Dear Readers,
In the latest entry in total waste of time, I spent an hour disabling the default AI writing features that, in the last few months, have invaded my email (Google) and the software I use to draft articles (Word). Words and whole sentences are suggested, in a reputedly “personal” style, interrupting my own train of thought. After I erase them, they remain in my mind’s eye, an afterburn, while I try to recall what it was I was attempting to write. Lately whenever I use my laptop, I feel like Griffin Dunne in After Hours, desperate to dial the number of the taxi company procured from the operator while Catherine O’Hara chirps random numbers at him.
Thank god for actual paper notebooks and other human communications that resist this helpful “optimization.” For instance, conversation, the oral/aural kind, which happens in real time and requires me to keep finding and generating and choosing words from my own overstuffed attic of personal memories and thoughts.
For further digital delousing, I try to see as much live theater and music as I can afford. In the last month or two, I took in Smith College’s production of CQ Quintana’s Scissoring (partly about scissoring, believe it or not), Verdi’s Requiem at Carnegie Hall, and Abe Koogler’s funny-kooky-emotional Deep Blue Sound (Clubbed Thumb, at the Public). All were wonderful, but most germane to LIBER was a new play by Bess Wohl called Liberation, which just finished an extended run at the Roundabout.
At the recommendation of Honor Moore, I gave the play a whirl, attending with my twenty-year-old son; we laughed and cried and even walked the three miles home instead of taking the subway so we could continue processing—I mean talking. The play, set in 1970, dramatizes second wave feminism via six women in Ohio who, strangers at the top of the show, meet once a week for several years to “rap” about their lives—otherwise known as forming a CR group. Over time, they replace the collection of myths they’ve swallowed about who they are with truths derived from their own experiences. From these sustained conversations comes self-awareness, solidarity, and confidence to act that would have been impossible without the community and the context of the movement.
Later I spoke with Alix Kates Shulman, Letty Cottin Pogrebin, Barbara Winslow, and others who caught the show and recognized parts of their own life (even literal scenes and quotes from their writing) portrayed truthfully on stage. For me, the real gift (besides the fact that ushers locked everyone’s phone in Yondr pouches) was how Bess Wohl and director Whitney White (wunderkind, it seems; watch out for her) rendered visible the very radical, life-changing feminist encounters of “ordinary” women in exotic places like Ohio.
It’s important to keep talking to feminism, not simply critiquing it as “problematic” or trafficking in its cliches. LIBER’s mission is to both contribute to feminist thought and to protect feminism’s actual history. Feminism is, in a way, women unlearning what we’re told about ourselves and claiming what we know.
Feminism is also about finding women and reclaiming their place in history. In this issue, we look at several protofeminist filmmakers such as the former ingenue Ida Lupino, who became the only female director in Hollywood in the 1950s and who deployed various feminine strategies to mask her power and keep the men from cramping her style. When the seventies ushered in a New Hollywood, Joan Micklin Silver was one of the first—and one of the very few—women to direct. Darnell Martin, the first black woman to direct a major studio movie, made I Like It Like That in 1994. All made films that pass the Bechdel Test, although the term is more accurately the Wallace Rule or just the Rule, as you shall see in our Primary Source for this issue.
Given the slow pace of change and the fact that we are amid a big backlash in women’s rights, I can’t think of a better time to watch the movies that made the grade.
Thelma and Louise, anyone?
