Posted on 05/19/2020 9:13:54 AM PDT by Kaslin
Just as has happened in our economy dominated by finance capitalism, feminism brought outsized benefits to a few in exchange for the suffering of many.
Starring Academy Award Winner Cate Blanchett as conservative firebrand Phyllis Schlafly, Hulu series “Mrs. America” has been getting awards buzz. While the writers are too skilled to give a one-dimensional portrayal of Schlafly, nonetheless the broader agenda of the show is clear: to anathematize Schlafly, build up the feminists who opposed her, and ultimately, to push for a new Equal Rights Amendment (ERA).
“Mrs. America” is effective propaganda against Schlafly and conservative ideas because it is not obvious. Show creator Dahvi Waller has implicitly admitted as much in interviews, saying, “I think if we don’t understand her [Schlafly’s] appeal and how she tapped into anxiety among a fairly large group of women, we won’t really understand how to get through to those women today.” The “we” listed in this is unstated but obvious—liberal feminists.
Schlafly always knew the feminist movement and corporate media would misrepresent her views and the views of other opponents of feminism. “Many women are under the mistaken impression that ‘women’s lib’ means more job employment opportunities for women, equal pay for equal work, appointments of women to high positions, admitting more women to medical schools, and other desirable objectives which all women favor,” she wrote in her prescient essay “What’s wrong with Equal Rights for Women?” which kicked off her campaign against ERA in 1972.
Schlafly grasped both the politics and the policy of ERA far better than her feminist opponents, noting that having children gives women financial and emotional security for their whole lives (which numerous studies have shown—and the larger the family, the less likely the parents will end up in a nursing home).
She understood the importance of free enterprise and male inventors in freeing women from drudgery: “The great heroes of women’s liberation are not the straggly-haired women on television talk shows and picket lines, but Thomas Edison who brought the miracle of electricity to our homes to give light and to run all those labor- saving devices—the equivalent, perhaps, of a half-dozen household servants for every middle-class American woman.”
None of this implies women did not face real problems of sexism in the 1970s or today, but the ERA was always far too blunt and misguided an instrument to accomplish what women needed. During a debate with Betty Friedan, Schlafly correctly compared ERA to killing a fly with a sledgehammer: “You probably won’t kill the fly, but you will break up some of the furniture.”
But feminist critics and the media never let facts get in the way of their narrative or their agenda. Doreen St. Felix in The New Yorker opened her review of “Mrs. America” by noting that 53 percent of white women voted for Trump, reflecting the left’s intersectional obsession with sex and race.
In general, happily married women, then and now, have been happy to support politicians and political movements that reinforce traditional understandings of the sexes. According to Gallup polling during the 1970s, men were consistently more supportive of the ERA than women were.
Feminist academics, of course, are intolerant of anything that shows Schlafly as something less than a monster. University of North Carolina history and women’s studies Professor Katharine Turk took to Twitter to declare that “Phyllis Schlafly was a sexist, racist homophobe who gave cover to corporations that made millions discriminating against women, and still do.”
Fortunately, in attacking Schlafly, the left has overplayed its hand: As Inez Feltscher Stepman wrote in The Federalist, “Mrs. America’s” writers “made an enormous error in thinking that the activists’ words, even filtered through a hostile writing team, would sound as ridiculous to the average American as they do in Hollywood.”
Yes, some women may find it appealing to be a writer, physician, or partner at Goldman Sachs, but working as a drugstore clerk, as a line cook at McDonalds, or on a high-pressure sales commission to make the mortgage rather focusing on raising one’s children is less appealing even to most contemporary women.
Schlafly is not a figure beyond criticism, of course. There were unquestionably reactionary and even at times conspiratorial elements to her conservatism. But in the two most consequential fights of her time — her support for Barry Goldwater in 1964 and in spearheading the defeat of ERA in the 1970s, both against overwhelming establishment opposition in both parties — she was right and her opponents were wrong.
The feminist movement Schlafly fought is a failure. Whatever gains it helped give to a small but visible subset of elite women, a post-feminist America is one of falling fertility, rapidly rising out-of-wedlock births, exploding rates of both sexual ambiguity and confusion (just 66 percent of Gen Z identifies as exclusively straight), uncertain gender roles, religious collapse, and an explosion in latchkey kids, as their mothers feel compelled to go into the workplace regardless of their desires.
