Arts & Events

The title of Mary Dore's spirited fem-doc throws a nice jab at a bit of chauvinistic jiu-jitsu that still haunts the English-speaking world. Truth to tell, an angry woman is anything but beautiful. In fact, the sight of an angry woman can be terrifying. Any man who has ever hoped to defuse righteous female anger with this tone-deaf compliment deserves every facial bruise that may come his way.

Director/Producer Dore's film comes to the big screen after scoring rave reviews in the festival circuit (including the Audience Award at the Boston Independent Film Fest). The film arrives at a critical time in America, when many of the rights won by women's struggles since the 1960s are either being threatened or reversed by neocon governors and the insurgent extremists in the Halls of Congress.

She's Beautiful focuses on the birth and development of the women's movement between 1966 and 1971 and tells its stories through a feast of interviews with more than 30 members of the long (and still continuing) campaign. Among those interviewed: Fran Beal, Heather Booth, Rita Mae Brown, Susan Brownmiller, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Muriel Fox, Jo Freeman, Kate Millet, Eleanor Holmes Norton, Trina Robbins and three Berkeley luminaries, Alta, Susan Griffin and Ruth Rosen. 

The trove of archival footage includes Eisenhower-era print and TV ads (designed to infantilize and marginalize women) and an early feminist panel hosted by (gasp!) Norman Mailer. The film documents a shocking-in-retrospect segregation of labor. This was an age when a newspaper's Help Wanted ads were separated by gender. Hard to believe, but in the 1960s, newpapers ran separate-but-unequal employment sections—one for "men" and one for "women." The executive jobs were all for men. The jobs offered to women were all "secretarial" or "clerical." As one entitled advertiser wrote: "Wanted: World's Best Looking Exec Secy to Assist World's Most Charming Boss." 

Author Jo Freeman (We Will Be Heard and Berkeley in the Sixties) correctly notes that feminism "brought about a social revolution in the US. While it was painful, it had to be done." She's Beautiful is true to this message: it contains images and events that are both empowering and painful. 

The film salutes the work of feminism's Founding Mothers, including Betty Freidan's prairie-fire bestseller, The Feminine Mystique, which torpedoed generations of gender stereotyping and had millions of women reading about a previously taboo topic—institutionalized male domination. (And, 51 years later, what is today's bestseller sensation? Fifty Shades of Gray. Discuss among yourselves.) 

In the Sixties, one vet reminisces: "There was no Internet. There were mimeographs, letters and stamps. That's all we had to work with." Nonetheless, by 1966 the early feminist crusaders had succeeded in founding the National Organization of Women (NOW), a "civil rights organization for women's rights." NOW schooled women in their rights and gave them tools to reform the workplace—even if it meant suing their bosses. 

In a clip of black-and-white footage of an anti-war protest in the streets of Berkeley, a reporter asks Free Speech Movement activist Bettina Aptheker: "What is the point of your march." Without missing a step, she replies: "There are hundreds of women who want peace. And we want peace now!" 

Like the Free Speech Movement, the nascent women's lib movement drew its energy and hope from the struggles of the Civil Rights movement. Many of the women who became active in free speech and social justice issues had risked their lives to help register voters in the segregated South. In the backwoods of Mississippi, they met fearless women and witnessed the power of organized community. 

Sensitized to social injustice, they returned home only to realize that their lives were compromised by the unquestioned dictates of men. Ironically, even in Berkeley's Free Speech Movement, the women felt muzzled. It was the men who were first to grab the microphones—and the last to speak. Female FSM vets recall being ignored or told to "sit down" at meetings. Berkeley poet-author-playwright Susan Griffin recalls: "We licked the envelopes. We did the grunt work. We did the real work of organizing." 

The resistance to gender justice was, at times, unnerving. One of the most shocking archival clips comes from a massive anti-war rally called to protest the election of Richard Nixon. It was to have marked the first time a woman's organization participated publically in a major antiwar demonstration. But when Marilyn Webb walked to the microphone, thousands of male voices drowned her out. The footage shows a sea of scowling men, with their angry fists shaking in Webb's direction. Jumping to their feet in anger, the young men yell disapproval and fling the thumbs-down sign at the stage. Some of the Left-centric males even called for Webb to be driven from the stage and sexually assaulted as punishment for her effrontery! 

Webb saw women's rights as just another step up the civil rights ladder but many young men—who clearly understood the justice of liberating black voters in the South—suddenly started behaving like White Southern bigots when their female cohorts started demanding similar rights and opportunities. 

She's Beautiful packs a lot of history into its 92 minutes. Among the many topics covered by film clips and interviews are Female Liberation Centers, Abortion Rights, Lesbian Rights, the Women's International Conspiracy Theory from Hell (WITCH). Magic Quilt. Redstockings. The Mount Vernon Group. Black Sisters United. Shameless Hussy Press. It Ain't Me Babe. No More Fun and Games. The Furries: Goddesses of Vengeance. Women Unite to Reclaim the Night. The National Women's Strike. There's also some rousing footage of the Chicago Women's Liberation Rock Band performing onstage at full throttle. 

