Summary
“All your life, you know, people would say ‘be a good girl’. Well… that implies that you are not”, claims Jane Fonda in “Feminists: What were they thinking?”, a Netflix documentary that first arrived on the platform in 2018 to discuss the contribution of art to the feminist movement and to understand how art changed through time and under the influence of social and cultural changes. The film, directed by Johanna Demetrakas, contains interviews of women of different ages and backgrounds, all from a distinct art field. Those interviews, made by the director and a team of assistants on the subject of feminism, are also connected with “Emergence”, a book that was published in 1977 by the photographer Cynthia MacAdams which contains all kinds of portraits of artist women, some of whom interviewed for this project.
The documentary starts by showing portraits from the book “Emergence”, all in black and white, of all sorts of women that pose as if they knew that they had to – and still have to – fight for who they are. We can see them looking through their own pictures from more than 40 years ago and understand that, in order to take back the power that they deserve, they need to be part of something that embraces all of them, all of us. The narrative of the documentary is pretty easy to follow, as it comes and goes from a woman to another while they share a story from the times when the picture was taken and compare it with their life today. “Forty years later, we meet some of the women again, and we look at the culture then and now”, explains Demetrakas; “but as the women look back at us, their eyes remind us that the challenge is still there”.
After making that statement, the narrative presents us the author and professor Phyllis Chesler, who enters this audiovisual project by sharing that “when I became pregnant, and I was teaching a full college load and had published two books and was finishing a third, I asked to teach at a slightly different hour because I saw when I was getting sleepy… and the dean at my university, he said to me: ‘well, look, you gotta make up your mind… do you wanna be a professor or a mother?’” The decision of presenting her through this affirmation works almost as enchantment, because as soon as that phrase is heard, every woman can automatically relate to the situation, even if they had never been pregnant, because it is something that is so internalized in women lives that is easy to picture and understand. “That was an ‘aha’ moment”, Chesler says, and we can easily agree as well, because it is in situations like that when women start seeing how different they are treated and how limited their options are compared to men.
Right after hearing Chesler’s story, the documentary continues with the artist and author Judy Chicago, who shares that when she was in college as a philosophy minor, she would just raise her hand to ask a question and the male professors wouldn’t call on her. Instead, they’d call on these guys around her; “and I’m like”- she thinks – ‘‘they are not calling on me because I’m a girl’… I knew that, but it was impossible to talk about”, Judy laments. “If I tried to raise it, people would say ‘what are you? Some kind of suffragette?’ And, of course, the image of suffragettes were these old dowdy ladies, you know, who would make all this trouble”, Judy explains. We can see later in the documentary how, after getting tired of “acting like a man” and trying to fit into a men’s world, Judy decided to start creating art from women, for women. She would later call her art a feminine art practice, to help the younger ones learn how to become professional artists without having to “disconnect from their impulses as women”, and also to find her way back to her own voice as an artist. “I was getting really pissed off by being told that I couldn’t be a woman and an artist too… I was watching the men get, like, moved along on the choo-choo train of success and everything… every single instance of moving forward”, Chicago shares when she explains why she decided to create this kind of art, while because of her experience the viewers can understand that, in humanity, being a successful professional and a woman at the same time seems to be something impossible to achieve.
Judy Chicago’s story, then, sets up the environment for the rest of the documentary, which keeps going forward while sharing some more testimonies that are shocking but internalized at the same time, with the intention of making the audience realize that what they are watching and listening is something that sounds incredible and unreasonable, but still happens everywhere. To support this last sentence, the filmmakers show women with different ethnicities, ideals, and testimonials who will, unsurprisingly, demonstrate that none of those traits matter when it comes to the minimization of a woman’s role in society. Besides this, it is easy to see that even though nowadays there are much more tools than forty years ago, and equality is not as far away as it was, there is still a long way to go before we can even think of achieving such a thing. Following this logic, we can see this idea confirmed by the end of the film, when the editing of the documentary sums up the different stories and the audience is able to understand that when someone is discriminated against as a woman, when someone is not “allowed to go to school in a country because is a woman… or when someone is shot because she has gone to school, then being a woman is a primary part of (your) identity”, as author Catharine Stimpson explains. In addition, Kate Millet’s last few words in this documentary help the viewer balance how much the feminist movement has achieved rather than keep looking at what is still undone, as she states that she tries “not to focus too much on how feminism has only moved the world a little ways”, because she sees it in the next generation already that “the men I know who were raised by single mothers are different men… the young people who don’t care what race someone is are different people… and we contributed to that”, concludes Millet.
