Jailyn Seabrooks is an Intern with NOW PAC. It is an important reminder that even our heroes of the 1970s women’s movement still had a long way to go for real inclusion of lesbians.

Carrying signs with slogans such as “If You Want Meat, Go to the Butcher”, women rejected the commodification of their bodies and the larger symbolism of the pageant, which had become popular in the 1920s as a backlash against women voting. Learn how your comment data is processed. This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. The woman who opposed equality with men: Phyllis Schlafly and the real history behind.

Women who had come of age in the late 1940s and 1950s had been promised total fulfilment in marriage and motherhood, only to find themselves feeling depressed and unfulfilled.

Your email address will not be published. It is troubling to see lesbians treated as some sort of frivolous afternoon activity that can be used and discarded for fun. Your email address will not be published.

By the early 1970s, prominent labour unions, including the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), joined women’s rights groups in supporting the ERA. We can all acknowledge that what we want is for every woman to be free to make her own choices, even if those choices differ from our own. In the aftermath of Trump’s election and the #MeToo movement, ERA proponents revived ratification efforts. © 2020 National Organization for Women. In a move that screams mid-century misunderstanding, Marc is initially not threatened by this since he sees affairs between two women are just not as serious.

The organisation she founded to fight the ERA was called STOP ERA, which stood for “Stop Taking Our Privileges”.

Women deserved the right to be autonomous: to have control over their bodies (the 1973 Supreme Court decision in Roe v Wade legalised abortion and galvanised Schlafly’s allies against the ERA); to pursue whatever job they wanted; and to not be defined by their marital status. This debate is again full of iconic one-liners like Brenda calling out the fact that Phyllis is not really a housewife but instead a “full-time lobbyist working to defeat the ERA.” While Brenda and Marc work through what an open relationship means in conjunction with having a child, Fred and Phyllis work through the fact that she wants to go to law school at the age of 50. While this episode focuses mostly on her marriage to fellow lawyer Marc Fasteau, it was fascinating to see how Brenda has influenced this movement that I did not even know. Do you have to be a “man-hating lesbian” to be a feminist, or do you have to be a traditional housewife to be a conservative? You can be a single woman and still fight for things like child care and paid family leave. Women, according to Schlafly, did not really want equality with men. These arguments eventually won out. Together they brought the ERA ratification to a grinding halt. Along with that, the show explored 1970’s feminism in unscathed. You can be a single woman and still fight for things like child care and paid family leave. It is an important reminder that even our heroes of the 1970s women’s movement still had a long way to go for real inclusion of lesbians. One of the things this show does exceptionally well is telling the stories of women in the movement that often get forgotten. In episode 5 of Mrs. America, we explore what it means to be in a marriage and how eerily similar it feels to be a woman in a traditional one or a “non-traditional” one through the lenses of Phyllis Schlafly and Brenda Feigen Fasteau. Chisholm fought tirelessly for civil rights, worker’s rights, and women’s rights, and her 1972 presidential campaign galvanised young voters and people of colour across the country. Brenda and Marc have a less traditional marriage than most in the 1970s; they both work full time, and as Marc says, “both wear the pants.” That free-spirited way of life gets tested when Brenda sleeps with a Ms. Magazine photographer, Jules. Donate and together we can secure equality for all women >. Indeed, many who followed the struggle over the ERA believed it would have been ratified in 1975 or 1976 had it not been for Schlafly and her allies, who convinced a significant portion of Americans that equality for women came only at the expense of marriage, family, and children. Required fields are marked *. You will shortly receive a receipt for your purchase via email. Attacks on abortion care keep coming. In today’s progressive movement, we have come closer to the ideal that you can choose to create a family in whatever way feels most true to you. You can be a housewife with children and still fight for feminist values. There are no upcoming events at this time. Chisholm championed the ERA because, as she argued in her 1970 floor statement, sexism was the “most subtle, most pervasive, and most institutionalized form of prejudice that exists”. NOW Chapter Websites Reinvented. Are women people, or are women best defined as wives and mothers? You can be a housewife with children and still fight for feminist values.

The episode centers on the debate that occurred between the two of them and their husbands. ERA proponents proposed Ms as an alternative – a title that indicated personhood (and gender), but not marital status. All rights reserved. Phyllis Schlafly, Gloria Steinem, Shirley Chisholm, and more historical figures appear in FX's Mrs. America. At either end of the conservative or progressive spectrum, we see women truly struggling in their marriages. Phyllis’s entire public image is built on her traditional values and traditional family, but at home, she is struggling with a husband who will not accept her ambitions. But then, a savvy politician disguised as a housewife turned her attention to defeating the ERA and, along with it, the idea that women were equal to men. Everything you ever wanted to know about... credit Phyllis Schlafly with the ERA’s failure, Free Thinker: Sex, Suffrage, and the Extraordinary Life of Helen Hamilton Gardener, Your guide to the Roman empire: when it was formed, why it split and how it failed, plus its most colourful emperors, Christian Frederick Cole: England’s first black barrister, Women’s history month: 11 podcasts to listen to, Nazi wives: the women beside Hess, Goebbels, Göring and Himmler. In today’s progressive movement, we have come closer to the ideal that you can choose to create a family in whatever way feels most true to you. But NOW is defending our access to reproductive freedom.

