Written by: Madelena Caron
Artwork by: Yanis Caillaud
Some American Feminists (1980), a documentary filmed in New York City in 1976 and ’77, is a window into second-wave radical feminism, and it can provide us with the reawakening we need to take on the issues of today (which seem to be, more often than not, the same issues as yesterday). The film was directed by three Canadian women, Luce Guilbeault, Nicole Brossard, and Margaret Wescott, but was only released in the U.S. in 1980, due to difficulty finding an American distributor—Women Make Movies agreed to distribute the film.
Some American Feminists incorporates historical footage, combined with that of anonymous women on the streets of New York, and interviews with six iconic feminists. Rita Mae Brown, Betty Friedan (The Feminine Mystique), Margo Jefferson, Lila Karp, Kate Millett (Sexual Politics), and Ti-Grace Atkinson (Amazon Odyssey) were integral to second-wave feminism, and the interviews included in the film delve into what drew them to feminism, the written works that put into words their innermost convictions about the world, successes of and challenges for the movement, the schisms that appeared within the women’s liberation movement (radical feminism, lesbian feminism, etc.), the desire to move towards a more intersectional feminism, and much more. Each woman speaks with such conviction and specificity about what she finds to be the most potent issues. By no means do they all agree, but perhaps that is the point—together, their comments and musings form a constellation of feminist concerns, a portrait of feminist movement of the time.
“We have suffered some setbacks in the U.S.—some setbacks in this business of the ERA, the Equal Rights Amendment—and then the women’s movement has become so large that its very success has mounted a reactionary wave against it. The reactionary forces of the church, the Catholic church, and of the reactionary profiteers that have exploited women, especially companies like the insurance companies, and even reactionary political forces, which have manipulated women in their timidities, in their fears, in their passivity—women were the largest group of people that could be easily manipulated...These reactionary forces see suddenly the threat to themselves in women acquiring their own independence and not being so easily manipulated.” - Betty Friedan
“We began to grow up, literally, get a little more mature, have distance from these issues, and I think the movement began to see that women can’t afford to maintain distinctions men have created. Lesbianism is a distinction that men made, not us, and if we maintain those distinctions, be it lesbianism or race or class background, we are going to create a warped version of the very society we seek to change. So we’ve got to make common cause, and if anything, we have to embrace difference, not run away from it.” - Rita Mae Brown
“As I say, figuring out a theory that will embrace the paradox of fighting sexism, fighting the sexism of a group of people who are fighting racial and economic oppression from another group —it’s a very interesting pyramid. It is Black women being oppressed by white women, Black men, and white men—that is a situation that only nonwhite, if you will (Black, Latin, so forth, Chinese women) find themselves in. It is the kind of complexity that the white feminist movement has not yet, in any way, attempted to deal with.” - Margo Jefferson
“It’s how many days and moments you’ve been immersed in a really unfriendly, unfamiliar, destructive set of psychic forces, of attitudes about yourself. And if it were just a matter of changing discrimination or something, we could write up a whole series of laws and paste them all over, and that would be it. But with women, just as with any oppressed group, the thing gets interiorized and it rots our souls, too, so that we really have a cause to say, “look, we really have not only been discriminated against, and treated unfairly, and so on, but seriously aggrieved and destroyed, in a sense.” And we have to fight back for all the inches of our souls that have been eroded by this.” - Kate Millett
“It’s a cliche of course, now, in most places when you first get together with women—you always thought you were the only woman in the world who always met nothing but jerks, right? People would say, “oh, you have a way of always finding the guy who’s the jerk in the crowd,” right? And you’re alone, so you never tell anybody about it, because obviously you have terrible taste. And then you meet all these other women who also met all the jerks in the world, and you put all those jerks together, and you realize that men are a problem. So, taking that position, I didn’t see how you could say men are the enemy and walk around with them. It was really quite simple.”- Ti-Grace Atkinson
“All of the sexism, the dominance-submission patterns that are so deeply, deeply rooted in our every gesture, in our every act, the way we eat, the way we talk, in everything—I began to become, it was like watching a movie, I would be sitting and watching this show, and whereas I normally could have just gone on, I found that, to put it simply, it was boring. I was bored with the old patterns, bored with the old games, so that existentially, what I found was that without saying to myself, “I think I’ll have no more male friends”—because I certainly did not make such a decision—more and more of my life, my engaged, everyday living, had to do with women.”- Lila Karp
In hindsight, the women’s liberation movement changed American society in deeply meaningful ways, and yet its reach seems not to have been extensive or pervasive enough. Women’s rights to abortion and to bodily autonomy may be brought up for debate yet again, in light of Judge Amy Coney Barrett’s likely supreme court appointment, sex trafficking and assault victims are still overwhelmingly female, and women still, on average, shoulder the majority of housework and childcare in our country, in addition to having jobs and careers of their own. There are endless examples of the grasp that patriarchy—one system of oppression out of a matrix of oppression—maintains over women’s lives. In these discouraging times, a return to radical feminist thought and practice couldn’t come soon enough. We need a fourth- wave or fifth-wave of feminism as widespread and ideological, with leaders and spokeswomen as illuminating and demanding, as the second-wave.
Even for those of us who were not alive in the '70s and ‘80s, the film holds a certain resonance—we can hear our own convictions echoed in the words of these radical feminists. Some American Feminists reminds us of the unresolved issues we must still, over forty years later, organize to resolve. We are up to the challenge—we need only get in touch with our radical feminist sisters, our forebears and teachers, to remember what we can do.
dir. Luce Guilbeault, Nicole Brossard, and Margaret Wescott
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