Ladies of first, series of third

In one of the best episodes of

, the 2020 series that tackled the history of the movement to ratify the Women's Equality Amendment and the reactionary opposition it provoked, the character played by Sarah Paulson, a young housewife from the conservative hosts, live your

a particular night during the National Women's Conference held in 1977 in Houston.

Alice, that's her name, ends her feminist immersion in a corner where a group of lesbian women are singing

.

There, uninhibited thanks to the effect of drugs, she ends up stealing the limelight from the others and finishes off the end of Woody Guthrie's anthem as a soloist.

At the end, she has a brief dialogue with a participant who tells her that Guthrie was a socialist.

She laughs incredulously and her interlocutor insists: "You've been there in the middle singing a Marxist song."

Alice corrects: "She's patriotic."

“Exactly”, concludes her new friend.

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From Jackie Kennedy to Melania Trump, the first ladies of the United States who have made history

This Land Is Your Land

, in the version recorded in 2004 by Sharon Jones with her usual band, the Dap Kings, is the theme song for

(Movistar Plus+), the series written by Aaron Cooley and directed by Susanne Bier that narrates and tries to relate the lives of three North American first ladies: Eleanor Roosevelt, Betty Ford and Michelle Obama, played by Gillian Anderson, Michelle Pfeiffer and Viola Davis respectively .

Sharon Jones, then an anonymous singer, had to combine her musical vocation with jobs as a prison officer and security guard.

In the 1990s, a Sony executive had told her that she was too black, too fat, too short, and too old — she was in her 40s — to make music.

Her version of Guthrie's song included all the verses, even those removed by the author himself to soften the social claims of the subject,

How to combine the disinherited of the promised land of America with the story of three of the most important women in the country and that span the key decades of the struggle for civil rights in the United States?

How did the intimacy of three presidents with their respective wives influence American political life?

's intentions

are as ambitious as decaf is her end result.

What do three women born in radically different times and environments have in common and who initially only share having married presidents of the United States?

To begin with, and according to Cathy Schulman, executive producer of the series, none of the three wanted to be there.

To understand it well, it is worth breaking them down individually.

As the niece of Theodore Roosevelt, Eleanor Roosevelt was already related to America's elites from birth.

She received an education that could still be considered privileged even for a young woman today, a passport to her independence unthinkable even for upper-class women of her day.

A woman more prepared to act as president than to marry one.

The conflict of the wife of Franklin D. Roosevelt is also inappropriate for her time: "You are the husband of a woman with a mind and a life of her own," she snaps from the trailer for the series to her husband, played by a Kiefer Sutherland to whom the savior of democracy in

works better than those of the politician who promoted the greatest reform in the history of the United States.

A woman who had to play her role as first lady for more years than any other because of the exceptional four terms that her husband enjoyed.

Viola Davis as Michelle Obama in 'The First Lady'.

In the video, trailer in English of the series.

That feminine audacity and ambition contrast with her tendency to depression and underestimate herself, a character well captured in

, the first series that portrays in depth the sentimental relationship she had with the journalist Lorena Hickcock, played by an always solvent Lily Rabe.

The series attempts to fill in the gaps left by the remarkable correspondence between the two lovers and fantasizes almost naively about Roosevelt's approval of the

of his wife.

It matters little on this occasion how the president and his wife settled the limits of their relationship when we find ourselves before a tandem that changed the history of the West.

Let us not forget her role in World War II shortly after which her husband died and that Eleanor, in addition to being a defender of the rights of women and blacks, was the main promoter of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights Humans in 1948.

If Eleanor Roosevelt went down in history despite her weaknesses, Betty Ford did so thanks to hers.

A stupendous Michelle Pfeiffer, whom we see on screen less than we should, embodies in detail the unexpected first lady who never expected to be, the most elaborate character with the most edges in the entire series.

Betty Ford turned her mastectomy into a public conversation about the contempt for women's health and, already outside the White House, her addictions to alcohol and painkillers, in the most famous rehabilitation clinic for dependents in the world, the one that bears the name of she.

During the two and a half years that she served as first lady, she defended the Equal Rights Amendment, a central issue of the aforementioned

, in one of its main causes, as well as the right to abortion.

And all this from the Republican party, which until the arrival of Reagan lived oblivious to a social regression linked to certain religious groups from which it has not been able to separate since.

Michelle Obama loses out in this equation, in which her character almost seems like a parody of herself.

Not only because we have her figure more recent, which is detrimental when it comes to fictionalizing her —Viola Davis has also assured that creative licenses have been taken to interpret her—, but also because, despite the fact that there is still much pending in terms of equality, compared to the other two, one could almost say that he arrived at the White House with a set table.

Her commendable work for healthy eating in the United States seems even less when compared to the fight for equality of sex and race, despite the fact that we understand that Barack Obama's defense of equal marriage and

arise within the family.

The portrait of the immediate consequences between private life and public life may be one of the weak points of the series.

Something that may be true is not necessarily plausible, in the same way that honoring deserving women does not necessarily lead to compelling hero's journeys.

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