She's Beautiful includes plenty of agit-prop, including footage of daring and disruptive protests at the Miss American Pageant, Slut Walks in the streets of New York to protest the rape culture and some tasty examples of in-your-face street theatre—like the day teams of women descended on Wall Street to sexually harass the men passing by in their business suits. "Hey, beautiful! I like the way you fill out those trousers!" 

Women began talking with one another and comparing notes and the result was electrifying. As one activist recalls, "I suddenly realized, I wasn't alone." A more profound realization was that discrimination wasn't the "fault" of women as individuals; it was the fault of the existing social structure. Traditionally, there was little sympathy for women who were sexually assaulted. It was assumed the victims bore responsibility for the attacks. (Unfortunately, this mindset still holds sway in many parts of the country.) Feminists redefined rape as "The All-American Crime" and argued that it was not a forgivable "crime of passion" but an institutionally protected "political crime against women." 

Even married women started asking why their lives had to stop evolving as soon as they became mothers and housewives. "Overthrow Male Supremacy!" became the battle cry. 

Women at college campuses began demanding the administration provide day care for women students with children. Journalist and UCB professor Ruth Rosen recalls joining a public protest on the Berkeley campus where women graduates assembled to display their degree certificates (some of them, PhDs). "And we burned them." (Isn't it odd that the burning of draft cards and bras is remembered but the burning of diplomas is not?) 

Many forgotten "movement moments" are revisited. African American women recall arguing for abortion rights with men in the Black Nationalist movement who believed "abortion is genocide" and that women had a responsibility to "have babies for the revolution." In another internal dispute, Betty Friedan is shown trying to squelch the call for lesbian equality, fearing that the issue was divisive and would allow opponents to target the feminist movement as a tool of dykes. Rita Mae Brown was forced out of NOW because many feared "it was too soon" to embrace lesbians. Some found it supremely ironic that even arch-feminists could wind up treating their lesbian sisters "the same way the men treat all women." 

When the Second Congress to Unite Women rolled around, it failed to include any panels on lesbianism. Refusing to be marginalized any longer, a group calling itself The Lavender Menace infiltrated the event and cut the house lights. When the lights came back on, the audience found itself completely surrounded by lesbian activists who had left their seats in a show of numbers. They took over stage and demanded recognition. It worked. 

She's Beautiful happily spends a good deal of time reminiscing with assembled members of the Boston Women's Book Collective, which self-published the historic Our Bodies Ourselves, a radical self-help book that took an uncensored, independent look at women's health "from birth to death." The first edition sold 240,000 copies. It became a publishing sensation. 

But what do you do in a era where abortions are illegal? Chicago's abortion alternative, simply called "Jane," allowed young women to secure medical abortions—from providers known only as "Janes"—without having to deal with organized crime or risking a jail sentence. (In those days, three people discussing an abortion on the phone constituted a "conspiracy to commit felony murder.") It was illegal and risky but the underground service successfully provided more than 10,000 safe abortions for needy women. 

In 1971 Congress passed a historic Child Care Bill. This progressive piece of legislation is largely forgotten because Nixon vetoed it, saying: "We don't want our women to be like Soviet women." Instead, Nixon encouraged the forced sterilization of poor and minority women. (In Puerto Rico, Washington went on to quietly sterilize one-third of the island's women.) 

The early birth control debates in Congress were exclusively male procedures—until the day women in the chamber stood up to protest the lack of "informed consent" on the dangers of birth control chemicals. It seemed reasonable to protest when decisions about women's health were being made exclusively by male politicians, male scientists and male doctors. But this protest in the Halls of Congress was enough to put the Women's Lib movement on J. Edgar Hoover's enemies list. Hoover sent female agents to "inform" on the women as "a national security threat." 

On the 50^th anniversary of the Suffragette's victory in securing the Right to Vote was celebrated in cities across the US. She's Beautiful revisits the Women's March in the streets of Manhattan—a massive display of surging urgency—along with footage of simultaneous mass marches in Boston, Chicago, Washington, DC and San Francisco. The demonstrations also included the (well-planned but illegal) unfurling a banner on the Statue of Liberty. Photos of the banner—reading, "Women of the World Unite"—were flashed around the globe. 

In the film, author Susan Brownmiller (Against Our Will) remarks ruefully that the US is "a country that doesn't like to recognize any of its radical movements." She's Beautiful provides a major service by recognizing and celebrating this history. 

Feminist production note: The film was shot, edited and produced entirely by women. And it was funded by a Kickstarter campaign that raised $81,000 from 1,231 donors, most of whom were women.