By Laura Medina
To the uninformed, to the hip and the trendy, not all women are alike and there are still young women who bemoan the fact that they have to work to earn a living. They go to law school to marry a lawyer. They go to medical school to marry a doctor. Not out of love, but of financial support through the means of socio-ethnicity privilege. These dependent but manipulative young ladies are the daughters and grand-daughters of passive-aggressive retrogressive, conservative activist, Phyllis Schalfly, the anti-feminist activist.
FX on Hulu, on Wednesday April 15th, premieres "Mrs. America," a drama centered on the woman who ruin and stalled the legalization of the Equal Rights Amendment but fail to stop the social evolution of women's careerism, single-parenthood, and women having rights in domestic abuse that domineering Schlafly failed to recognized.
According to the Cate Blanchett, Schlafly is transgressive who fought hard to protect and save the status quo is that grown into upper-middle class women who eventually voted for Trump, still believing they, as females, still need a men to financially support them, protect them and use their husbands as a weapon and as a tool against people (other women) they perceive as a threat. Voting Trump into office, is a joke on them.
Since the miniseries is set entirely in late Sixties to mid-Seventies, it's a generation battle between Baby Boomers versus the Greatest Generation that came of age during the Great Depression, when women...mothers...had to work because of the Wall Street Crash and marrying bad choices in men; or fathers dumping their families since they no longer can support a family. That's Phyllis' childhood.
Surprisingly, Phyllis' mother, Odile Stewart (née Dodge),[4] was the daughter of attorney Ernest C. Dodge. She was a pioneering feminist that her daughter, Phyllis fought so hard against. Before her marriage, she worked as a teacher at a private girls' school in St. Louis.[5] During the Depression, Schlafly's mother went back to work as a librarian and a school teacher to support her family.
Odile was a highly accomplished intellectual achiever who married down.
Schlafly's father, John Bruce Stewart, was a machinist and salesman of industrial equipment, principally for Westinghouse. He became unemployed in 1932 during the Great Depression and could not find permanent work until World War II.[9] He was granted a patent in 1944 for a rotary engine.[10]
Phyllis came from a hard-scrabble Great Depression life, worked as a ballistics gunner and technician at the largest ammunition plant in college.
For a woman who feared feminists are going to take away her privileges of a certain woman of a certain social status of a certain ethnicity, Phyllis was the biggest careerist in her own right and was strong enough to dominate her husband, Fred. She later earned a Juris Doctor degree from the Washington University in St. Louis School of Law in 1978.[
In 1946, Schlafly became a researcher for the American Enterprise Institute and worked in the successful United States House of Representatives campaign of Republican Claude I. Bakewell.[11]
She played a major role with her husband in 1957 in writing a highly influential report, the "American Bar Association's Report on Communist Tactics, Strategy, and Objectives." Critchlow says it, "became not only one of the most widely read documents ever produced by the ABA, it was probably the single most widely read publication of the grassroots anticommunist movement."[12]
She attended her first Republican National Convention in 1952, and continued to attend each following convention.[15] As part of the Illinois delegation of the 1952 Republican convention, Schlafly endorsed U.S. Senator Robert A. Taft to be the party nominee for the presidential election.[16] At the 1960 Republican National Convention, Schlafly helped lead a revolt of "moral conservatives" who opposed Richard Nixon's stance (as The New York Times puts it) "against segregation and discrimination."[17]
She came to national attention when millions of copies of her self-published book, A Choice Not an Echo, were distributed in support of Barry Goldwater's 1964 presidential campaign, especially in California's hotly fought winner-take-all-delegates GOP primary.[18] In it, Schlafly denounced the Rockefeller Republicans in the Northeast, accusing them of corruption and globalism. Critics called the book a conspiracy theory about "secret kingmakers" controlling the Republican Party.[19]
In 1967, Schlafly lost a bid for the presidency of the National Federation of Republican Women against the more moderate candidate Gladys O'Donnell of California. Outgoing NFRW president and future United States Treasurer Dorothy Elston of Delaware worked against Schlafly in the campaign.[20][21]
Schlafly joined the John Birch Society, but quit because she believed that the main Communist "threats" to the nation were external rather than internal.[citation needed] In 1970, she ran unsuccessfully for a House of Representatives seat in Illinois against Democratic incumbent George E. Shipley.
Phyllis tried to be a traditional housewife who wants to be financially supported by a man but her intellect, drive, and focus betrayed her. She was more engine and fuel behind the machine.
Her anti-feminism is more of a backlash against her hard-scrabble upbringing when mothers had to work as means of survival and having an husband was and is still is an award. Phyllis never wanted careerism as a means of fulfillment when her mother had it so rough yet her father failed her.
For all you Gen-Xers, Millennials and Gen-Zers, go ahead watch "Mrs. America" on FX on Hulu on Wednesday, April 15th to know the full scope that still rages on.
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