Original subtitles

A NETFLIX ORIGINAL DOCUMENTARY

EMERGENCE CYNTHIA MACADAMS

I remember�it was a very important period in my creative life.

I really fought to hold my ground at that time.

I felt, which might have been a delusion,

but I felt that I needed to fight to be who I was.

I like the way I look here. I like my hair.

As I look at this...

it brings back the enormous energy of those days...

and the go-for-broke sense of them.

How did she convince all these women to take their clothes off?

I think it was the times.

We always said the personal is political.

The rise of the women's movement

was just part of that kind of personification

of "we're taking our power."

The second-wave era of feminism...

we had an opening in history

and we all, like Nora in Ibsen's Doll House,

we all left the house at the same moment.

STEVEN KASHER GALLERY

Come on, girl.

CYNTHIA MACADAMS FEMINIST PORTRAITS, 1974-1977

Oh, it looks very beautiful.

All these...

beautiful women standing up.

In the mid-'70s, photographer Cynthia MacAdams

asked if she could take a picture of me for her book.

She said she thought women looked different because of feminism

and she wanted to see�if that difference showed up in photographs.

She started with the women she knew,

artists, writers, activists,

and gradually went to the streets of New York and L.A.,

and she found something more complex than political fervor,

more basic than sexual identity.

She captured these women at a moment

when they felt the freedom to be who they are.

These women represent

this one hour when women

-took responsibility for themselves. -That's right.

And it's really personal. It's really personal.

It's very personal. We had all this consciousness raising

where women sit around and find themselves

and express themselves, and they were not afraid.

Did you ask them to pose in any particular way?

No. I just wanted to get as much...

clarity as possible.

I just wanted them to be in their innermost self, their core.

Forty years later, we meet some of the women again

and we look at the culture then and now.

But as the women look back at us, their eyes remind us

that the challenge is still there.

Whenever I look at a picture of myself, I never look how I thought I looked.

But this picture looks more like myself than most do.

Except for the skirt.

It's interesting, this shot here, um...

because I didn't like it of all the photographs.

It was a hard time.

I was working in my studio and just trying to stay in the moment.

I always made a dark room where I lived

because I think as a mother I had to be there.

Not that I was that great of a mother,

don't get me wrong...

...you know?

I, uh...

But I... That was something that I had to do

and my oldest children were at that point--

were getting into their teens

and it was really hard.

But now I love that picture...

because I, you know, I look a little beaten up

but I kinda like it, because I was beautiful

and beauty was a commodity.

GENTLEMEN PREFER BLONDES (1953)

♪ We're just two little girls From Little Rock�♪

When I was 14 I was an usherette at a theater in Detroit, the Avalon.

We were watching a movie one night

and it was Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell.

♪ Men grow cold As girls grow old�♪

A middle-aged couple were leaving

and the wife was way ahead of the husband and she kept...

"Come on. Let's go."

You know? And he's dragging behind 'cause they're singing and jiggling

and he just kept lagging back watching the screen and she said,

"Oh, come on, they don't have any talent anyway."

And he said, "They don't need any."

And that was epiphanous for me.

Jane and I wrote about it and she expressed it this way,

she said, "I felt the embryonic, uh...

kicking of feminism,

uh, even though I didn't know I was pregnant."

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 have to make up your mind.

You wanna be a professor or a mother?"

I said, "Are you kidding me?"

Hah! That was an "Aha" moment.

God, was I young.

When I was in college I was a philosophy minor

and I took all these classes and I would raise my hand to ask a question

and the male professors wouldn't call on me.

And, you know, then they'd call on these guys.

I'm like, "They're not calling on me because I'm a girl."

I knew that but it was impossible to talk about.

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'd made all this trouble.

So, no, of course I didn't wanna be identified as a suffragette,

just like these young women don't wanna be identified as a feminist.

-They look free. You wanna be like them. -Yeah, that's the thing.

It's contagious. It makes you wanna...

do you.

I always feel like when someone�asks me

if I'm a feminist that it's a trick question.

Just amongst my friends,

we don't use the word "feminism" that much.

We tend to be a lot more specific. You know, like,

"We are fighting for gender equality" or "We're fighting for equal pay"

or "We're fighting to get more women on-screen."

But we don't necessarily throw around the word "feminist."

In fact, of my friends, the only ones who are openly feminist

and use that word are men, because it makes them look really cool.

I remember walking into a FedEx

and I was being helped by a man who was...

just there to help the customers

and we got into a conversation somehow

about gender issues. Somehow.

And he asked me if I identified as a feminist, and I said yes.

And he just looked at me like I was a green monster.

Like I had then just affirmed that I hated him.

