‘She’s Beautiful’ charts gender battle
Once upon a time, help wanted ads were divided into jobs for women and men.
This notice appeared under Help Wanted Female: “Wanted world’s best looking exec. sec’y to assist world’s most charming boss.” No, that did not come from Don Draper.
That reality — one where women typically were ogled, pigeonholed, underpaid, hobbled by a lack of child care and couldn’t even see the glass ceiling let alone dream of shattering it — is what fed the fire of the women’s movement from 1966 to 1971.
“She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry,” a 92-minute documentary, examines those early years when women were armed with mimeograph machines, stamps, grass-roots meetings and their voices.
Concentrating on organizers in San Francisco, Chicago, Boston and Washington, D.C., it follows the worker bees and the spurs (African-American women, lesbians labeled “the lavender menace,” the Jane Collective assisting women seeking abortions, the college course that evolved into the “Our Bodies, Our Selves” book), which split off. That results in a scattershot feel but admittedly the subject is vast.
In 2013, PBS aired a threepart documentary, “Makers: Women Who Make America,” examining the roles women played in shaping America in the past 50 years. This seems a more rough and tumble collection of interviews, all shot by women for the documentary also directed, produced and edited by women.
It’s a blend of then-and-now insights along with priceless vintage photos and footage, as with the bar that advertised “Ladies Invited After 3 p.m.,” the Capitol Hill hearings about birth control pills that included no women, or the grads who literally burned their master’s and doctorate degrees after realizing just how little they knew about women’s history.
As with the civil rights movement, for instance, no one book or film or mini-series can paint the definitive picture of a time, place and people. “She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry” (the title is from a 1960s feminist street theater performance) is just one piece of an everevolving mosaic proving we’ve come a long way, baby, but have yet to reach the finish line.
Opens today at the Regent Square Theater.