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One of the year’s best films, Mary Dore’s She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry is an urgent, illuminating dive into the headwaters of second-wave feminism, the movement that — no matter what its detractors insist — has given us the world in which we live.
“We live in a country that doesn’t like to credit any of its radical movements,” Susan Brownmiller says in the film. “They don’t like to admit in the United States that change happens because radicals force it.” A score of those who dared force it turn up for fresh interviews in Dore’s wide-ranging film: Here’s Rita Mae Brown, Ellen Willis, Fran Beal, Judith Arcana, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz and many more, dishing truth and priceless anecdotes about what it felt like to change the world — and how tough it was to do so. Dore is generous with fiery archival footage — marches, chants, meetings, gobsmackingly sexist news reports — as she traces the development of the National Organization for Women and its many sister groups, culminating in 1970’s Women’s Strike for Equality.
The doc is wise, moving, upsetting and sometimes funny. Witness the “Stare at Your Own Damn Tits” T-shirt, or the ogle-in that Karla Jay arranged on Wall Street, where feminists leered at suited dudes after a newspaper article described brokers lying in wait each afternoon to grope and hiss at one buxom office worker.
Dore opens with the movement’s birth — with Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique in ’64 and the formation of NOW in ’66 — and then, just a few years later, its splintering from the New Left. At a protest targeting Nixon’s election, Marilyn Webb took the stage to speak out about women’s issues ignored by the civil-rights and anti-war movements — and about the shoddy treatment to which women were subjected within organizations like Students for a Democratic Society. Webb says in the film that she expected the women’s movement to be viewed as the third leg of the New Left, a natural outgrowth of existing activism. Instead, it was attacked. As she and the late Willis describe it, the mostly male crowd responded with catcalls and threats: “Fuck her down a dark alley!”
Dark alleys, of course, became a rallying point for feminists and their earliest organizations. Besides the commonsensical equal-treatment platforms, they pushed for still-controversial reproductive freedoms, most pressingly the right to never again have to seek abortions from backstreet doctors. She’s Beautiful lays out the pro-choice case with a clarity that’s been lost in America. “We were always being subjected to a double message,” Willis says. “Sex was supposed to be okay now, but if we were pregnant, it was our problem.” Thousands of women died each year from illegal abortions; as the ’60s bled into the ’70s, the movement rallied around this. But as Dore is always quick to point out, that movement was never monolithic. Fran Beal recalls arguing a pro-choice message to supporters of the Black Liberation Army, whose doctrine demanded that women have babies to support the revolution — and that birth control was a white plot to perpetrate black genocide. Rita Mae Brown, meanwhile, kept clashing with NOW over its failure to address the experiences of all women. She says, with exuberant relish, “I called them on the carpet about class, I called them on the carpet about race, and I called them on the carpet about lesbianism. I said, ‘You are treating women the same way men treat you.’ ”
The film builds to an epochal moment that is not as widely remembered as it should be: the August 1970 Women’s Strike for Equality, organized by Friedan and NOW, that set thousands of women marching down Fifth Avenue on the fiftieth anniversary of the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment.
That defiant sisterhood changed the workplace, our sexual politics, our language. She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry is the best filmed account of how that happened that you could ever expect to see.
She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry
Directed by Mary Dore.