Given its legacy of failure, it is no surprise that a substantial academic literature has shown that women (but not men) have become continually unhappier directly coinciding with the boom in the feminist movement in the 1970s. Just as has happened in our economy dominated by finance capitalism, feminism brought outsized benefits to a few in exchange for the suffering of many.
Despite the defeats those with more traditional understandings of sex have suffered in the decades since Schlafly’s ascendance, all is far from lost. In an obituary of Schlafly, who died during the 2016 presidential campaign, her feminist biographer Carol Felsenthal wrote: “Oh, to be able to hear or read her response on November 8 when Hillary Clinton defeats Donald Trump. Schlafly, a true believer if ever there was one, would have been certain, until the polls closed, that the Donald was soon to become President Trump.”
As the election of 2016 showed, it is Felsenthal and the creators of “Mrs. America” who are the true believers who often do not understand our society, even as they damage it with their destructive ideology. “Mrs. America” seeks to mock Schlafly and the millions of women who supported her. But is ultimately Schlafly who will get the last laugh.
Schlafly was brilliant. I’ve known many Republicans that were so cowed by the feminist crowd that they continued to reject her until the end.
I love the bit about the feminist biographer preemptively gloating about how Schlafly would have responded to Trump’s defeat in 2016.
If the caption is the level of ignorance I fear for the rest. Finance Capitalism? There is no such thing. There is Capitalism. There is Corporatism aka Mercantilism aka Public- Private Partnership.
Post WWII The US has moved away from capitalism of any type. It has moved maybe 5% in the direction of Socialism and 40% in the direction of Corporatism.
Finance Capitalism... George Orwell meet Chomsky.
A great woman. I hope this series introduces her to a lot of young viewers who may have never heard of her.
Despite the so-called "progressive" movement, with its decades-long pressures to impose a false ideology on the society, insisting on a form of "group think" on women and girls, those who were influenced by Schlafly have made significant contributions to preserving liberty and fighting tyranny over the minds of a total segment of the population.
It will introduce her husband as a rapist,her STOP ERA friends as racists and oh yeah,she hates women...I’ve been watching the series..All it will do is to make young women smug knowing feminism is the true freedom...
i am watching that also, and do not get the same vibe as you.
In my large group of old ladies (68 yrs), I have been chastised greatly for not even caring about watching Mrs America. They cannot believe that I did not believe in the ERA. I could never get an answer from them about what rights I had that were not equal. I just get an intense glare that says ‘are you crazy?’ My mother was born in 1912, became a successful concert pianist in Boston area, had a 2 hour show each week at Radio City Music Hall, before she ‘gave it all up’ to marry the man of her dreams, an 8th-grade educated Texan. She moved to Texas in 1945 and raised SIX children. She was a piano teacher all of my life. Never did she let the feminists have any influence on her. She was already liberated! I can understand challenging pay scales and promotions becoming equal. But that is considered good business ethics. The free market can take care of those challenges easily. No need to condemn half of the world who don’t obey some hag’s warped belief system.
I’ve watched the series because I was too young to appreciate the politics of the 70s. The not so subtle bias is prevalent from the first episode. I would recommend a detox after each episode - watch the Eagle Forum videos, and others, that correct the record with actual footage of her debates/speeches, and interviews with people who knew her.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjiIwLjEKPU&list=PL9CC8V5vDzr13ZxJ_tOYiVVYi-4MvHRIb
https://www.realmrsamerica.com/era/
Only in this era of over schooling and under education could capitalism be so misunderstood. Any teenager who owns a mower and mows lawns for income is a capitalist. When I was born my parents were capitalists who owned a tiny farm as did most of our neighbors and relatives. Most of those who WERE capitalists did not ever hear the word and did not know its meaning. Now we have people who are wealthy capitalists raving about the evils of capitalism.
Modern politics is mostly a scam. But a dangerous scam because it allows people to do insane crazy things in it’s name.
I forgot to mention, last season of “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” attacked Schlafly out of nowhere.
They had Mrs. Maisel (in NY) inexplicably cutting a LIVE (and national WTF?) radio ad for Schlafly’s longshot 1960 Congressional campaign (in ILLINOIS, where I believe she stepped into the GOP primary as a write in cause no one filed to run). Maisel (and everyone else in the room) was disgusted by the (absurdly lampooned) political copy she was supposed to read and tanked the ad.
They just can’t help themselves.
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