7 votes

A documentary called 'Mrs America' shows how Phyllis Schlafly partidarized the ERA, birthed the culture war and pioneered modern Conservative rhetoric

2 comments

  1. moocow1452
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    If the Outrage Merchant behavior has been around for at least 40 years, do we have some ideas on how to better innoculate ourselves and others to it, or does the internet make it too potent to...

    If the Outrage Merchant behavior has been around for at least 40 years, do we have some ideas on how to better innoculate ourselves and others to it, or does the internet make it too potent to compare to anything that came before, since everyone is "always another rube" all the time?

    3 votes
  2. Kuromantis
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    If, as per baudelaire, the greatest trick the devil played was convincing the world that he didn’t exist, the irony of Phyllis Schlafly’s legacy is that she undermined women so efficiently that her pernicious influence on American politics hasn’t gotten the credit it deserves. During the 1970s, Schlafly was camera-ready pith in pearls and a pie-frill collar, a troll long before the term existed, who’d begin public speeches by thanking her husband for letting her attend, because she knew how much it riled her feminist detractors. Armed only with a newsletter and a seeming immunity to shame, Schlafly took a popular bipartisan piece of legislation—the Equal Rights Amendment, which affirms men and women as equal citizens under the law—and whipped it up into a culture war as deftly as if she were making dessert.

    Mrs. America presents Schlafly as half opportunist, half contrarian—someone who refused to accept that her gender might be holding her back, who was completely disinterested in women’s issues but could get people to pay attention to her only when she was talking about them. “I am not against women succeeding; I am not against women working outside the home,” she says at a Daughters of the American Revolution luncheon, something she’d repeat to her critics whenever they accused her of hypocrisy for building her career on preaching the virtues of women not working. What she is opposed to is the women’s-liberation movement, which she broadly characterizes as “a small elitist group of northeastern establishment liberals putting down homemakers.” (The movement is neither small nor elitist in the series, but Steinem fully admits to being “against housewives.”) As the room responds approvingly, Schlafly’s arguments get more heated, and more risible. The “libbers,” she states, won’t be happy until the women are all drafted and the men are all home nursing the babies. “It’s ridiculous,” she says. “And it’s downright un-American.”

    What Schlafly tapped into before anyone else, the show suggests, was the power of a certain kind of polemic. Stoking resentment against a so-called group of privileged snobs who threaten the authentic American way of life is easy. So is provoking judgment by making people feel judged. From the first episode on, Schlafly evolves into a strikingly sophisticated peddler of outrage before anyone has calculated its potential. When put on the spot, she brazenly lies; when challenged, she smoothly changes the subject. She’s a master of messaging whose first anti-ERA campaign involves giving homemade bread and jam to male congressmen with a card celebrating traditional gender roles: “To the breadwinners, from the breadmakers.” (The series makes clear later that much of the bread is made by the black maids who actually do the domestic work while Schlafly and her nascent group of supporters are out lobbying.)

    2 votes