'Mrs America' Episode 5: Hard to sympathize with Phylis belittled by her husband given her subservient dogma
Spoilers for ‘Mrs. America’ Episode 5, ‘Phyllis and Fred and Brenda and Marc’
Now at the midseason mark, the one thing that FX’s biographical miniseries ‘Mrs. America’ has demonstrated successfully consistently, is the irony of Phylis Schlafly’s life. Played by the incomparable Cate Blanchett, Phylis was a woman on fire. She believed in conservative Christian values. She was anti-choice. She was a diligent housewife. She was a vocal adversary of the Equal Rights Amendment and feminism.
But her own pursuits -- and they were highly political pursuits -- were very often roadblocked by the very values she publicly advocated and defended. Episode 5, titled ‘Phyllis and Fred and Brenda and Marc’ takes a hard look at this conflict.
There’s a scene in the episode where she, a powerful woman, who gave the second-wave feminists of the ‘70s a run for their money, whose opposition to the ERA resulted in it no longer being the sure thing it was once considered, asks her husband Fred (John Slattery) to accompany her to a debate in Los Angeles. While the couples’ debate between them and Brenda and Marc Feigen-Fasteau (Ari Graynor and Adam Brody) was shown as Fred’s brainchild, Phylis chose to ask her husband in a disconcerting slavish manner if he would be able to make time for her from his work. She did so while sitting on the floor, rubbing his feet. She did so, calling him “daddy”.
In another instance, when a newspaper profiles Fred but refers to him as Phylis’s lawyer husband in the headline, the former holds a grudge against her shining star. During the debate, Phylis in a moment of hubris makes up a court case that was immediately called out by Brenda. Not only did Fred not help Phylis out, he later in the debate called Phylis a submissive woman, claiming that in the family he was the one who “wore the pants”.
It was clear that Fred had intentionally left Phylis without support in order to demonstrate his own power over her. And when she asked him why, he belittled her and her movement -- ironically, a movement that left the status quo of a power imbalance between genders unchecked, that let men like him lord over women like Phylis.
In a later scene, Fred, once again belittles Phylis’ ambitions to study law, only demonstrating his own masculine insecurity -- his wife was already more famous and sought after. How could he assert his dominance if she was also as qualified in a field that had thus far been his area of expertise? And while it’s easy to find Fred pathetic, pitiful, petty, and host of other negative epithets, it is hard to sympathize with Phylis.
How can one sympathize with a person who acts against her own interest, not out of ignorance, but out of zealotry? How can one sympathize with Phylis when she eventually made the lives of innumerable women harder not just then but in the years to come, continuing even today? The show has often been accused of painting Phylis in a sympathetic light. I’d argue, however, that it doesn’t.
It only creates a conundrum for those who would weigh immediate repercussions with the long-standing ones. It creates a complex portrait of a woman who shouldn’t be sympathized with, but who should be pitied. Phylis's tragic flaw is her own determination to make a world an unequal place for women. It is only obvious then that she should reap the benefits of the seeds she has sown.
'Mrs. America' drops new episodes weekly every Wednesday only on Hulu.