‘Mrs. America’ Review: The Voice of an E.R.A.

“Mad Men” ended its timeline in late 1970, with the advertising patriarch Don Draper peaced out at a yoga retreat, om-ing his way to the inspiration for the classic 1971 Coca-Cola “Hilltop” ad. Since then, fans have dreamed about a follow-up, one focused not on the Don Drapers of the world, but on the women whose limitations and liberations were the through-line of the series.

FX on Hulu’s breathtaking “Mrs. America,” from the “Mad Men” writer Dahvi Waller, picks up in 1971, raising a throaty howl just as Don is teaching the world to sing. The story of the fight for and against the Equal Rights Amendment, it’s not a sequel, either literally or in format: It’s a nine-part series following real historical figures.

But it is a kind of spiritual successor, a meticulously created and observed mural that finds the germ of contemporary America in the striving of righteously mad women.

Like “Mad Men,” “Mrs. America” finds a fresh angle on a much-observed age of revolution by focusing, first, on a counterrevolutionary: Phyllis Schlafly (Cate Blanchett), the cold warrior who, in Waller’s telling, seized on the culture war over women’s rights to raise her political profile and advance a broader conservative agenda.

The insight of “Mrs. America,” in the punchy words of Representative Bella Abzug (Margo Martindale), is that Schlafly “is a goddamn feminist. She may be the most liberated woman in America.” She just chooses not to see herself that way.

The wife of an Illinois lawyer, Fred Schlafly (John Slattery, putting a Midwest spin on his Roger Sterling suavity), she’s run for congress, an ambition Fred has been glad to entertain as long as she didn’t win. Men admire her beauty and indulge her intelligence. When she appears on a TV politics show with the Republican representative Phil Crane (James Marsden), he reminds her to “Smile. With teeth.”

Schlafly sees managing men as simply a woman’s lot. At a meeting with male Republican lawmakers, she says, “Some women like to blame sexism for their failures instead of admitting they didn’t try hard enough.” They ask her to take notes, assuming she has the nicest penmanship.

Still, her interests lie more in nuclear policy than in propagandizing the nuclear family, until her friend Alice Macray (Sarah Paulson) mentions the proposed amendment, which Alice worries will marginalize housewives and subject women to the draft. Schlafly soon retools her political brand from anti-Communism to anti-feminism. Her way to climb the ladder is to pull it up behind her.

“Mrs. America” hardly sees Schlafly as its heroine, but it respects her cunning and force of will. Blanchett gives her a Katharine Hepburn clipped-syllables charm — like Blanchett’s Galadriel in “The Lord of the Rings,” she is regal and terrifying (to her allies above all). Her final scene, wordless and devastating, might as well end with Blanchett being handed an Emmy onscreen.

Parallel to Schlafly’s story is an ensemble series about the 1970s feminist movement. Its principals aren’t introduced until the end of the first episode: among them, Abzug, Gloria Steinem (Rose Byrne), Representative Shirley Chisholm (Uzo Aduba), Betty Friedan (Tracey Ullman) and some less-celebrated E.R.A. warriors, including the G.O.P. activist Jill Ruckelshaus (Elizabeth Banks). (Among other things, the series is a journey to a time when socially liberal Republicans could be spotted in the wild.)

Schlafly and her fledgling movement are barely an annoyance to the noisy, ebullient group. (Friedan can’t pronounce her name, a running gag.) They’re busy plotting what they assume will be the swift passage of the amendment, endorsed by President Nixon.

This chapter of history, they figure, is just about over. They won. Arguing over tactics and priorities is all that’s left — until they get hit by what’s coming from the right.

The decade-long fight that unfolds is epic and swaggering, bubbling with cultural ferment and bouncing along on a soul-laced soundtrack. There is an “Avengers Assemble” feeling here, both in the gathering of historical figures — a young Ruth Bader Ginsburg even appears, briefly — and the bumper crop of acting talent. Waller is producing feminism’s most ambitious crossover event, and she relishes it.

While Schlafly is the driving force of the series — it is not, after all, called “Ms. America” — the show spotlights one character at a time. The third episode, about Chisholm’s 1972 run for the presidency, rings familiar not just in the story of an outsider fighting what she calls a “rigged” party machine, but in the intra-movement clashes over whether race and gender are equal priorities. (Chisholm, whom Aduba gives a fierce magnetism, gets this from black politicians, too, who see her more as a “women’s” candidate. “I don’t look black to you?” she asks.)

The series is constantly smart about how even visionaries can have blind spots, and about the arguments over picking up the master’s tools versus knocking down the master’s house. A debate over whether to confront sexually predatory Democratic politicians — bad actors with good politics — is all too relevant.

There are too many knockout performances to list, but Ullman is tsunamic as Friedan, the outspoken “Feminine Mystique” author now raging for relevance in the current wave of feminism. Martindale’s Abzug is a tornado in a hat, a piquantly funny force of personality. (“I never shouted,” she says when confronted about her brash manner. “I spoke with feeling.”)

An episode focused on Alice Macray — eventually sidelined and demeaned by the rising conservative star Schlafly — is both caustic and deeply sympathetic. Her zeal for traditional homemaking may be reactionary, but irony of ironies, it’s the Stop E.R.A. movement that gave her a sense of purpose outside the kitchen.

History not being a spoiler, we know how the meta-story turns out: Schlafly and company kept the amendment from passing the required 38 states by its deadline. (The attempt to revive it has continued, with Virginia ratifying it just this year.)

But the real story animating “Mrs. America” is laying out how both sides of this battle won — or, at least, changed America significantly. Schlafly’s fight was the birth of the modern culture war, in which ideologues seek concrete gains by pushing sectarian buttons. Pointedly, Schlafly is introduced at the dawn of the Reagan era to Paul Manafort and Roger Stone, future blunt instruments of the Trump campaign.

The parallels with today’s setbacks for women are obvious. (“We select our leaders first by eliminating women,” Steinem says in a monologue, and, well, read the news.) But “Mrs. America” is also attentive to the big and small advances. Some were behind the scenes in politics; some were gradual shifts in culture, represented in one episode by Steinem and friends sitting down to watch the TV premiere of “Free to Be … You and Me.”

Others — like Steinem’s rise to media celebrity — came very much in the public eye. In a late scene, during a two-part arc about the 1977 National Women’s Conference in Houston, Steinem strides down a hotel hallway to Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love,” turning heads even among the adversaries plotting to take her movement down.

It’s the series’s spirit in an image: iconography without hagiography. The show is smitten with its subjects, but in a cleareyed way, awed but not overawed. “Mrs. America” is a disco ball packed with TNT, a pop-literate political drama that’s not too cool to be optimistic, not too triumphalist to lay down a challenge to its country today.

You’ve come a long way, baby, it tells America, but not always in a straight line, and not necessarily forward.