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Gloria Steinem in Mrs America: How does episode two's portrait of the iconic feminist measure up?

BBC/FX/Sabrina Lantos
BBC/FX/Sabrina Lantos

“No one likes feminists,” quips Fred, husband of vehement anti-feminist Phyliss Schlafly, in the opening moments of Mrs America’s second episode.

“That’s so true, they’re no fun,” she chuckles - before we immediately cut to Gloria Steinem, played by Rose Byrne, who very quickly proves that one, people like feminists, and two, they can be very fun indeed.

Steinem and Schlafly couldn’t have been more different: one a feminist icon who’s inspired millions and lobbied for abortion rights; the other devoted to dismantling the Equal Rights Amendment, which enshrines equal rights for all, regardless of gender.

The second instalment of Mrs America maps their very different campaigns alongside each other - and gives us a poignant insight into Steinem’s ceaseless fight for legal abortion. Here’s how the storylines measure up against the facts...

Was the media obsessed with Gloria Steinem’s looks?

(BBC/FX/Sabrina Lantos)
(BBC/FX/Sabrina Lantos)

Mrs America portrays the aviator-wearing, wavy-haired Steinem as a figure of glamour: when we first meet her, she’s chased by paparazzi and is then the most in-demand person in the room at her Ms. magazine launch party.

In one particularly painful scene, we see the money man behind Steinem’s magazine proudly tell her co-editor Dorothy Pitman Hughes that he first hired her as a rookie reporter because she had “nice legs”; as her colleagues look on askance, Steinem reminds them that keeping him on-side will keep the magazine in print.

On screen, it seems that Steinem’s appearance is a blessing and a curse for her: the activist, as Byrne plays her, knows her looks might be helpful in drawing media attention to her cause, but she’s also aware that she might not be taken seriously for that very reason.

Looking back in her autobiography My Life On The Road, Steinem suggested that the popular stereotype of feminists as dowdy and dull helped feed the media’s fixation on her appearance.

“I had been called a ‘pretty girl’ before I was identified as a feminist in my mid-30s,” she wrote. “Then suddenly I found myself being called ‘beautiful.’

“This grew into an accusation that I was listened to only because oh how I looked, and a corollary that the media had created me.”

Did Phyllis Schlafly pioneer ‘fake news’ on the Phil Donohue Show?

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(BBC/FX/Sabrina Lantos)“When you go on Donohue, do you know what you’re saying has no basis in fact, or do you just not know what the hell you’re talking about?”

A female Democractic aide’s scathing response to Schlafly’s appearance on The Phil Donohue Show - in which she claims that passing the ERA will lead to a ban on women-only bathrooms and force women into serving in Vietnam - could just as easily be a riposte to the current President’s PR strategy, give or take a few contemporary details.

This isn’t just a scene thrown in to amp up the contemporary resonance - in fact, Schlafly was known for repeating soundbites that weren’t always true over and over again until they became the headline (is it any wonder she was a Trump fan, and vice versa?).

She was very aware of the importance of soundbites, training her followers to use specific quotes and catchphrases in interviews in order to amplify the campaign message (as we’ll see in a later episode).

Did the Stop ERA campaigners really use baking as a campaign tactic?

The tactic of baking bread in a bid to win over state legislators feels like it could be one of Desperate Housewives’ less convincing storylines, but that’s just what Schlafly and co did.

The Stop ERA movement was known for turning the trappings of domesticity into campaign tools. In episode two, we see Schlafly and her supporters handing out fresh loaves to the men working at the Illinois General Assembly, tweely decorated with the handwritten slogan “To the breadwinners, from the breadmakers.”

It didn’t stop there - according to a People magazine profile from 1975, which aptly described her as the “velvet fist” masterminding the slowdown in support for the ERA, she went on to deliver apple pies, as well as jam jars inscribed with “Preserve us from a congressional jam, vote against the ERA sham.”

Was there tension between Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan?

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(BBC/FX/Sabrina Lantos)

At Steinem’s Ms. magazine launch party, a journalist corners her, fishing for a rebuttal to an inflammatory quote from fellow feminist Betty Friedan, with the author of The Feminine Mystique claiming that “the media tried to make her a celebrity, but no one should mistake [Steinem] for a leader.”

Feminist in-fighting, it seems, is nothing new. Friedan’s quote is a real one, picked from a speech she gave in 1972, and she would often claim that Steinem and others were attempting to profit from the movement by creating a profile for themselves.

As we see in Mrs America, the animosity, it seems, was largely on one side. It’s been suggested that Friedan, whose best-selling book helped kickstart second wave feminism, felt that her position as the movement’s de facto leader had been usurped by a younger, more palatable alternative in Steinem - who later admitted that she tried not to be publicly riled by Friedan’s comments.

“I never responded in person or print, on the grounds that it would only feed the stereotype that women can’t get along,” she wrote in My Life On The Road.

Who was Gloria Steinem’s boyfriend?

(BBC/FX/Sabrina Lantos)
(BBC/FX/Sabrina Lantos)

While the episode’s emphasis is skewed more towards Steinem’s politics than her personal life, we do get a glimpse at her boyfriend Frank Thomas, played by Insecure’s Jay Ellis, during episode two.

The couple were linked in the early 70s, after Steinem profiled Thomas, a lawyer and campaigner who went on to become the first African-American to lead the Ford Foundation, a charitable foundation dedicated to reducing poverty and improving international cooperation. A deeply impressive figure in his own right, he went on to lead the September 11th Fund, which distributed donations to those affected by the 2001 terrorist attacks.

Steinem and Thomas parted ways after a couple of years, but the writer later referred to Thomas as “the long-time love of my life, and best friend” in a 2015 interview with the New Yorker. As the exact details of their romance are sketchy, it’s safe to assume that scenes featuring Thomas required a liberal dose of creative licence.

Was Steinem really a teenage tap dancer?

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(BBC/FX/Sabrina Lantos)

Steinem uses tap dancing as an unorthodox stress reliever in the series and tells her colleagues that she had hopes of becoming a professional as a teenager, viewing it as an escape route from her hometown.

This isn’t just a humanising detail that the writers have used to jazz up Steinem’s backstory - as a young girl, she set her sights on a dance career, but later had to focus on caring for her mother, whose divorce precipitated a nervous breakdown.

“Tape dancing was the extremely impractical way I was going to get out of Toledo,” she said in a 2011 HBO documentary. “If I could dance a little bit, it was going to be my ticket out.” She’s kept her skills pretty sharp, too - you can watch a charming clip of her dancing with actress and activist Amandla Stenberg courtesy of Teen Vogue.

Is the abortion scene based on fact?

“How many more women are going to die from botched abortions while we wait for men to feel comfortable with us having control over our own bodies?” Steinem asks her colleagues in one of the episode’s most stirring moments.

“How many women are going to be forced to give birth to babies they can’t afford to feed while we wait for housewives, who have no idea what it’s like to have to work to survive, to feel comfortable with women having power?”

For Steinem, the fight for safe and legal abortion was a deeply personal one. We find out why in the episode’s poignant coda, a throwback to her early 20s, when a London doctor asks her to promise him two things before he agrees to carry out the procedure: that she will not tell anyone his name while he is alive, and that she will do what she wants to do with her life.

Steinem eventually dedicated My Life On The Road to the doctor, John Sharpe, who helped her get an abortion in 1957, when it was still illegal in England.

Mrs America airs on BBC Two on July 8 from 9pm and is also available to stream on BBC iPlayer

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