In its second episode, Mrs. America takes on Ms. Magazine co-founder Gloria Steinem
TV Reviews Recap
Seeing as how Gloria Steinem is probably the most well known figure of this series, her episode has the largest shoes to fill, so to speak—and Rose Byrne really delivers. Byrne has always had an uncanny ability to mimic real people: Her Rebecca Skloot from The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks movie was eerily perfect, and her Gloria is no exception. Byrne nails the slightly hunched posture and sardonic murmur perfectly, though her giant multi-faceted hair color and giant specs and general costuming help a ton. My favorite detail is how we see Gloria carefully put her glasses on over her hair, so that her locks stay in place. She knows her aura is just as much in her looks as it is in her politics.
“Gloria” sets Phyllis and Gloria up as a study in contrasts. Where Gloria refuses to run for the head of the National Women’s Political Caucus, Phyllis manipulates her friends into choosing her. Where Phyllis’ home base is at home, Gloria is constantly on the road. Where Gloria winces at her publisher’s story about reaching out to her because of her “great legs,” (as does the rest of the Ms. Magazine office), Phyllis and her crew lean very happily in to the housewife aesthetic. While Phyllis gains power (and loses it) with her husband’s help as well as his whims, Gloria knows that marriage to Frank Thomas (Jay Ellis) would be a tricky prospect for her. Where Phyllis plies policymakers with bread, Gloria attempts to reason with Senator McGovern (John Bourgeois) with her wordsmithing. And where Phyllis manipulates and coerces the women of her coalition, Gloria and Betty Friedan talk openly and know they’re at odds, but have the same goals. And finally, where Gloria’s views on abortion and politics are personal, for Phyllis they are a means to forward her agenda, which is about expanding her ego and personal power.
The main contrast, of course, is that Gloria is authentic and Phyllis isn’t. Yes, they both engage in politics and compromise. For Gloria, it’s her condescending publisher, as well as her acceptance of herself as a celebrity to help the feminist movement. The Ms. Magazine launch party looks like something out of Studio 54, with Gloria bedecked in furs and her classic aviators, and Gloria’s mother gets interviewed about her daughter. But for Phyllis, it’s partly about becoming a celebrity. She even wants to name her group after herself.
And her disinterest in caring about the issues extends to not caring about the facts as well. As the formula discussion last episode suggested, Phyllis is more interested in repeating lies like they sound like facts. Unsurprisingly, considering how the real Phyllis was a big fan of Trump before her death in 2016. In fact, she speaks in such a Trumpian way in her appearance on The Phil Donahue Show that Phil asks her if she even fact checked her claims. She doesn’t see how that’s relevant.
Unfortunately, here’s where the focus on Phyllis Schlafly gets in the way of the series. While the first episode drew up deep into Phyllis’s world, we don’t get the same benefit of immersion into Gloria’s. The episode is disorienting because of it, not unlike the problems you’d find in a movie like Julie & Julia. The late, great Nora Ephron’s talent aside, it’s very hard to focus on two characters, especially characters that evoke such different feelings (both from the audience and through direction) in one story and give them each their due. Even though Gloria and Phyllis are at odds, their stories are very different and the back and forth is disorienting.
I do like how Gloria’s passion for reproductive rights—specifically, abortion—is presented as about her personal experience with abortion. So much about the problem of politics around abortion is that there’s so much shame around it, and people feel too vulnerable talking about their personal experience with it. Her personal story about abortion—taken straight from her dedication of her memoir My Life On The Road—is presented at the end of the episode, but there are echoes of this passion throughout the episode. When she asks the woman if she’s ever told anyone, the way that she will only lead the caucus if she can push for a vote on abortion at the Democratic National Convention, and the fact that it appears in the first issue of Ms. Magazine. And of course that’s not a knock against having children, as Phyllis suggests it is—in fact, when someone new joins the magazine staff, she brings her daughter, who joins the childcare section inside the offices themselves like something out of 9 to 5.
It’s the National Women’s Political Caucus’ passion that pours out of their protests that Phyllis can’t compete with. When the ERA is up for ratification in Illinois after passing the Senate, Illinois House Rep. Henry Hyde (Geordie Johnson) tells her that she and her coalition may think they’re protesting with “dignity” by not appearing with signs and slogans, but it actually makes them seem invisible. I was a little wary of this scene, as it attributes Phyllis’ idea to start baking bread and making homemade jam to a man. But it was interesting to see how baking bread could be its own protest—maybe one we could do ourselves nowadays, considering how much bread I see being baked on Instagram. Rep. Henry lords this over the sponsors of the bill, Illinois State Rep. Ginny Dyer (Laura DeCarteret) and Rep. Ginny Chapman (Alison Brooks) when he finds them eating the bread and jam.
