-schlafly-long-shadow/610129/

I literally had NOT made this connection before and it is a startling one. But over here across The Pond, BBC2 began showing the miniseries "Mrs. America" three weeks ago. At approximately the same time, the Swiss French channel RTS1 began airing Series III of the Hulu series "The Handmaid's Tale" that almost immediately follows "Mrs. America."

The similarities were so obvious with this serendipitous juxtaposition.

This article is from April, when the miniseries aired in the US. From the link:

If, as per Baudelaire, the greatest trick the devil played was convincing the world that he didn’t exist, the irony of Phyllis Schlafly’s legacy is that she undermined women so efficiently that her pernicious influence on American politics hasn’t gotten the credit it deserves. During the 1970s, Schlafly was camera-ready pith in pearls and a pie-frill collar, a troll long before the term existed, who’d begin public speeches by thanking her husband for letting her attend, because she knew how much it riled her feminist detractors. Armed only with a newsletter and a seeming immunity to shame, Schlafly took a popular bipartisan piece of legislation—the Equal Rights Amendment, which affirms men and women as equal citizens under the law—and whipped it up into a culture war as deftly as if she were making dessert.

For all her efforts, she actually won very little—she was too toxic for a plum Cabinet post, and too early for a prime-time cable-news show. After her heyday, only glimmers of Schlafly lingered in mainstream culture. The character of Serena Joy in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, who once worked full-time lecturing women on the sanctity of staying home, was partly inspired by her. By the time a hagiographic biography of Schlafly was published in 2005, reviewers deduced that although her impact on the ugliness of American politics had been profound, her manipulation of grassroots resentment (not to mention her isolationism and hostility toward immigrants) had rendered her fogyish and obsolete in the George W. Bush era.

The other great irony of Schlafly is that she died in September 2016, two months before Donald Trump, a leader anointed in her image, beat the first female candidate for president of the United States. 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.
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Excellent article! It is also devastating to see what this woman wrought on us all - but especially women - and how Margaret Atwood so accurately captured the essence of what was happening in the US as early as 1985.

We were warned. We just didn't believe it. Let us hope it is NOT too late for us.