‘Mrs. America’ Writer Tanya Barfield On Why The Depiction of Shirley’s Marriage is Revolutionary

Awards Daily chats with Tanya Barfield, 2020 Outstanding Writing for a Limited Series, Movie or Dramatic Special nominee, about her Mrs. America episode, “Shirley.”

One of the things FX on Hulu’s Mrs. America truly excels at is its inclusivity. Instead of whitewashing feminist history and only portraying one point of view, it represents many sides of the movement, including LGBTQ rights and Black women.

That was something that Emmy-nominated writer Tanya Barfield really appreciated in the writers’ room on the series, that this diversity was also represented behind the scenes with many voices hashing out how to portray these real-life women on screen.

Shirley Chisholm (played by Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Limited Series or Movie nominee Uzo Aduba) was the first Black woman to run for president, and the Mrs. America episode devoted to her titled “Shirley” (written by Barfield) feels especially relevant with Kamala Harris becoming the first Black woman to be on a major party ticket for Vice President.

I had the opportunity to speak with Barfield about the research and care that went into this episode, how the structure of the episode mimics history, and what Shirley would have thought of this Biden/Harris ticket.

Awards Daily: Congratulations on your first Emmy nomination! What was it like finding out you were nominated? 

Tanya Barfield: Oh my goodness. It was amazing. But I must admit, I went into a strange shock, because I had been trying to stream the Emmys because I was really hoping the show would be nominated. I’m not the most technologically profound, so I was trying to get the stream, and then my phone starting blowing up—“Congratulations!” I was like, “Great! The show is doing so well.” But some of the congratulations were from some of the other writers on the show. I was like, “Wait a minute. . .” They told me I was nominated for “Shirley” and I was so happy.

AD: Your background is in playwriting. How different is it to write for TV and where did your background help you in the creative process?

TB: TV is of course so different from playwriting, because in many ways playwriting’s structure is like film—a three-act structure. But of course playwriting relies heavily on dialogue, and so does television. So that was a big help. In playwriting, we go deep into character, and TV has the benefit of being able to do that even more so, because they’re arcing things out over an entire season and in some shows multiple seasons. What I love about television is that you get to unpeel the layers of characters very slowly and each episode can reveal new things. Now that TV is structured with growth of character, in a way when I was growing up it wasn’t, you can go deeper into character and they can change over the course of a season and over the course of a series. That can be very satisfying, both as a writer but also as a viewer. Something I enjoyed about Mrs. America is that the episodes are episodic, in terms of how we focus on one character in each episode, but if you look at the piece as a whole, the characters really do change and grow and evolve. There’s an incredible difference between where they start in the first three episodes and where they end up.

AD: Your episode “Shirley” is bookended with a beginning and ending based around Phyllis Schlafly, not Shirley Chisholm. Was that on purpose, to show how black women were marginalized in conversations about feminism?

TB: Exactly. One of the things that I think is a great success of this series is that we really get into the way Black women experienced the feminist movement very differently than white women did. At the time, in the early ’70s, there were more Black feminists than there were white feminists. Since there have been periods where people thought white women were the true feminists and they dragged Black women along, but in fact that wasn’t the case at all. Because of the different challenges that Black women and white women faced, the way we responded to a feminist push can be really different.

One of the things I love about this series is that we get really into intersectionality in a way I haven’t seen on TV before. We don’t shy away from the intense debate within that and the struggle and the moments of unity and the moments of discord. I think that we in the show are having a real dialogue with those questions. In the writers’ room, we did as well. We really struggled with, how are we going to tackle this? Sometimes we had differences of opinions and sometimes we had hard conversations, because it was a very diverse writers’ room. It was ultimately very rewarding because there were times when we were just banging our heads against the wall—how are we going to do this if we don’t want to talk about it with each other at times? And we kept going, and I credit Dahvi Waller, the showrunner and creator, with not shying away from that at all. She really was willing to work outside of her comfort zone with these issues and embrace making this show delve into Black feminists with as much depth as it has. It wasn’t a show designed to be that, but the more research we did as a crew and the more research she did, she felt she had to do that. I was so happy, I thought, “Finally! I get to say everything I want to say without having to make it small to fit into a whitewashed vision.” That wasn’t at all the case.