He was repulsed.

Repulsed.

My body, my choice!

THIS PUSSY GRABS BACK

FEMINISM: BACK BY POPULAR DEMAND

Equal rights. Equal rights to have a job, to have respect,

to not be viewed as a piece of meat.

I've never seen any definition which refers to women

when you become the eunuch. It's always a man who's castrated.

It's impossible to castrate a woman,

at least as far as the definition is concerned in the dictionary.

It's only impossible to castrate a woman because...

...it's assumed that she has no sex.

I mean, I didn't castrate women, Freud did.

Every time you talk about an issue of feminism,

you somehow have to have someone that's saying

women are not human beings

or wanting to be a human being is not ladylike.

Why do we smile so much? Why do we try to be so appealing?

Why are we so afraid to show our anger?

Why is anger considered not feminine?

For better or worse there is not a situation in one's daily life

that does not have feminist subtext,

um, superstructure implications, and one is constantly aware

that even when you want to rest it stands up�and hits you in the face.

WOMEN OF THE WORLD UNITE!

This is a whole class of people oppressed for just millennium, suddenly,

you know, like, breathing air and drinking in the light.

Any kind of change, I mean, any healthy country,

like any healthy individual,

should be in perpetual revolution, perpetual change.

I was born resilient.

I was solitary a lot

but I was never lonely.

I had a lot of imagination...

and there were a lot of oak trees on our property

and I would climb to the top...

and 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.

Or I was the Lone Ranger,

the masked bandit who would come and save people.

Sometimes I wanted to be Tonto too,

but always active and masculine.

This is the world of busy girls.

The world of Suzy Homemaker.

For me...

being a girl, being a woman, was the end.

If you wanted to live and you wanted to have power and you wanted to succeed,

you were a boy.

I really wanted an electric train set

very badly...

...and my father didn't get them for me and I...

Thinking back, maybe it was because I was a girl.

I remember inviting a boy from my class, Billy Young, to my house

and my mother said,

"You have to let him win all the games that you play...

because girls don't win."

And I remember thinking, "That is really strange

and I don't think it's fair at all

and I'm not going to follow that at all."

Most girls, we're feisty when we're young,

man, before puberty sets in.

And it's when the specter of womanhood begins to loom on the horizon...

you have to stuff anger... you know, you have to be a good girl.

Well, all your life, you know, people are saying, "Be a good girl."

Well, that implies that you're not...

naturally good.

It's really nice.

There really is a power to being...

female. I mean, it's... I don't know how to explain it but...

you can see it in these images.

It's really kind of magical.

Fourteen for some reason was an age that just everything...

Everything shifted.

I was constantly uncomfortable and sort of aware of what other people thought of me

and, of course, that meant, like, boys.

All of the insecurities in the world happened.

In some sense, before...

that time I was more of a protagonist in my life.

It's like your role as a girl is to, like, watch boys do stuff.

Suddenly you become aware that you're living

sort of from the perspective of a male

and reclaiming that I think is like... really hard.

I was raised in a politically active, left-wing,

secular Jewish household.

My parents believed in equal rights for women.

For a woman of my generation I had a very unusual experience,

which was I was really fathered.

My father adored me, he encouraged me,

he taught me, he played games with me,

he trained me in logic and in values...

and he taught me

that I could trust a man.

My father was a labor organizer.

He worked at the post office

but his passion was change, making it a better world.

And he was a victim of McCarthy

which was, of course, in the '50s.

The FBI visited my house when I was six years old.

My father was hounded out of his work...

fired from the post office

and hounded out of the labor union.

And he went through a slow...

physical and emotional decline.

He died when I was 13.

Here I was faced with the fact that the world was telling me

my father was a terrible person...

but that was not my experience.

My experience was of my father

as a wonderful person.

And at 13 I had to make a choice

between whether I would believe what the world said

or whether I would believe my own experience.

I come from a military family and we traveled with my father.

My first memories...

are of the hospital in Japan

where I had pneumonia.

They would take us for a walk...

all the kids, down this big corridor...

and at the end of the corridor

were people left from the bombing, the atomic bomb...

getting treatment.

I still remember those people...

and that colored my whole life.

I never could understand

how people could blow each other up.

Down with the tyrant!

Down with his exaggerated thunder!

You want to talk psychosis?

Down with the tyrant!

Daggers, hysterical puritans, starved animals.

You want to, you want to,

You want to talk?

You want to write?

This is the writing dance

For all to see...

The whole picture of the decimated site

The picture of charnel ground.

And the jackals came.

And the jackals came.

One very strong epiphany moment was in grade�school.

