The limited series Mrs. America, available to stream at FX on Hulu, follows conservative Phyllis Schlafly (Cate Blanchett, who’s also an executive producer on the series), who led the backlash against the movement to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) during the culture wars of the 1970s, forever shifting the political landscape. As she went up against the second wave of feminists, including Gloria Steinem (Rose Byrne), Betty Friedan (Tracey Ullman), Shirley Chisholm (Uzo Aduba), Bella Abzug (Margo Martindale) and Jill Ruckelshaus (Elizabeth Banks), she helped give rise and a voice to the Moral Majority.

During this conference call, executive producer/actress Cate Blanchett talked about how she viewed Phyllis Schlafly, how very relevant this series is to the times we’re living in now, the source material that she turned to, why Schlafly believed the ERA was detrimental to America, how playing Phyllis Schlafly affected the way she views her own feminism, why she was underestimated, how the costumes helped her get into character, and what she hopes this series does for viewers.

Question: How did you interpret Phyllis Schlafly, as you played her?

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Image via FX

CATE BLANCHETT: She’s such a polarizing figure and quite contradictory, but it’s undeniable that she was a contemporary woman who really changed the course of the American political landscape, and I think she did that by shifting the language. She really did move the notion of anti-abortion, which then became pro-life, as the central platform of the Republican party, and conflated that with being pro-American and pro-family, and characterized the feminist movement as being anti-family. So, the language and the rhetoric that she employed, during the course of the campaign to defeat the Equal Rights Amendment has had a profound influence in the way the Republican party not only talks to the American populace, but talks to itself about what it stands for.

This series is coming out at a remarkable time, for everyone in the world. Do you see anything new in the series that is really relevant to the very unprecedented time that we’re currently going through? Do you think people will react to this differently than they might have, if it had come out a year ago?

BLANCHETT: I certainly feel that what’s being revealed to us, in the current global crisis, is how the systems that we labor under are not serving us well. The interesting thing for me, about the series, is that ostensibly the main thrust of the plot is about the fight over the Equal Rights Amendment, which was an incredibly fierce battle, but it also deals with the fact that the change that was hoped to come about from the Civil Rights Act of 1964 hadn’t happened profoundly enough and that the system hadn’t shifted profoundly enough to serve all of the American citizens. And so, I think that what we’re dealing with now, in 2020, is still a very unequal system. I wonder what America would have been like, if the Equal Rights Amendment had been ratified. What laws would have been put into place to shore up equality, not only between sexes, but between the races, and between the 1% and the 99%? I hazard a guess that we would be in quite a different place. It is very telling that it’s still not enshrined in the document and in the Constitution, which is an inspirational document from which laws get made, that the sexes are equal and that all American citizens are equal. That has huge ideological but practical ramifications on the position that we find ourselves in right now.

What sort of source material did you turn to, for this?

BLANCHETT: The Sweetheart of the Silent Majority was certainly the place that I started from. I spoke to (author) Carol Felsenthal. That was something that (executive producer) Stacey [Sher] set up for me, very early in the piece. I was interested in the copious amounts of books – probably far more than anyone who’s represented in the series – that Schlafly, herself, penned, basically one a week, in her lifetime. You can read all of those. Phyllis Schlafly Speaks is perhaps one of my favorites, which is a very thick tome. I wanted to go back to her authorized biography because she was obviously content with what had been written there. It wasn’t an embellished book. It was a fairly balanced book, so I thought that was a really great place to start. It is also telling that, if you go back and look at two of the major figures in the second wave feminism – Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem – there’s not a huge archive for either of those women. But the Phyllis Schlafly archive is enormous, and I almost sank under the weight of it. At a certain point, I had to say to myself that I’d absorbed enough and had to attend myself to the story that that we were telling. When you go behind the scenes of any of these characters, or with any figures who actually lived, there is invention involved. So, in the end, we have to give ourselves over to the characters, as written in the series . . . What’s interesting, now having enough time between the making of, and then having gone through the post-production process and looking at all the episodes stacked up, there’s a really strong feeling that I don’t think I was fully aware, because I was bogged down in the minutiae of actually making it, that there’s so much connective tissue between the longings, the ambitions, the hopes and the dreams. Even though they are so far separated on the political spectrum, there’s such a sense of connectedness between the women, although their rhetoric would seem to say otherwise. There’s not a lot of self-actualization or realization in the political structure, as it stands. There are not a lot of winners in the series.

Did anybody reach out to the Schlafly family, or did they weigh in on this, in any way?

