YMMV / Mrs. America

• Alternative Character Interpretation: Alice, as related to Misaimed Fandom, has attracted many Sarah Paulson fans who ship her with Phyllis based on Paulson's real life sexuality and her past roles as lesbians in period pieces like American Horror Story: Asylum and Carol and Alice's admiration of Phyllis showing in what appears to be in a Held Gaze, then after the previews for episode 8 dropped where it showed Alice giving the same gaze to a walking Gloria Steinem doing a Hair Flip pushed this interpretation further.
• Aluminum Christmas Trees:
  • The Phil Crane fundraiser starts with a beauty pageant with women in evening gowns and Phyllis in a star-spangled two-piece. It sounds unbelievable, but according to Waller pageants were something that indeed occurred during political fundraisers in the mid-century, especially in Republican circles.
  • John Schlafly really is gay and was forcibly outed by a liberal magazine in 1992 as a means to get back at his mother. He is something of an Armoured Closet Gay who continues to work for her anti-LGBT group as a lawyer and has never been in a long term relationship or married.
  • The Klan did get members involved as delegates and guardsmen at STOP ERA conferences as one cardholding member boasted about the attendance there.
• Audience-Alienating Premise: Some find Phyllis herself and her views so reprehensible that they think it’s irresponsible to give her such a big platform. The show has been accused of glamorizing and white washing her. In particular, the deliberate choice to not highlight her, shall we say, checkered past on race relations to make her seem more sympathetic is a sticking point.
• Awesome Music:
  • The montage near the end of "Bella" where the invitations and envelopes sent delegates for the National Women's Conference are sent to Betty, Jill, Brenda, Pamela, Rosemary, and Pamela set to "Hold Your Head High Woman" by Argent and they are all excited.
  • Three in "Houston": the scene where Alice and Pamela spot Gloria Steinem to "I Feel Love" by Donna Summer, Alice singing "This Land is Your Land" with young feminists, and the convention singing "We Shall Overcome".
• Base-Breaking Character: Alice. There are the shippers who love seeing her with Phyllis that like her (also helps she's played by Sarah Paulson) and then there are viewers that see her as a distraction who is there to make Phyllis and her campaign look less reprehensible, especially given race issues. Like in "Shirley", Alice is shown to be horrified that they have racist supporters and that Phyllis would insist on having their support, but she has been established to have been a supporter and follower of Phyllis's political work and it's been documented that Phyllis not only enjoyed the support of anti-integrationists but also opposed the integration platform the Nixon campaign had wanted to use for the general election at the 1960 Republican convention.
• Catharsis Factor: The two instances where Phyllis gets some measure of comeuppance.
  • The first in when she gets hit with a Pie in the Face.
  • The second comes at the end when Ronald Reagan declines to offer her a job in his administration, leaving her peeling apples in her kitchen. Hoist by Their Own Petard indeed.
• Genius Bonus: A few throughout the series.
  • Most of the things Phyllis has said about the ERA and women came from actual Real Life quotes.
  • The racist STOP ERA housewife who says that they wouldn't want the sexes to mix just like the races, this was an actual quote pulled from anti-ERA material.
  • Gloria's friend Marlo filming the TV special Free To Be You and Me is referring to Marlo Thomas, star of That Girl, married to Phil Donahue in Real Life (who made The Cameo in "Gloria"), and was a ERA supporter. Interestingly enough, Marlo Thomas made a cameo in Ocean's 8 which also featured Blanchett and Paulson.
  • In "Bella", Coretta Scott King is mentioned as part of the commission for the 1977 convention in Houston, in real life King did get involved in feminist causes and actually died within the same week as Betty Friedan.
  • Rosemary towards the end of "Houston" says she plans to write a book called The Price of Liberty which got published in 1978.
• Harsher in Hindsight: One of Phyllis Schlafly's motivations for resisting the ERA was the fear that it would make women eligible to be drafted into the military. In March 2020, a Congressional commission recommended that the law be changed to make women eligible for the draft, even without the ERA.