In the most well-known of these feminist cultural protests, more than 200 women travelled to Atlantic City, New Jersey to protest the 1968 Miss America Pageant. It is fascinating to see how Phyllis is fighting for a way of life that she does not even want. You have successfully linked your account! If you subscribe to BBC History Magazine Print or Digital Editions then you can unlock 10 years’ worth of archived history material fully searchable by Topic, Location, Period and Person. In episode 5 of Mrs. America, we explore what it means to be in a marriage and how eerily similar it feels to be a woman in a traditional one or a “non-traditional” one through the lenses of Phyllis Schlafly and Brenda Feigen Fasteau. Kimberly Hamlin is a historian who writes about women, sex, and politics, and the author of Free Thinker: Sex, Suffrage, and the Extraordinary Life of Helen Hamilton Gardener (WW Norton 2020). Traditional gender roles are still running rampant. Feminist icon Gloria Steinem, introduced in episode two of Mrs. America, did not attend the 1968 protest, but she helped spread its message through her writing, activism, and in the pages of Ms. Magazine which she helped launch in late 1971 as a feminist alternative to women’s magazines funded by beauty ads. One of the things this show does exceptionally well is telling the stories of women in the movement that often get forgotten. In episode 5 of Mrs. America, we explore what it means to be in a marriage and how eerily similar it feels to be a woman in a traditional one or a “non-traditional” one through the lenses of Phyllis Schlafly and Brenda Feigen Fasteau. While many factors – including lobbying by corporations that did not want to pay women equal wages, and by the insurance industry, the business models of which are based on sex-based actuarial tables – came together to slow ratification, historians credit Phyllis Schlafly with the ERA’s failure. This is the core question of Mrs. America and ongoing debates about the ERA. Phyllis Schlafly died in 2016, but she lived to see the presidential campaign of Donald Trump, whose candidacy she endorsed, and the resurgence of the ERA. You can find her on Twitter at @ProfessorHamlin, Mrs America begins on BBC Two on Wednesday 8 July 2020 at 9pm, This article was first published in April 2020. In March 1972 the ERA – a proposed constitutional amendment to provide for the legal equality of the sexes and prohibit discrimination on the basis of sex – overwhelming passed both houses of Congress and was soon ratified by 35 of the required 38 states. Phyllis Schlafly ignited a national movement by arguing that women were fundamentally different from men. What Schlafly supported was nonsense, said the leaders of the ERA campaign. What is more striking in this episode are the eerie ways in which Brenda’s and Phyllis’s marriages are similar. Before the 1970s, women were divided into two categories: married and unmarried, Mrs or Miss. Our best wishes for a productive day.

Mrs. America stars a huge and impressive cast, led by Cate Blanchett, telling the story of the resistance to the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970s Short description about your NOW chapter in this footer section. One of the things this show does exceptionally well is telling the stories of women in the movement that often get forgotten. What happens when the things we as women want in life conflict with the movements we are pushing for? For me, one of those women is Brenda Feign Fasteau. This website uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience on our website. What is more striking in this episode are the eerie ways in which Brenda’s and Phyllis’s marriages are similar. Get a website like this for your NOW chapter. Where NOW sought changes in the law (modelled on the Civil Rights Movement and its signature achievements including the Civil Rights Act of 1964), younger women and women of colour who had come of age in the anti-war and anti-racism movements of the 1960s sought changes in the culture more broadly. ‘Mrs’, ‘Miss’ and ‘Ms’; within these three titles, viewers can glimpse the main ideas undergirding Mrs. America. She was one of the founders of Ms. Magazine, a Harvard educated lawyer, and the co-director of the ACLU’s Women’s Rights Project alongside Ruth Bader Ginsburg. That idea underscores much of the way Mrs. America, and the broader public at the time, see the LGBTQIA+ community. In a move that screams mid-century misunderstanding, Marc is initially not threatened by this since he sees affairs between two women are just not as serious. Fred even goes as far as to call her “submissive” during the debate. At the time, the state considered all women as mothers whether or not they had – or ever wanted to have – children (the 1908 US Supreme Court decision in Muller v Oregon had ruled that women should be considered “a class by herself” because of their reproductive capacities). Traditional gender roles are still running rampant.

By the early 1920s, more than 1,000 state laws contained sex-based provisions, most of which were designed to protect female labourers from dangerous workplace conditions. Thanks!