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"She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry" Highlights Grassroots Feminists

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With the new Congress poised to roll back basic gains made by women over the past four decades, the documentary She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry has been released at the perfect moment. It opened at the end of 2014, and is currently being screened around the country.

The audience is introduced to a cast of players who were at the root of moving feminism forward in the United States during the years 1966 through 1971, a time director Mary Dore calls “an enormously rich period.”

Dore begins with footage of a recent Texas demonstration demanding abortion rights and an end to the forced closure of local clinics. She told me, “Texas is in the film because of its aggressive defunding of Planned Parenthood under the guise of ‘protecting women’s health.’ Stopping abortion, they shut down clinics and made sure that poor women had no access to health care.” 

Dore’s inclusion of numerous examples of engagement coming from the ranks of a new generation, both online and in the streets, makes it obvious that the struggle is far from over. As Virginia Whitehill, daughter of a suffragist, states, “You’re not allowed to retire from women’s issues.”

The women’s movement evolved from the energy of college campus activism, the civil rights movement, and agitating against the war in Vietnam. In all of these areas, women played a key role in organizing. Nevertheless, one of the strongest threads throughout the movie’s 92 minutes details women galvanizing momentum on the ground, while simultaneously being dissed by their male compatriots. Marilyn Webb, journalist and top member in Students for a Democratic Society, tells the horrific story of addressing an anti-war demonstration to announce the aspirations of women—only to be belittled by “New Left” men. She was greeted with taunts of “Take her off the stage and fuck her.” Heather Booth remembers being told by man at an SDS meeting to “sit down and shut up.” As an early New Left organizer, she questioned why there were only male leaders. She started the Women’s Radical Action Program, a female consciousness-raising group, and later set up the Jane collective, an underground network that assisted women in obtaining more than 11,000 illegal abortions from 1967 to 1973.

 
Photo Credit: Virginia Blaisdell

Fran Beal, who spearheaded the SNCC [Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee] Black Women’s Liberation Committee in 1968, noted the same pattern within her organization. It was a “contradiction,” she says wryly, that that they were not willing to accept. Among those pushing back within the Puerto Rican social justice group the Young Lords was Denise Oliver-Veleznow a professor and cultural anthropologist. Commenting on the group’s work against forced sterilization of Puerto Rican women, Oliver-Velez underscores: “We were the first ones to begin to articulate an idea of reproductive justice.”

I asked Dore how she chose her interview subjects. She told me:

“From the start, I was most interested in the early days of the women’s movement, which is less known. I’d read Sara Evans’ book Personal Politics and Alice Echols’ Daring to Be Bad, and they both influenced me a lot. We did a ton of research, and also pre-interviewed women around the country. It was clear that the movement spread like wildfire and that sticking to a strictly chronological structure would not work, so we organized the film more thematically. It was important that the we show that the movement was active across the United States, and that different areas gave us a deeper understanding of how people tackled certain issues.” 

Dore demonstrates the zeitgeist of the time through commercials and print ads, highlighting firmly entrenched norms. The film acknowledges that there were women opposed to the movement, ostensibly satisfied with the status quo. Yet, with help-wanted ads segregated by gender and clubs and facilities featuring “No Ladies Allowed” signs, most women were ready for a seismic shift. As women started to talk and connect, they realized that their experiences weren’t isolated. Rather, as Jacqui Ceballos, former president of the New York chapter of NOW, points out, “It was society.” The powerful statement “The personal is political” offered a new way of understanding individual experiences. When Susan Brownmiller, author of Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape, disclosed the fact that she had had three abortions, she learned she wasn’t alone. “Problems that you felt were happening to you alone, probably were your fault,” she says. “If it’s happening to other people, then it’s a social problem and not just a personal problem.”

Women reacted to different catalysts. For Muriel Fox, a cofounder of NOW, the “impetus was employment discrimination.” She emphasizes, “We knew we were making history.” Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, historian and author of An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, viewed the struggle through the prism of class, reflecting insights from her upbringing in a family of Oklahoma sharecroppers.

Lawyer and reproductive rights activist Alice Wolfson recounts, “We didn’t want a piece of the pie. We wanted to change the pie. We were talking about changing the whole paradigm of how men and women interact.”

The demonstration at the 1968 Miss America pageant offered a new level of media visibility for the movement. Viewed as the perfect venue to protest sexist and racist standards, the event featured the mantra “All women are beautiful.” In a choice bit of political theater, a banner proclaiming “Women’s Liberation” was unfurled at the same moment that Miss America was crowned.

Dore does not retreat from exploring the fact that despite efforts to be nonhierarchical, there were fissures within the growing movement. Beal asks rhetorically, asks rhetorically, “How do you integrate race, class, and gender?” Longtime feminist and anti-racism activist Linda Burnham points out white women’s lack of understanding of what was going on in communities of color. “When the voice of one is used as the voice of all,” she says, “then you have a problem.” The divisions weren’t just between women of color and white women—lesbians found themselves rejected and sidelined. Karla Jay, author and professor of English and women’s and gender studies at Pace University, experienced the 1960s as a time when lesbians grew up in “silence and isolation and shame.”

Rita Mae Brown, author of the groundbreaking novel Rubyfruit Jungle, was not accepting that trajectory. A member of NOW, she was very vocal—with numerous objections, especially about the treatment of lesbians. Brown asked, “Why are we reviled by what should be our own people?” Betty Friedan didn’t want what she termed the “Lavender Menace” on board. With this point of view taking precedence, Brown was thrown out of NOW. Eventually, a lesbian feminist manifesto was issued, demanding recognition of their concerns.

She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry shows how specific issues had the greatest mobilizing effect. Many believed child care was, in the words of historian Ruth Rosen, “the absolute precondition for women’s emancipation.” In 1971, Congress passed a child care bill—which President Nixon promptly vetoed. Eleanor Holmes Norton, twelve-term Congresswoman for the District of Columbia, calls it “a tragic moment in history.” Health and safety were front and center. Rape was reexamined—and redefined from a crime of passion to a violent act emanating from the “urge to dominate.” In Boston, self-defense classes and women’s patrols sprung up.

Birth control and abortion were illegal, and the fear of unplanned pregnancy was real. “Sex was supposed to be okay now,” recalls journalist Ellen Willis. “But if we were pregnant, it was our problem.” The Boston Women’s Health Book Collective educated a generation with Our Bodies, Ourselves. Although women originally welcomed the protection of the birth control pill, it came with a slew of side effects. At a Senate hearing, with all male panelists from the medical and drug fields testifying, women successfully pushed for the FDA to require warning labels and informed consent.

During these dynamic years, women initiated a multipronged approach. Poetry and skits were performed in San Francisco; presses cranked out information and manifestos (in 1969, only 6 percent of books published in the United States were by women); the first “Ogle-In”—where women sexually harassed men on Wall Street—was held. On August 26, 1970, a women’s strike was organized. One slogan was “Don’t iron while the strike is hot!” More than 50,000 women marched in New York City, with double that number nationally.

In this singular film, Dore captures the essence and fervor of a major American social movement. It’s exhilarating to watch unsung women, in both their youth and maturity, bear testament to their struggle to challenge patriarchy. They hoped for nothing less than to change the world.


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