It's funny how television works. I was watching an episode of the classic sitcom The Partridge Family the other day (on the essential retro network Antenna TV) and wound up thinking about the outstanding FX on Hulu limited series Mrs. America, which made Millennials and Gen Z'ers aware that as recently as the '70s the idea of women being treated as equal to men was not universally popular. (In fact, many thousands of women opposed it.) Mrs. America was smartly centered around Phyllis Schlafly, the woman at the center of the movement to crush the Equal Rights Amendment during its infancy. (Schlafly and other like-minded individuals ultimately failed, but they did quite a job anyway. The official ratification of the ERA remains a source of controversy to this day.) The episode of The Partridge Family that caught my attention dealt with that exact same issue, but the character at its center was a young man.
That Time When "The Partridge Family" Deconstructed Feminism
