In "Jill," Mrs. America captures a painful turning point

I’ve said this before about Mrs. America, but I’ll repeat it: it’s a real shame this show is organized by character. The strain shows in this episode as it did with “Betty,” but less because Jill Ruckelshaus is a household name and more because of the huge leaps in time and story. A million things happen in this episode, set a year after the last one, and I wish it was at least three separate episodes. The year is 1976, and the National Women’s Caucus is scattered—Betty, Gloria, and Brenda don’t even show up in this episode, and Bella and Shirley have a storyline that barely overlaps with Jill’s or Phyllis’.

That doesn’t mean they don’t at all—if there’s a thematic connection between these stories, it’s that boys will be boys, even if they’re men in leadership. It’s a phrase that echoes throughout the episode with all the tone of a depressing drag of a cigarette. As Jill tells Bella and Shirley in a meeting with Congressman Hays (Curtis Shumaker) after a particularly crude joke on the Congressman’s part, “I’m used to suffering for my cause.” It’s there that Shirley tells Bella that nothing came of her organizing an exposé on how senators regularly sexually harass their secretaries. It’s there that Phyllis smiles politely as Reagan’s campaign staff, supporters, and donors make an even cruder joke in her presence. There are countless little moments when this connection appears, and it’s so painful to watch.

What was so surreal about the first episode of Mrs. America was seeing Republicans agree without a second thought to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment. I admit that sometimes I feel too young for this show—so much of the history feels like something I could only understand if I had lived through it. But this episode gave me a feeling of déjà vu—or rather, jamais vu. While I didn’t live through these events, this episode really shows how much the revolution of the ’70s led to the backlash of the much more conservative ’80s led to the political moment we’re at now. And it does so without condensing it into such basic terms like I just did, instead following so many different threads before approaching the bigger picture. It pinpoints the turning of the tide. My guess is the next few episodes will have a similar gut-wrenching effect—most of us are watching this show know that the Equal Rights Amendment will remain a few states short of ratification. But it’s still painful to feel it. It reminds me of the very same feeling I had on November 8, 2016.

And actually, the comments and actions of the men throughout the episode remind me of the week before the election, when a tape of our current president was released where he gloated about how he forced himself on women. The crude jokes the Congressmen make, the condescending cartoon they pass around during a Congressional Prayer Breakfast (!), the haunted eyes of the secretaries who tell Shirley about being sexually harassed. It’s all just “locker talk,” except these men have no shame. They don’t need to keep it in the locker room because there are literally no consequences to their actions.