BLANCHETT: I would welcome a discussion, but no, we haven’t heard from them, at all. There’s so much of Phyllis in the public domain, including The Sweetheart of the Silent Majority, so that wasn’t an issue.

Do you see Phyllis Schlafly as someone who was constrained by sexism and not able to pursue her actual passion of defense, or do you think that, as she learned more about the Equal Rights Amendment, she genuinely believed it was detrimental to America?

BLANCHETT: I think she saw it as the thin end of the wedge. Initially, when it was brought to her attention, she thought it was a fairly innocuous piece of political business, and it wouldn’t have a lot of impact on her life, or the lives of the women that she knew and lived alongside. But when she started to see it, in terms of the way it could dismantle, from her perspective, America’s already fragmented and fragile defense capacity, it was through that prism that she moved into it. Also, she was able to mobilize and identify with very special interest groups who thought, in defeating the women’s movement, they could shore up their own platforms, which of course were anti-abortion, or what became, pro-life, or non-integration to decrease or diminish government intervention, and to shore up patriarchal family values and isolationism. All of those things, she thought could be brought into the public discourse in a politicized way, through the conversation of the Equal Rights Amendment. It also opened the door for her into Washington. Phyllis was continually on the outside. She had two failed bids to Congress, but even through all of her embarking on a political career through, by default or by design, the Equal Rights Amendment debate and battle, she still wasn’t able to get through the door. Even though she had a huge influence, there was something about the system or something about her, as a person, that wasn’t able to break through. But she would never have said, at all, that she was prevented from doing anything. She would say that she got a law degree when she was in her 50s, and she couldn’t have done that and had children when she was younger. She was not able to practice at the same level as men seemed to because she decided to have children. I think that she would say that that was the priority in her life. Some people would say differently, but I know, myself, as a working mother who identifies as a feminist, it’s a constant juggle between following your personal and professional passion, and trying to give yourself over to and serve your family. In a way, she knew, as even feminists know, that still really, at base, that women have to make it work. It’s a very rare partnership where the men also accept that responsibility, in making things work.

Why don’t you think Phyllis Schlafly understood how the liberation movement could have helped her?

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Image via FX

BLANCHETT: No matter what, you have to treat this person like they’re a character. She lived, but it’s not a documentary. It’s also not a biopic or a bio series on Phyllis Schlafly. It’s about the various sections of the women’s movement. There was an equal and opposite traditional women’s movement, as there was the feminist women’s movement. You have to always, no matter who you’re playing, put them on the couch and ask them the hard questions. And so, I found her role models, as a child, absolutely fascinating, particularly when you look at her long-term, successful marriage, and the fact she had six children and a very public career, and she would say that she balanced both. I don’t think anyone balances anything. Her mother was a very strong influence in her upbringing. Her mother worked 24/7 to put her and her sisters through a very exclusive Catholic girls’ school. Her father was unemployed for a number of years, but remained the patriarch within the family structure. And therein lies the rub. She grew up in a very contradictory, unusual household. Fred, her husband, saved her from the life of a working girl. It’s very interesting that she always gravitated towards the notion of defense. She had a foundational understanding that she needed to be able to take care of herself, and she needed to be incredibly capable and able to learn a living, should she be abandoned and left alone. So, she was always the most overqualified person in the room.

How did you reconcile the fact Phyllis Schlafly spoke anti-gay rhetoric and anti-feminist rhetoric while having a gay son?

BLANCHETT: One of my favorite scenes in the series, from Phyllis’s perspective, is when Fred teaches her how to debate. There’s something that did to the conversation, which is the first-person negative trick, where you frame the terms of the argument. I had always thought of the American Constitution as being an inspirational document from which legislation flows, and what she did was that she laid the terms of the conversation that were incredibly literal and that each word was to be taken as read, rather than it being an aspirational notion of equality embedded into the Constitution, and then the literal laws would spring out of that. That ambushed the feminists, but it also meant that she kept the conversation small. When she was debating feminists or talking on various talk shows, and she did that quite a lot, she always kept it down to the literal. Therefore, she was able to terrify the women with whom she identified and galvanized – the homemakers and the self-described traditional women – who felt alienated and marginalized and terrified of the notion of change, and by the growing power and groundswell of the liberation movement. Because she kept the conversation about the fact that they were gonna be thrust out into the workforce and they were gonna be drafted, she jumped the gun. She moved towards the worst-case catastrophized pieces of legislation that no one wanted. She stopped it dead from her literalism . . . She truly did believe that healthy families, whatever that means, are the foundation of every other political cause and that it was the woman’s place to hold the family and therefore American society together, and if you were asking women to think about expanding on that possibility or identification, then American society, as we knew it, would fall apart. Rather than entering into the conversation in an open-hearted way, saying there are many, many women out there who are forced to work and are in jobs with as much qualification as men, and who were not receiving equal pay for equal work. Cut to 2020, where that’s still the situation. She didn’t want to talk about those nuances or possibilities. She was always catastrophizing the effects that the Equal Rights Amendment would have, and how it would mean disaster for women who felt that they were unprotected, apart from by their husbands. She really did sell this notion that it was going to be the Equal Rights Amendment that would break apart the American family.

