At a time when the pleas of so many groups pursuing equal rights are being trivialized, it’s refreshing and inspiring to see a film like Mary Dore’s She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry, a rousing documentary that chronicles the birth of the Women’s Liberation Movement in the mid-1960s, a sociopolitical movement so significant that it’s hard to believe no one before had ever made a film about it. The film features interviews with some of the key figures in the creation of NOW, the National Organization for Women, which was at the forefront of the battle women had to take on in order to gain control of their bodies and their right for birth control, among other key issues.
Dore is an award-winning producer whose work intends to encourage activism and remind viewers of the evolutionary process such movements require. She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry played the the 2014 DOC NYC festival and is being released in theaters starting December 5, with a New York premiere followed by a national rollout. We talked to Dore about the process of making the film, her thoughts on current feminists and what audiences should take from the experience.
I found the film to be quite entertaining and knowing how serious the subject matter is, it made me wonder if you were conflicted about finding the right tone for it, especially because most documentaries about important issues are so severe and serious.
Grim! (Laughs) Well, here’s the deal, it’s a serious film on a serious subject, but I wanted to convey the spirit of the women’s movement which was very complex, and so as you can tell from the title of our film, we wanted to be in your face and provocative and that’s how the women’s movement was! So yes, there’s humor, quite a bit, but that’s based on what they were doing, that’s one of the stereotypes of the movement, people think it was all grim all the time and obviously they were absolutely serious about what they were doing, but they also found the humor in it. When I read so many of these old articles there was a lot of fun in them, and a lot of anger as well, so I wanted to show both.
Yeah, it looks like they were also having a lot of fun!
It was fun, as you can see in the footage, they don’t look upset when they’re marching. It was exhilarating! Finding a movement, something that you care about is unbelievably exhilarating. Of course there was downtime and conflicts over issues, but for so many of these women this was the time of their lives, when they discovered they could fight for these issues no one was talking about, whether it was rape or birth control.
Putting together the film, did you always know this would be the path it would follow?
I started working on the film a very long time ago, it’s been five long years just to get it to this point, but I did research for decades before that. I kinda knew that I wanted to cover the early years. What these women were facing was infuriating, which isn’t the same as grim, if you know what I mean, they were angry about all these injustices, many of which they themselves had overlooked until they started talking about these issues. I knew I wanted to cover the early years, because that was the part that was the least known, that most of the people who were involved from early on had backgrounds in the civil rights movement, the antiwar movements, they were all activists. I knew that was the main focus, but as I worked in the film through all these years, the battle for reproductive rights also became important, we are living in a different world right now, but reproductive rights are still a critical issue.
Many other issues you touch in your film are still relevant as well, some haven’t changed at all…
Well, they did change and then there’s a backlash. I think it’s important to note that the women’s movement had many successes, this is a cliché and I say it all the time but when you see a man walking down the street with a baby strapped to his chest, that’s because of the women’s movement, because they demanded all these changes which also benefited men. I don’t think that any man would say he hasn't benefited from having a closer relationship to his children, similarly you look at the Supreme Court and all those other issues. Has it been 100% successful? Of course not. Our country is so far behind in terms of political representation of women. For example, we also didn’t get childcare and when you see how countries in Europe give women more time off, help with childcare that we don’t have here at all. So in many ways the movement succeeded and in many ways it’s been pushed back.
I admired how the film reminded us that all movements for equality in a way spring from one another and I liked how you pointed out the fact that the women who created the women’s movement had just been fighting for civil rights…
Civil rights was so informative for the women’s movement because actually one of the most important things that actually changed things in the movement was the beginning of consciousness raising groups where people would talk about things they’d been ashamed of before, issues like incest or rape which no one would talk about. Those issues came forward in the women’s movement and then people began to organize around them, they organized for education, better laws...and all of this came from the civil rights movement because they knew that you had to talk about race and all these issues.
We also have people like Virginia Whitehill who talks about how her mother was a suffragette.
Suffragist, nowadays we use the “ist” at the end, but it’s common to make that mistake. Virginia is an amazing person, even though we don’t show it in the film, she was an early advocate for the Roe v. Wade case which started in Texas where she lived. She’s been an admirable person her whole life. But what was shocking and true for many women of my generation is that we didn’t grow up learning any women’s history, none! I didn’t know about the suffragist movement and I feel with Americans lack of history makes it so easy for all of these things to just slip away and be forgotten. Just because these people already fought these battles, doesn’t mean we won’t have to fight them again. Look at what the civil rights movement achieved in terms of the right to vote and then look at these laws that are being thrown around right now to prevent people from voting, so you have to be vigilant on all these issues.