Furious, they confront Phyllis on her lies when the STOP-ERA women come to the state senate to fight. This seems to be enough to shake Phyllis’ confidence, though only because it happened in front of her peers.
It’s enough for her to start doing her homework. She asks her husband for help with understanding constitutional law, so she can brush up on legal research and writing. When he teases her, she says witheringly that she also got into Harvard Law School. “The first thing you need to know when presenting a legal argument, is that while you have a lot of leeway to be creative, you never want to make a statement that’s objectively, verifiable as being false,” Fred says in response. “For instance, you weren’t invited to attend Harvard Law.” He points out that her lie is easily debunked with a phone call, especially considering she got her master’s before the law school went coed. Phyllis harrumphs, saying, “They would’ve made an exception for me,” demonstrating that there’s a limit to how truthful she wants to be.
Stray observations
- The childcare point made me curious about the legislation around child care and I found out there was a comprehensive child care bill that passed the House and Senate in 1971 before being vetoed by Nixon! *shakes fist at sky* NIXON!
- Jay Ellis plays Frank Thomas, who was Gloria Steinem’s boyfriend from the founding of Ms. Magazine. He was an accomplished lawyer, charismatic community leader, and divorced father of four, who served as President of the Bedford-Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation during the 1970s. Steinem describes him as “the longtime love of my life, and best friend.” We don’t learn much about him this episode besides the fact that he does have children.
- Read more about Ms. Magazine in this oral history piece.
- Gloria sees famous feminist lawyer Florynce Kennedy (Niecy Nash) at the Ms. Magazine party. Flo, bedecked in her standard cowboy hat and wit and charm, complains that Andy Warhol didn’t say hi to her. “Well, you did represent Valerie Solanas,” Gloria reminds her.
- Apparently Shirley Maclaine cut out Gloria’s bit on abortion from George McGovern’s speech with a pair of scissors. Here she is stumping for McGovern (though not by name, per ABC’s insistence) on The Dick Cavett Show.
- I love how the cover of the first issue of Ms. Magazine is an image of the goddess Kali. Sure, they got rid of her skirt of arms and necklace of skulls, but the use of Kali and her many arms is a perfect metaphor for the unfair expectations put on women, and it’s still used today. Look, anything is better than the Kali representation in Indiana Jones And The Temple Of Doom.
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I know its fairly unrelated but I was genuinely shocked to find out Christian Bale is Gloria Steinems step son.
Technically true since Gloria Steinem was married to Christian Bale’s late father for a few years. I do think it is funny that she called Christian Bale to check on him after she read about the big on-set meltdown he had
She married Christian Bale’s father toward the end of his life. I’ve read just as much Gloria Steinem as I can get my hands on, I’ll listen to just about any podcast she appears on and I still randomly remember that connection and think about how strange it is.
I like Gloria Steinem but on some level I do suspect that if Betty Friedan was more conventionally attractive (or younger?) we would have never heard of her
…you and every intersectional feminist out there. Steinem is great but also very much a white feminist.
You are young, aren’t you?
How familiar are you with Steinem’s actual writing and organizing work?
Ugh. Steinem’s looks inevitably did boost her visibility and popularity and there are stories she was able to write as a journalist because she was a conventionally attractive woman. The Feminine Mystique is largely considered the starting point of second wave feminism and helped to create an environment in which Gloria Steinem would get this much attention. Also that is just a frustrating and sexist sentiment. We don’t reduce men’s accomplishments to being a measure of how much their physical appearance allowed them to get in a door.
Something I really loved about this episode is that while the show clearly despises Phyllis, and rightfully so as man is Blanchett having fun selling her awfulness, it also showed the seeds for why the Women’s Liberation Movement failed. It wasn’t even the abortion or them constantly ignoring Friedan’s attempts to temper their message, but it was that moment when some of them were baffled why they shouldn’t consider housewives their enemies.Even if I didn’t know what was to come, that was the moment I would have known they were going to lose as no matter how noble their cause, they had taken their eyes off the ball and were openly hostile to those they saw as not as themselves.
The “Women’s Liberation Movement” did not fail. Women are liberated and things have been improving since before the timeframe depicted in the show. Organizers were just unable to get a constitutional amendment passed in an allotted amount of time and the amendment’s opponents were just more legislatively successful.