How did she come to terms with the fact that she had a gay son?

BLANCHETT: There’s one interview where she was being interviewed and it did come up that she hated homosexuals, and she said, “I don’t hate anybody. My son lives a very private life.” She found it abhorrent that people would drag him in for what she perceived to be political gain and use his perversion - to use her words - against him. She thought that it was like a sickness. That her son had a sickness or a disability, and that he was vulnerable, in that way. She found it revolting that people would bring him into it, because she was a public person, and use him against her. She said that homosexuals were perverts. She also said that they have all the rights and should have all the rights of every other citizen, but that they should not have the right to marry because God has said that marriage takes place between a man and a woman. That is the unassailable argument. As soon as people bring the notion of faith or belief into it, because that is enshrined in the American Constitution, it is inarguable. We are looking down the barrel of these changes happening, where I can fire you or I can refuse to give you medical care because I believe that you are a perversion. When you enshrine religious belief into the American Constitution, but you don’t enshrine equality, you then have these very complicated sets of relationships between people and the ability for people to say things, which are incredibly contradictory lies, as Phyllis did. I still don’t understand it, except that it existed. She loved her son very much, and he continues to be an incredible supporter of her, so it’s a very, very complicated dynamic.

How did playing Phyllis Schlafly affect the way that you view your own feminism?

BLANCHETT: Growing up in high school, I always identified as a feminist, but I grew up in a backlash. We’re in another backlash now, but I grew up in a backlash when you were considered a man-hater in the 1980s, and that you wanted to prevent men from doing things, simply because you were identifying as someone who had equal possibilities in the world in which you were emerging. I couldn’t understand how, even as a teenager, the notion of equality was so difficult for people. The thing that Phyllis did identify, perhaps more roundly and realistically than feminists, is that in order to reach equality, certain white men in power are going to have to share their privileges, and she identified that ain’t never gonna happen. She knew that the patriarchy was a much stronger structure, intractable structure, resilient structure, well-supported structure, and less pliable structure than perhaps the feminists were hoping it was going to be. And so, she knew which side she was going to stand on. Feminists, by trying to be genuinely intersectional, it meant that there was always room for discord and doubt. Whereas in Phyllis’ camp, it was a very patriarchal structure, where all of the voices – and there were many voices – were really channeled through her. Unlike a lot of the feminists, she was very happy to be the only woman in the room. It was a solo, singular voice to fight on, from her perspective, which was quite different than the Women’s March, which was about the many, and not the few.

Why do you think Phyllis Schlafly was so underestimated?

BLANCHETT: Even though she wasn’t established or well known, they underestimated her capabilities and her endurance and her ability to simplify a message. In dealing with the intersectional nature of feminism, it deals with nuance, and with a complex series of needs and desires and hopes because they’re trying to re-imagine society, in a way that’s inclusive. When you’re simply trying to defend something, you’re able to reduce it to its core, and that is so-called family values. Phyllis was able to get a message out that was simply understood and that was fear-based. In that way, she was able to spell the homemakers’ big fear, which is that their lives were going to be busted apart by the feminists. And so, once she found that rhetoric, she increasingly simplified it, so she was able to hold her audience and use the media. She was very media savvy. That is a skill, if perhaps a dubious skill, that the feminists absolutely underestimated in Phyllis. And she had a fire in her, that made her a long-distance runner . . . The feminists were trying to speak to the aspirational nature in women, as human beings, and Phyllis really spoke to the homemakers’ fears. Women did feel marginalized by the feminist movement, or confused by it, because change is confusing, at first. Change is always unsettling and exciting, and Phyllis appealed to the unsettling end of it.

Phyllis Schlafly was able to manipulate the media, and the media played into her trap, by parroting her rhetoric. How do you think we, as journalists, could do a better job of being more responsible in what we print and write about issues of inequality, in general?