In terms of logistics was it easy at all to gather all your subjects for the interviews?
No (laughs), nothing in making films is ever easy. Some had been interviewed before, some had not, I had to essentially talk to them about what the vision of the film would be so I could gain their trust. We also had a very hard time raising the money for the film, so we were never able to make the film in the most efficient way because we had to jump from grant to grant, so I could film for two days and then we’d be out of money and that kind of situation, which unfortunately is not unique in the documentary world.
Did anyone suggest you shouldn’t make the film?
Oh a whole bunch of people, a lot of people when I approached them for money, many estimable and progressive funders, just had no interest. So they didn’t tell me not to make it but they showed severe disinterest which was really not hopeful as you can imagine. They felt like it had been done before or that nobody would be interested...the excuses were many, so one of the things that helped us was a Kickstarter campaign. It was a lot of work, and if anybody ever wants to do one I can run them through it, but it was so uplifting, we had over 1200 people donate to us, which made me feel like we were on the right track, if these many people were donating because they felt this story needed to be told, maybe I wasn’t crazy after all.
Nowadays that it’s easier for people to access information, do you think that the old excuse of “cluelessness” or not “knowing better” when it comes to social issues is still valid?
It’s frustrating because a lot of people make many idiotic statements. When you see the old footage of people like David Frost, who was a very smart journalist, patronizing the women in the audience who were trying to explain what the women’s movement was, I think that’s not absent from the discussion today by any stretch of the imagination. With that said, I think you have to put that in some kind of context, but the women’s movement was very revolutionary, a lot of other movements were very clear about moving on one point, but the women’s movement they were looking at the whole concept of society and saying “there’s something seriously wrong with this”, which they challenged. That was amazingly brave, because even though they didn’t have a thought-out thesis all the way through, they were figuring it out as they went along, which was immensely courageous. I’m less concerned about the obvious sexism of the past which we show, and more concerned about the more insidious sexism we see today when you have so many colleges trying to erase rape from the public eye in any way possible. There are so many ways in which women are harassed on the streets, those issues are still relevant today.
We had that awful thing with Time Magazine suggesting the word “feminist” should stop being used!
Isn’t that unbelievable? We started getting a little bit of hate mail on our website, and I guess in a way you can take that as a sign of your success because when someone like Time Magazine thinks the word should be banned, I guess they feel threatened. I still can’t understand how they would do such an idiotic thing though, they would never do this with any other social issue. When it comes to women’s issues there’s a kind of derogatory tone, which they would never do to a minority group. Would they ban the word “racist”? I don’t think so.
Do you think that celebrities who talk about feminism in a completely ignorant way are at least engaging people in a discussion to correct their misconceptions or should they just remain silent?
Well, I feel sorry for celebrities in a lot of ways because they really can’t win. If they’re outspoken politically they get criticized, if they’re ignorant of the issues that makes them look dumb. I am happy to have allies wherever we can find them, I don’t discriminate. If somebody famous wants to be helpful to feminism I think that’s fantastic, I’m all for it, but the movement doesn’t need to rely on celebrities, I think that’s a misstep, but when Beyoncé put the word “feminist” behind her at that show, that’s a big deal, that reaches a whole lot of other people who may not know anything about it, but it might at least hopefully spark their curiosity, which is very positive.
You’re getting a theatrical release which is a very big deal, especially because it’s becoming harder and harder to get films out in theaters.
It’s impossible! We’re opening in Los Angeles, New York, Connecticut and next year we’re opening in a whole bunch of cities, so it’s very exciting.
What’s the call to action you wish viewers would take when they leave the theater?
Our primary message is for people to take women’s issues seriously, but I also feel like we are living in such a depressing time, with things like what is going on in Ferguson for example, where it’s so easy to feel powerless and I want people to come out of the film angry about some of these issues but I hope they’ll also feel empowered. The women in this film were not famous people, they didn’t have any power or money, and they created a movement essentially out of their imagination and will, and that’s really laudable and anyone can do that. The film is important for anyone interested in social change because it shows that it can be done. These women didn’t even have the internet, can you imagine how hard it must’ve been for them to communicate, and they achieved it in such an unimaginable way, it really was like a wildfire all over the country, they’d mail out statements and somehow with so little technological help they spread out the message so brilliantly.
She's Beautiful When She's Angry opens in theaters on December 5. For more information about the film visit their official website.
