Patricia Clarkson, who portrays late equal pay activist Lilly Ledbetter in a biopic released this week, has a wish.
The Oscar-nominated actor hopes her fellow American women collectively withhold sex from their partners – especially men in power – if the second Trump administration’s assault on diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives ever takes aim at the gains won by the subject of her new film.
“Do not go after this – do not because there will be a Lysistrata moment,” she told the Guardian in an interview recently, alluding to the ancient Greek comedy about women resolving to abstain from sex to compel the men in their nation to stop warring and sign a peace treaty. “We will put chastity belts back on.”
Clarkson is only the latest in a long lineage to float the idea of a sex strike as a protest tactic. Nonetheless, what sets the Easy A and Sharp Objects star’s admonition and potential call to action apart is that it comes as her starring turn in Lilly coincides with the first months of a second Donald Trump presidency marked in large part by the rollback of policies meant to widen the professional opportunities of historically underrepresented groups.
Directed by Rachel Feldman, Lilly dramatizes the struggles endured by a working-class mother from Alabama who began working at the tire manufacturer Goodyear in 1979 before becoming its only female supervisor and eventually realizing she was paid substantially less than her male colleagues, including much less experienced ones.
She sued and at one point had been awarded nearly $4m in damages and backpay. But, in 2007, the US supreme court ruled that she had waited too long to sue, preventing her from ever collecting her award.
Ultimately, with lobbying from Ledbetter and supporters that she picked up while pursuing her lawsuit, Congress enacted legislation early in Barack Obama’s presidency that afforded workers greater latitude to sue their employers over unequal and discriminatory pay.
Clarkson said she did not get to meet Ledbetter before her death at age 86 in October. So Clarkson said she drew inspiration for her portrayal of the resolute Ledbetter in large part from her mother, Jacquelyn “Jackie” Brechtel Clarkson, who served several terms as a Democratic member of New Orleans’s city council and Louisiana’s state legislature during a political career regarded as legendary in their home town.
She marveled at how her mother, who died at age 88 about four months before Ledbetter, never compromised raising five daughters – “all working women” – while facing down countless intense political battles.
“They had similar DNA in ways that came to me as I was doing these scenes,” Clarkson said.
To say the least, the political climate depicted in Lilly through Clarkson’s acting as well as through archival footage of prominent liberal American political figures who philosophically aligned themselves with her has changed seismically.
In between Trump presidencies, the US supreme court eliminated the federal abortion rights established by Roe v Wade, a staggering blow to women’s reproductive rights.
Trump has then spent his second presidency pushing his government to withhold funds from institutions which adhere to DEI practices that took hold nationally after the Minneapolis police’s murder of George Floyd in 2020.
Less than two weeks before Lilly’s theatrical release, Trump’s defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, announced his intent to eliminate a program meant to promote women’s contributions and safety in global conflict zones. The announcement raised eyebrows given that it was implemented during Trump’s first presidency and had drawn a ringing endorsement from his daughter, Ivanka.
Clarkson made it a point to deliver an impassioned defense of DEI measures in general, urging Americans to stay informed about the topic despite the other fights being stoked by Trump’s second presidency.
“When we work with people of every race, creed, color, sexual preference – that’s the best part of this world we live in,” Clarkson said. “I refuse to live in the world” demonizing that concept.
Speaking to the Guardian after accepting the New Orleans Film Society’s Celluloid Hero Award and hosting a local screening of Lilly in early April, Clarkson said she honestly could not envision the Trump administration turning its crosshairs on the equal pay progress that has become synonymous with Ledbetter.
“Equal pay is not – it’s not a political issue,” Clarkson said. “It’s a human rights issue.
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“Wherever you live across this great country, whether you are Black or white or brown or young or old or whatever you are, Republican or Democrat – when women make equal pay, everybody wins.”
Yet the New York City resident also fears nothing is truly off the table during a second Trump presidency that has already shattered political norms many could not imagine being vulnerable. And if the administration dares to test something as drastic as re-implementing a system where pay is based on gender, she said she hoped the public mounts commensurate resistance – from Ivanka herself trying to talk some sense into her father to a women’s sex strike if necessary.
“How is it cool for anyone to want their spouse, the love of their life, to be paid less, and you’re still going to ask for sex?” said Clarkson, who once attained digital virality with an appearance in the music video to the Lonely Island song Mother Lover, an irreverent ballad of sorts to desirable moms. “I say, ‘Honey, there must be another bedroom I’m sleeping in.’”
Clarkson was quick to point out that she has faith in the willingness of men to step up in the event that Ledbetter’s achievements are ever directly threatened. By way of evidence, Clarkson said she was glad Lilly spent a decent amount of its 93-minute run time exploring how Ledbetter’s husband of 52 years, Charles, steadily supported her professional goals and activism despite the backlash they generated for the couple and their two children.
The decorated US army veteran, played by John Benjamin Hickey, never sought to persuade her to settle for less than she believed that she deserved in hopes of easing some of the pressure. He instead remained in her corner until his death at 73 in 2008, a little more than a month before the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act for which his beloved battled so hard became the first piece of legislation Obama signed as president.
Clarkson said Charles Ledbetter’s unquestioning devotion to Lilly reminded her of the love the actor’s mother shared with her father, Arthur Alexander “Buzz” Clarkson Jr, a former medical school administrator to whom Jackie was married for more than 70 years.
“My father wanted my mother to run this city,” Clarkson said while seated in the living room of an 18th-floor suite in downtown New Orleans’s Windsor Court hotel. “My father wanted my mother to make this city better.
“Lilly’s husband wanted her to succeed. Charles … got caught up in her journey in realizing what she was sacrificing and the injustice of not being paid” adequately for the time she dedicated to making ends meet for her family.
Clarkson has previously said that she chose to be unmarried and not have children. But she said she admired how her father and Charles Ledbetter were “kick-ass husbands that loved every single moment of their [wives’] lives”. And it positioned the women whom each of those men loved to thrive in the face of political adversity, providing an example Clarkson said she hopes more American spouses – especially husbands – emulate.
As Clarkson put it: “These remarkable men stood by these women. And they wanted them.”