• Heartwarming in Hindsight: Creator Bina Daigler first thought of the series during the 2016 United States Presidential Election, hoping that Democratic Hillary Clinton winning would be a nice bookend to the events covered in the series. Clinton lost but the year the series came out ended with the Democratic Kamala Harris being elected Vice-President, the first time a woman has been voted into such a position.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: A couple with Fred Schlafly, given John Slattery's earlier role in Mad Men:
  • In "Phyllis & Fred & Brenda & Marc" the eponymous couples are set to debate in Los Angeles where Fred (after arriving at a hotel with Phyllis) sulks and comments "I hate Los Angeles"; this makes viewing Mad Men's episode "A Tale of Two Cities" hilarious, as in it Roger visited the city with Harry and Don for work, Roger checked out some attractive young women, and then got punched out at a party.
  • Roger's quote "God, I miss The '50s" considering Fred and his Stay in the Kitchen attitudes towards Phyllis.
  • Phyllis (Cate Blanchett) and Rosemary (Melanie Lynskey) are shown to have a rather belligerent friendship with one another, one where the former finds herself more superior to the latter. Don't Look Up reunites Blanchett and Lynskey as romantic (and even moral rivals), especially where Blanchett's character has an affair with Lynskey's character's husband.
  • Sarah Paulson goes from playing a character who follows a notorious, self-righteous, unlikable blonde Moral Guardian whose actions altered the course of U.S. Politics to actually portraying one in Impeachment as Linda Tripp.
• Hollywood Homely: Enforced with Betty and Rosemary, who were both ordinary looking in real life, forcing the attractive Tracey Ullman and Melanie Lynskey to tone down their natural good looks.
  • Another example is where Gloria's money guy, rejecting her pick for the 2nd magazine issue to have Shirley Chisholm on the cover (due to having a African-American woman on the cover being "risky") and naming Wonder Woman instead and accuses Gloria of wanting to be "the only one around here with great legs". The other women at Ms. are all attractive or average looking and the point was that the money guy was a jerk.
• Misaimed Fandom: There are queer viewers who enjoy shipping Phyllis with Alice.
• Nightmare Fuel: Alice's dream where Phyllis shows up to scold her about her botched speech for an interview and starts smothering her on the hotel bed.
• Tear Jerker: Pamela's end point. She is still married to her abusive husband and she has had another baby and she seems resigned to her fate as she is following Phyllis's advice to treat her husband as "the king of his castle".
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Many viewers were distressed that "Houston" spent more time on Alice rather than the many real-life feminists of color featured on the show (more Shirley, Flo Kennedy, Magaret Sloan, Audrey Rowe Colum) or that there was nothing that explored Pamela's inner life, to figure out why a young abused woman was supporting a counter-movement that was hostile to battered wives as a whole.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Many viewers wished "Houston" focused more on feminists of color and the resolutions regarding race and ethnicity or saw more resolution to Pamela's story arc; also regarding Alice's disability to be explored more or even that she ran into disabled activists or the issue of reproductive freedom at the convention.
• The Woobie:
  • Phyllis's sister-in-law Eleanor, who serves as the Parental Substitute for her nieces and nephews and is found weeping over being a childless Old Maid at her age and confides in her professional sister-in-law. She is in turn humiliated when Phyllis at a Mother-Daughter tea makes disparaging remarks about feminists being bitter old maids who hate children, which leads to chuckles from the crowd and a very heartbroken face from Eleanor.
  • Pamela, a young wife and mother who is easily taken in by Phyllis and is dealing with an abusive marriage with only Alice supporting her and giving comfort while Rosemary and Phyllis coldly ignore her or tell she's not doing things right. Unlike the other women in the STOP ERA group, she is very young and hasn't figured herself out, according to her portrayer Kayli Carter, and also, hasn't been given much options aside from marrying and starting a family right out of school and her role models were more concerned about presenting an image of perfection rather than confiding in one another.
    "I think there are experiences of being a new mother and feeling maybe ill-equipped or like you’re failing constantly. I think that’s a feeling women have oftentimes, and that, to me, was very easy to empathize with because I could tell that that woman was doing her best and not being recognized or appreciated. And beyond that, my goal is to disappear a little bit and to play that person from the inside out, and with any period piece, you just start closing doors off to yourself. I feel like that’s the way I got in is asking myself, what is my set of circumstances? What are the things that in 2020, as a woman, I have access to and am afforded, and what are the things that she doesn’t have access to and what she is not afforded in the early ’70s in this community in Illinois? And that really helps because it pared back a lot of options. If my options were to graduate high school, marry my high school sweetheart, and settle down and have children immediately, then that’s a life she is potentially really proud of and wanting to excel at, and if you feel like you aren’t doing that, god, I have a lot of empathy for that. I think that’s the way I got into her."

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