AD: I loved all of the perspectives of women on the series. You guys did a wonderful job. How much research did you do for writing this episode? I feel like you could have done an entire limited series on Shirley alone. Or on a lot of the women in this series for that matter.

TB: Oh my goodness—I did so much research on Shirley! All the writers, we did so much research on our individual feminists that we were in charge for our episode. I felt like I was going to grad school in second-wave feminism with a major in Shirley Chisholm. (Laughs) It was amazing. We’d be in the writers’ room from 10 to 6 and then we’d go home and I think I must have done three to four hours of research every single night and on weekends, because it felt like we really wanted to get it right. There’s so much that never made it into the show of course because of the limits of the show. As you said, we could have done a whole series on Shirley. But I’m particularly proud of some of those lesser-known details that we found. When I found the stuff about the investigation that’s highlighted in Episode 4, or when we found the stuff about how in Episode 6, all the secretaries came to Shirley when they were dealing with their #MeToo moments. That was stuff we uncovered.

Brooklyn College has the Shirley Chisholm papers, and I live in Brooklyn, but the writers’ room was in Los Angeles, and I was staying in Los Angeles for the room. And at the 11th hour, I said to Dahvi, “Can I go back to the Shirley Chisholm papers? Can we afford to let me not be in the room, so I can fly back to New York, get to the papers, and find out anything we haven’t found out already about Shirley?” So I did that and it was also very illuminating.

AD: What was in the papers?

TB: I felt like what I found was more about her personality. Her vivaciousness, but also her vulnerability. There were a couple of letters that made me feel that there was a side of her that she didn’t show the world, that was just like us, human and vulnerable. It was very important to me to put some of that in so that she just wasn’t this iconic hero, but that we could see in those beautifully acted scenes with her husband Conrad, that other side of her. Interestingly, the FBI file section Shirley is missing. So I opened up that section—even though I’m a conspiracy theorist, I’m sure it’s just a coincidence, but I opened up the FBI section, and it said, “This file has been removed.”

AD: Wow.

TB: So I was like, yeah, I feel pretty good about including some of that phone-tapping in here. I did see some pictures of her with Bobby, the Black Panthers’ leader, and that was really powerful, to even see the photos.

AD: That’s so cool. What is it like writing for someone who was a real person? Did you feel a pressure with getting the rhetoric right, how she would speak and talk?

TB: I read a biography about her and then an autobiography she wrote. There is a documentary on her that shows her campaign and you get a sense of her cadences. Of course, in the speech, it’s a formal way of speaking, but she’s from Barbados originally. Her parents are, and then she was there from ages 3 to 10 and I looked up some other people and listened to their speech patterns to see if there was any overlap. There was a lot of research in that regard.

AD: That’s so interesting. Shirley’s relationship with her husband Conrad (Brandon J. Dirden) is completely different from Phyllis and Fred’s relationship. What do you think having that support at home does for Shirley compared to what not having it does for Phyllis?

TB: Shirley definitely spoke very openly about how supportive Conrad was, and you can tell by some of the things that Conrad said, how much he believed in her. I think that it was unusual in many ways to find a man that was willing to be so unconditionally supportive of his woman’s career and aspirations. I’d have to say many successful women are. When we looked at Bella, she also had a very supportive husband; and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, even though she only has one line in Mrs. America, she also had a very supportive husband. I think there is something remarkable about men of that generation who are able to do that. It was very important to me to make sure that was part of the series.

At one point Dahvi said, should we really put this stuff with Conrad in? Just in terms of dramatic storytelling? And I said, the sad part is that putting a supportive Black husband on screen—which we in the Black community all know exist in real life but has not been shown on screen enough—that’s revolutionary in its own way. Let’s show more of that, because up until now in many instances, there’s been a false mythology of Black manhood as being unsupportive of their wives and I don’t think that’s based in reality any more than any other man.

AD: We have a black woman running for Vice President right now; she could be just one step away from the presidency. What do you think Shirley would think of this?

TB: I think Shirley would be very, very happy and also have a few things to say and advice to give on that. But the thing about Shirley is that while she really worked for other people, she also was very supportive of other politicians. I think she’d be very, very supportive of Kamala Harris. Certainly, so many of us, we stand on Shirley Chisholm’s shoulders.

All episodes of Mrs. America are streaming on FX on Hulu.