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Image via FX

BLANCHETT: The 24-hour news cycle makes it very difficult to be responsible to long-term thought. Journalism has become a reactive art, by and large. Not always, but if you’re constantly having to respond, it doesn’t give a lot of time to process. It’s a machine that is being fed. And also, because Phyllis understood the power of being a contentious figure, she really understood how saying the provocative thing would get her attention. A lot of politicians, subsequent to her, have really taken up that that mantle. Not necessarily for journalists themselves, but certainly for the outlets that journalists often work for, that becomes the shiny object, rather than someone who is perhaps thinking deeply and being very considered about what they’re saying, and doesn’t necessarily have the answers to everything. Phyllis didn’t like loose ends. She didn’t like unanswered questions. The space that she came alive in was doubt. When deep change is happening, you do have to countenance doubt.

What goes around, comes around, and we’re currently seeing a resurgence of nasty politics, gaslighting, racism and anti-Semitism. Did you leave this project hopeful, or did it make you sad about the state of affairs in the world?

BLANCHETT: I, for one, became increasingly sad, but also really galvanized by the fact that, week by week, as we were filming, all of the issues that the feminists were talking about, like the traditional women’s movement that is really big in the UK, for instance, where I am now, and all of these issues that feminists were locked in time and space, back in the ‘70s and ‘80s, were erupting, each week, as if they were up for grabs again. All of these achievements and advances that American society had made are somehow back in the courts again. You wonder, if equality was placed as a no-brainer, basic understanding in the American culture, how different it would be in America right now. The conversations would be different. I really do think that. That’s something that makes me incredibly sad, but also incredibly galvanized me. To me, the importance of the series is to keep that conversation alive. What is so frightening about equality?

What did you make of Phyllis’ bonds with the women in her life, including her supporters, her mother, and her sister-in-law?

BLANCHETT: It’s interesting that, in everything that I read about Phyllis, she was a Joan of Arc figure, to be admired and revered, but I didn’t come across a lot of people who were very close friends with her. That might’ve been partly to do with her personality, and it could have been partly to do with the fact that she was a mother of six. Between her activism and political aspiration, and the engagement with her family life, that left precious little time for her to have what’s traditionally called friends. Whereas you think about feminists and you see them as being more of an intersected collective. The Phyllis Schlafly Report was the cornerstone of the traditional women’s movement, which I think is very interesting and quite lonely.

How did Bina Daigeler’s costumes help you get into character?

 

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BLANCHETT: I love Bina. Bina’s great. She’s a genius. If you look at her work in Mrs. America, and then you look at her work in Mulan, you can see the scope of her ability. It’s all about character. It’s very easy with period to feel like you’ve been dropped into a time where people are wearing costumes, but she has very much designed clothes that are all character-based. I had some of the best creative conversations with Bina. She’s absolutely wonderful. I love working with her.

Was there one particular costume that made you feel most like Phyllis Schlafly?

BLANCHETT: We were obsessed. We saw the footage of the Death of the ERA dinner, and Phyllis speaking at the ERA dinner, and she had this extraordinary Oscar de la Renta dress. They found the exact dress on Etsy, or something, and it’s the most unique dress. Its’ actually in the poster, and it looks like she’s wearing angel wings.

Do you want audiences to walk away with a different understanding of Phyllis Schlafly than the one that they may have come in with? How did you come to understand her?

BLANCHETT: Fortunately, or unfortunately, before the series, I knew precious little about Phyllis, so the whole thing for me was a process of discovery. I approached it in a very open-hearted and non-judgmental way. A large part of why I wanted to do this series was to work out what made her tick and how she could think in such a binary way. She represents a whole way of thinking in America that really has to be acknowledged. My father was American, so I have a deep connection to America, but I didn’t grow up there. I think she really does personify this notion of individualism in America, a fear of centralized government, and a love of tradition, hierarchy and order, but also the abhorrence of being told what to do. For her, the ERA crystallized all of those feelings and fears, and the women that she spoke to and spoke for are still there. So, I would be very curious to know what they think about the series. It’s not telling an audience what to think, at all. I hope that the series doesn’t do that. The desire was to not just make it about the second wave of feminists, but to make it equally about the equal and opposite movement of the traditional women’s movement of the family women, whatever they would define themselves as. People can talk about both of those perspectives because they still seem to be at odds with one another, and that makes me incredibly sad. What an audience, perhaps, will come away with, and what the feminists talk about a lot in the series, is that Phyllis is a feminist that doesn’t identify as being a feminist. So, what is feminism? For me, it’s about equality.

Mrs. America is available to stream at FX on Hulu, with new episodes on Wednesdays.