Clutching your dog tag,�hiding under your desk, hands over your head

with these, you know, sirens going, there was some tremendous fear

but also an idea. "This does not make sense. What is this about?"

War I associated with men.

I often feel that was the point where I went to poetry.

Oh, yeah. Conceptual artist. What does that mean, conceptual artist?

♪ O Superman ♪

"O SUPERMAN" (1981) LAURIE ANDERSON

♪ O judge�♪

♪ O Mom and Dad Mom and Dad�♪

I aspired to be non-aggressive.

I'm sure that I'm aggressive in some situations

but I aspire to non-aggression.

There is something very, um...

essentially and really deeply non-aggressive about women.

If you look around and see, um...

who's picking up the guns,

for the most part it's not us.

We're not running in the street and...

In my own experience and in my own life,

women tend to be the peacemakers...

the ones who are going,

"You guys, you brothers, don't kill each other, okay?

Don't kill each other." You know? They have to like maintain some stuff

at the very basic family level.

From that to other models of, um...

peacekeeping, I think you can, uh,

uh, big statement, look to women

to be the ones who are very skilled at that.

Very, very skilled at understanding...

uh, networks and how things work,

seeing things as not a big storyline with a big, you know, narrative arc,

but as a fabric that is bound together and is...

You can't do anything without it affecting something else.

I was born and raised in Barbados.

I wasn't from a city, I was from a small village

so I'm a village girl.

And I think that really has had a big impact in my life

and how I see the world.

There was an elder who lived across the way from us...

and before we could eat, my mother would say to my sister and I,

"You go take this food for Ms. Rice."

And we would say, "But, Mummy...

We're hungry, Mummy. Why can't we eat and take the food?"

She would say, "No. Before you eat,

you take the food over to her."

And we kind of grumbled a bit and then we did it.

And then when I was a lot older I realized the lesson that she was really teaching us

in terms of

looking out for others even though we had very little,

of sharing what little we had.

Immigrating from that village to Brooklyn was like

one of the most traumatic experiences in my life.

We were living with my aunt who was a member of Brooklyn CORE,

Congress of Racial Equality,

and immediately, I think about two weeks

after arriving from Barbados,

we were out on the picket lines

because there was a huge civil disobedience

where black people were protesting the fact

that they were building a medical center in Brooklyn,

the Downstate Medical Center,

and they weren't hiring black people.

We would take a little paper bag lunch...

and we would stand there and block the cement trucks.

And that's how we'd spend our summers, so this...

was my introduction from my village to the United States.

My mother was a witch,

my father was an atheist...

and from these two sources,

my father was the one who recognized me.

When I was three months old already, I was not yet christened,

and on my mother's side my grandma

and mother's older sister wanted to do that

because that was like a Catholic thing to do,

and Father said, "No, no, don't...

don't do that. When she grows up she finds her own religion."

So my father had the sense about me that I will find my own religion,

and you know where I found it? Right here in L.A.

The balmy weather�and the wonderful smells that the air got from

blooming flowers, the jasmines and the orange trees,

and the Goddess is very, very feelable and visible.

I didn't have a coven anywhere else but here...

and this is where it became an activism,

it became a spiritual, political activism

and, to me, they were the same.

I felt that the oppression of women is rooted in religion.

From childhood, little boys think that they're going to grow up to be God,

and this is consciousness raising. We say,

"Hey Church, if you really, really think of all human beings,

you better start changing that image of...

You see that thing? "And God created woman in her own image."

Cynthia wanted me to be the Reverend Sally Kirkland,

um, and she said to me that she was just gonna do my torso...

and, there I am.

Thinner than I am now.

My mom, Sally Kirkland, Senior,

she was the first person to hire an African American at LIFE magazine,

Gordon Parks, the photographer and then filmmaker.

And Henry Luce was very upset and came to my mother and said,

"We can't do this. He's a negro."

And my mother said, "If you don't hire him, I quit."

My mother was extremely independent.

It was hard not to inherit a feeling that I deserved equality,

that I deserved to be paid the same as men and to have the same opportunities

as an actor, as a painter.

I became a yoga teacher at a time

where there were only men teaching.

You know, so she taught me how to just go for what I wanted

and not take no for an answer.

I was being photographed somewhere...

outside Boulder, Colorado.

So I was a slightly misplaced New Yorker...

in this photograph.

I quickly saw that I had a certain...

You know, I became the head of the Poetry Project,

founded this school... You know, the Kerouac school.

Allen couldn't be there full time,

somebody had to, you know, really mind the store and take charge.

I just took charge.

I think I was able to hold my own...

with Allen, with Burroughs. It was, you know, not easy at first.

I wasn't intimidated.