Blanchett continues to be magnificent in her role and the episode was absolutely ruthless towards Phyllis. My three favorite scenes were:-How Phil Donahue was so perplexed by Phyllis’s blatantly lying on his show that he legitimately couldn’t even figure out how to approach her about it.-When Phyllis is confronted after winning the ratification vote. Something I slightly disagree with the review on is that it isn’t that Phyllis doesn’t care about the truth, it is rather that she is so convinced of her own brilliance and only surrounded by fawning enablers that she cannot comprehend the possibility that she might have misunderstood something. And the way Blanchett sold that moment of vulnerability when she was actually being grilled by someone who knew things was incredible.-And finally that final discussion with her husband where Phyllis lied even to him about having had the choice to go to Harvard before being called out how obviously false it was. I think it was again Phyllis’s need to feel extraordinary after having been humbled in that matter, as highlighted with her inability to laugh off or even be embarrassed by having been caught up in that lie.
As a sidenote, I think there is a really subtle choice they already did in the first episode and continued here.When they show the Schafly children, the boys are shown running around, laughing about things and just having fun. The girls, in turn, are almost always still, silent, they whisper to people and are just there.
I thought that was a really good character beat when they showed Phyllis lying about getting into Harvard Law. Because the thing is, for all her many (many, MANY) faults, Phyllis Schlafely was very often the smartest person in the room. Certainly smarter than her husband and the army of housewives she corralled into a movement, anyway, and probably a hell of a lot smarter than Nixon or Goldwater. But because she was sort of feted as the lady allowed in the guy’s club, she got nervous about any avenue where she was not the smartest person in the room. That’s why the ERA scared her – not because it was a bunch of commies trying to get women equal pay and reproductive freedom (although also that) but because it meant she’d have to start competing for a spot in the world, instead of enjoying one as a novelty.
Her blatant lying was so recognizant of how so much of the Republican party speaks when they appear on the news today. Like I don’t know if its because Schlafly was part of the beginning of Republicans telling absurdly boldfaced lies or because the show’s creators were drawing a deliberate parallel or it was just a coincidence.
Tracey Ullman’s having a ball as Friedan and I love it. She’s really captured that sort of bull-in-the-china-shop who nonetheless knows more than everyone else vibe.I really, really want to resist any sort of sympathetic portrayal of She Who Must Not Be Named, but I do like how they drop in a few of Phyllis’ opinions that were a consequence of the liberation movement. Yeah, women often do feel guilty or tired juggling work and children (and then you get a pandemic, which means maybe people now understand the feeling of trying to focus on work when you’ve got kids crawling all over you, and vice versa!) – but the answer to that isn’t to keep women from working; it’s to shift the paradigm so that men and women can effectively balance both, which is what the Women’s Caucus was trying to do.This episode made me like Gloria Steinem a bit more than I already did (I already liked her plenty, but I admit I also shared a lot of the same criticisms that Betty Friedan did). Byrne’s playing her brilliantly.Can’t wait to watch Shirley’s episode tonight! All three actresses have such a tough job portraying real women that a lot of people have very passionate feelings about (at least in my case, ranging from hero worship (Chisolm) to I wouldn’t piss on her if she was on fire (Schlafely)) and that’s a really hard line to walk.
What were exactly the criticisms that Betty Friedan had for Gloria Steinem?
I do like how they drop in a few of Phyllis’ opinions that were a consequence of the liberation movement. Yeah, women often do feel guilty or tired juggling work and childrenI wonder whether that was actually a contemporaneous Schlafly opinion, or something the writers inserted from a modern persepective.
As I recall, yes. One of her main talking points in the 80s at least was that professional women* couldn’t juggle a job and a family effectively and would therefore feel that they were failing at both. And since raising children is more important than work*, the answer was simple.*I hate the phrase professional women because it sounds like being a woman is something I’m supposed to treat as a job. My performance review will be unsatisfactory, I imagine.**Which, listen, i do think kids are more important than work, if only because we’re trying to raise better humans than the ones we’ve got now. But also my job – which I’m very good at – is optimizing software solutions to lesson manhours or cost, so it’s not like I’m out here curing cancer. Doesn’t mean I can’t do that and parent my kids; it just means I have to have an equal partner to parent those kids with.
I love how you pointed this out, sometimes I feel like admitting any nuance in the other side’s position can get you shouted down
The other side were (and are) as successful as they were because they hit on some very real fears that people have. The problem is, instead of trying to mitigate those fears with advancement, their solution is to pull everyone back into a time when they feel life was easier. (and it was. for them.)Like, just take the solution of having in-work daycare that the Ms office apparently had (I didn’t know that! That’s so cool!) – that’s the sort of advancement that helps to ease the stress a parent has when juggling kids and a career. Phyllis’ solution would be to haul the mom back home and have her cook up the bacon that the man brings home.
Wasn’t the cover of the first issue of Ms. Magazine in reality a drawing of Wonder Woman? I assume there were rights issues complicating putting that in the series.
I think the preview issue of Ms. was Kali and then the first issue was Wonder Woman. They do talk about the Wonder Woman cover in the episode
That makes sense! Thanks!