by Colleen Holcomb
In a recent column, Washington Post and CNN contributor Max Boot used the FX/Hulu series Mrs. America to conflate conservative icon Phyllis Schlafly with his detestable caricature of President Trump, and to classify all conservatives, by extension, as “incendiary, irrational” hypocrites who play “fast and loose with the facts.”
Yet, Boot supports his thesis by directing readers to the fictional series, Mrs. America, and cites in his column only fictionalized characters and dialogue from the series to support his own hypocritical, incendiary and irrational points.
Mrs. America tells the story of the fight surrounding the failed attempt to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) in the 1970s and 80s. The series focuses primarily on ERA opponent, Phyllis Schlafly, who is widely regarded as the godmother to the conservative movement.
In creating the series, writer and producer, Dahvi Waller, paradoxically declared that she declined to speak with Schlafly’s family or those closest to Phyllis to avoid biasing her portrayal. Clearly, Waller wanted to give her audience the Phyllis she imagined, not the Phyllis who really was.
Waller and team employed Schlafly biographer Carol Felsenthal as a consultant for the show, but apparently ignored her extensively-researched writings about Schlafly. Felsenthal, who published the Schlafly biography, Sweetheart of the Silent Majority in 1982, described herself as a political opponent of Schlafly’s, and unabashedly admitted that while researching the book, she actively looked and hoped for some way to tarnish Schlafly’s reputation, but could find none. Although Felsenthal was no fan of Schlafly’s, her book directly contradicts many of the series’ viciously inaccurate depictions of Schlafly’s character, marriage and family.
Mrs. America producers deliberately replaced truth with prevailing biases. Now liberal echo chamber member, Max Boot, is citing the fictional series as an authoritative source in his effort to accuse conservatives of “playing fast and loose with the facts.”
Boot cites one of the series’ fictional characters, “Mary Frances,” who is presented as the Louisiana contingent of Schlafly’s Stop ERA organization in support of his claim that some of Schlafly’s supporters held “unsavory views.” Unfortunately for Boot, Mary Frances did not and does not exist. Mrs. America producers declined to feature one of the real-life Louisiana Stop ERA leaders like Charlotte Felt, the well-respected wife of Times-Picayune Editor Arthur Felt, who, herself, served as president of the New Orleans Chamber of Commerce in the 1950s or Marilyn Thayer, who was inducted into the Louisiana Center for Women in Government and Business Hall of Fame. Apparently, respectable, high achieving women of this era did not fit producers’ image of an ERA opponent. So they invented Mary Frances, a brash, racist and homophobic “composite” character as a weapon to be used against conservative women. And intellectually lazy liberals like Boot could not resist picking up that weapon and haplessly swinging.
In support of his accusation that Schlafly was “incendiary,” Boot cites the series’ fictionalized dialogue between Schlafly and Phil Donohue, which producers invented in a deliberate attempt to make Phyllis sound far-fetched and paranoid by comparing feminists to Bolsheviks. In truth, Schlafly’s on-air dialogues with Donohue were clear and down-to-earth. They resonated with large numbers of American women. And, at points, she even left the then-reigning King of Talk speechless.
While alleging conservatives’ propensity to make “incendiary and irrational” comments, Boot makes the sexist, judgmental and inaccurate assertion that Phyllis was a champion for homemakers who “devoted most of her energy to political activism, not to looking after her husband and six children.” And here we’ve been led to believe that enlightened progressives are above making assumptions and judgments about others’ family choices.
Schlafly’s youngest daughter, Anne Schlafly Cori has condemned the series for inaccurately depicting her mother on so many levels, but particularly in portraying Schlafly as an abandoning mother.
Cori has also decried the show’s thoroughly false portrayal of her Aunt, Eleanor Schlafly, as a dowdy, put-upon spinster left to do the domestic duties her sister-in-law, Phyllis, abandoned. Mrs. America projects its own sexist biases about unmarried women onto Phyllis, as Cori notes that, in truth, Eleanor Schlafly was elegant, stylish, effective and fulfilled. Cori explained that the notion of Eleanor serving as a caretaker to Phyllis’ children was unthinkable. She was too busy operating her own successful organization and managing her active social life, including a string of “cool and good-looking boyfriends.” Yet, just as they did with Phyllis, series producers ignored the positive truth about Eleanor and chose, instead, to objectify this effective, liberated conservative woman purely to suit their narrow agenda of attacking conservatives. And again, Max Boot took the bait and used this inaccurate characterization to write one of the only overtly sexist sentences that could pass editorial muster in 2020.
Mrs. America producers claim that the invented dialogue and made up characters are merely “artistic license.” But, when purported intellectual elites like Max Boot and others like him default to citing such politically-motivated historical insult fiction as authoritative fact, someone must be held accountable.
