By Laurie Baron
SAN DIEGO — Even more so than the Civil Rights movement, second-generation feminism changed the cultural, economic, political, and social dynamics of American life. Despite the persistence of sexism, we are more aware today about how it can be eliminated or reinforced in child rearing, government, health care, language, the mass media, personal relations, and the workplace than we were before the 1960s.
She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry, directed by Mary Dore, documents the evolution of the women’s movement between 1966 until 1971, but it also goes outside these chronological parameters back to the suffragette movement and forward to present efforts to fight the curtailment of the right to an abortion. It consists of compelling interviews with many of the movement’s founders intercut with stereotypical advertising images of women from the period, news coverage of the emerging phenomenon, and readings from feminist classics.
The sheer scope of the issues feminists raised and continue to address is stunning. Starting with Betty Friedan’s clarion call to emancipate women from being channeled into marriage and motherhood or predominantly female vocations, the movement challenged the sexual objectification of women in advertising, beauty contests, cinema, journalism, music, and television. It demanded access to abortions, birth control, and information about other women’s health matters and drew attention to sexual harassment and the injustice of unequal pay for the same work. Its members highlighted the gender bias in vocabulary and promoted arts and literature created from a women’s perspective. It eventually splintered along the lines of class, race, or sexual orientation.
As each of these facets of the movement is revealed, the audience realizes how skillfully edited this film is to have compressed this diverse history into ninety minutes and how much of it had to be omitted in the process. I did some internet research on the women who appeared in the film and determined that over half of them are Jewish, though this is never mentioned in it. Many of them became feminists partly as a rebellion against Jewish patriarchalism, but others have credited their commitment to social justice and ending prejudice to their Jewish backgrounds. For example, Susan Brownmiller has recalled:
“Somewhere in Against Our Will, my book on rape (1975), I mention quietly that I am Jewish from Brooklyn, but I have never stressed my Jewish heritage in my writing. Yet the heritage is still with me, and I can argue that my chosen path – to fight against physical harm, specifically the terror of violence against women – had its origins in what I had learned in Hebrew School about the pogroms and the Holocaust.”
Indeed, the movie only has one scene which touches on organized religion as a repressive force that women have attempted to reform. It shows a woman minister invoking a feminist version of the trinity. Yet the past fifty years have witnessed the ordination of women as ministers and rabbis in various Christian and Jewish denominations and the introduction of gender neutral language into their liturgies. Given that religious texts often provide the justification for opposition to abortion, contraception, gender roles, and same-sex marriage, feminist battles on the religious front deserved more than a passing reference.
Nevertheless, within its time constraints, She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry does an impressive job of conveying the diversity, significance, and the vitality of the women’s movement not just for those who championed it at its genesis, but also for the subsequent generations of men and women who take many of its accomplishments for granted and still find themselves confronting those who would undo its achievements. As one of the women in the film puts it, “You’re not allowed to retire from women’s issues.”
Baron is a professor emeritus of history at San Diego State University. He may be contacted at lawrence.baron@sdjewishworld.com