Evaluation
When I sat down to watch this documentary for the first time, I had the intention of taking notes as it goes, like I always do, because when I write I like to quote the phrases that catch my attention right away, as I think that this is a great way to share my ideas with my reader later. However, I was unable to write anything this time, because I was completely absorbed by the stories that the different women share in the documentary.
It is out of one’s mind to think that any single woman that watches this documentary could be able to picture every narrated situation in such a perfect way and empathize with it, but that is, as I have learned, the truth. It is a fact that our society has these behaviors internalized so badly that we sometimes don’t even notice them and instead we just learn to live with them. I liked the way Jane Fonda explained it, as she remembers some of her childhood and narrates how she would climb to the top of the oak trees that were around her house: “I could see myself leading an army up the side of the hill like Joan of Arc… that was one of my images of myself”, Jane says, “always active and masculine”. “For me, being a girl, being a woman, was the end”, Jane continues, “If you wanted to live, and you wanted to have power, and you wanted to succeed… you were a boy”, and that is somehow the world I grew up in too. Right after this part in the documentary, which is said at the very beginning, I decided that I was going to take my notes on the second watch, as this was not just a homework assignment anymore, but some piece of audiovisual content that hits me very close. Jane keeps talking about how, as she grows older, that little girl that climbed trees disappears to start trying to be this ideal of a “good girl” that society will put on them, on us.
I understand that my childhood wasn’t as strict as Jane’s and those generations that are in between hers and mine, but I understand what she means, and I can see myself right there, as while growing up I also learned that power and success are things that belong to men, while women are those that should be submissive to men’s power and not even try for success. Basically, I grew up learning that this is a man’s world, and we are just living in it for their own benefit, which is repulsive in every way I can think of. Because of this, being a woman was the end for me too, just like for Jane, but now is when I am able to see the change and I would guess Jane sees it too, because she is talking in past tense, as I am doing. The truth is that, just like as seeing a little girl growing up, it is impossible for us to see the changes that feminism is making on an everyday basis, because taking care of this problem – and I bring up one of the signs that show up in the film, that says “I can’t believe I am still protesting this ?#@!” – is like growing up: you can’t see the differences from one day to another, but you can see them between long periods of time. I can see the improvements since Jane’s childhood to mine and I can also see younger generations take over the issues that mine couldn’t: now we know success and power are not only for men… even though it still takes women twice the time and effort to achieve them. As Catharine Stimpson stated at the end of the documentary, “women are raped, women are denigrated, women are marginalized. Even in this glorious country of Uncle Sam and the Statue of Liberty, there are still hard things about being a woman, and that’s why we still need a feminist movement…and must have a feminist movement”.
As Kate Millet also concludes at the end of the film, we should not put our focus on how little feminism has done for the world but see it as a Domino effect. Millet says that even in the small things, such as young people who don’t care about someone’s race at all, feminism has contributed, because it is not only a women issue, but a societal one. Following this logic, I would like to bring up the last few words Jane Fonda speaks in this documentary, because just like her “as I have gotten older, I have come back to where I started as that feisty girl who would climb to the top of the oak tree and lead armies up the hill, and knew who she was, and would stand up to anything, and never told a lie”, right before the dos and don’ts of patriarchy took her away. “That part of a lot of girls goes way subterranean, its not that it disappears”, Jane Fonda explains, “It doesn’t get lost, it goes underground…and the goal of our lives is to bring her back up” and that, for me, is the correct idea of a good girl.