At some point I felt I had to correct Allen.

I mean, I had to... You know, he would say "girls" instead of "women."

I mean...

I don't know where this, you know, came from exactly

but my mother was a real force.

She had a real vision for what it was to be a female artist

and a fully liberated person in the world.

One letter she's saying to me,

"Men can put love aside and get on with their work,

they can be more compartmentalized.

Don't just fall into this fallacy

about falling�in love and giving it all up for love."

She was very afraid.

And this was in my last year of college she was writing me these kinds of letters.

I had to please her. I had to do the work that she couldn't do.

I had a mother who was...

incred...

Well, at least her discourse was like very, very feminist.

Something that she said my whole life was, "Les femmes ont le pouvoir,"

which means "Women have the power."

She really raised my sister and I to believe that, to live that.

She would even, like, discourage my sister from having boyfriends for too long.

It was like, "You need to go have fun,

uh, and be free and not be tied down to men."

But at the same time, you know, she did grow up in France

so she did have these pretty conservative ideas

of, like, what women should be.

The more my mother would tell me�to be feminine and quiet and not funny or loud,

the louder I would get and the more irreverent I would get.

I remember wanting to... fit in with the group.

And one day, one of the little girls...

tells me...

Mind you, this is a little fifth grade girl,

"I just wanted to let you know that you can hang out with us

if you lose a little bit of weight."

I remember...

kind of feeling, like, resistance to that

but feeling like, "Okay...

If that's what I need to do to fit in."

But I knew that it wasn't about my size.

I remember I went home and I told my mom

and I asked her about ways in which I could potentially lose weight

and my mom told me, essentially,

"Anybody that does not see

how phenomenal and beautiful you are

and that does not value the fullness of you as you are,

essentially does not deserve to share space and time with you.

And that instilled a dignity in me early on...

and it helped me navigate the world as a black woman.

WHITE SILENCE = VIOLENCE

-This is my mom. Yeah.

What is it like being here with your daughter?

Well, it's really great

because I was here in 1993 with my mother

and that's when I wore this button.

She's no longer here but we're representing her

and it's just really, really nice,

um, to be here with my daughter but it's very sad at the same.

I'm just ashamed that I've lived through not being able to pass the ERA,

I now have lived through not being able to get a woman president

and, um, it just... I cry a lot still.

I CAN'T BELIEVE WE'RE STILL PROTESTING THIS SHIT.

It's like, "Come on. It's 2017."

-I'm done.

-I wanna be done fighting but you can't. -Yeah.

-Thank you. -Thank you, sweetie.

WHY STUDY HOME ECONOMICS

If I'm gonna be a homemaker the rest of my life,

I wanna know what I'm doing.

So do I.

What can they teach you in home ec class that you can't learn right here at home

or pick up after you get married?

We had to bring a demonstration into homemaking.

Because I had a brother who was 15 years younger...

I brought in a demonstration of how to diaper a baby,

and I got an A.

One of the things they taught us in home ec

was how to cook.

I got an A in that.

And they also taught us how to wash dishes.

They gave us a chart: what to do first and what to do last.

It was home ec. We had to take it. All the girls had to take it.

I just had to see what pictures of me are in this book.

Aw, look. I love this picture of me and Aloma.

And here I am...

on... my 1970 Mercedes...

which I still have.

I was thrown out of high school

for forging absentee slips...

and I never went back.

That summer I went to San Francisco...

and that's when I turned into an adult.

["Four Strong Winds" The Journeymen]

HUNGRY I

And that's when I met John Phillips,

because the Journeymen were playing the Hungry I...

and I just fell madly in love with the tall guitar player.

And we had my father come up from Los Angeles

and John just begged him...

to let him take me to New York.

And my father said, "You know, she hasn't even finished high school."

And John said...

"Gil... l'll teach her everything she has to know."

And my father said, "Yeah, I bet you will."

I was walking down the street in my poncho,

and the reason I'm in that outfit is I could not afford a winter coat.

I was a professor and making very little money.

I was in a male-dominated academic environment.

Other women my age have said the same thing:

English departments were all men.

I didn't have any women professors.

I was not a liberated woman.

I had a boyfriend from high school that I followed through college.

So I was following a guy that I thought I would be spending my life with.

He didn't know how to make love so I had no experience sexually.

I didn't know what a clitoris was. I didn't ever experience gratification

until I met someone who was like 26 or whatever in college.

It was actually my professor and I had an affair with him.

And he showed me what it's about.

And that was the end... That was the beginning of my,

"Oh, my God, you can have an orgasm."

It was a very big thing.

When I met Abdul Kareem, and that's not his real name,

we talked about Dostoyevsky and Proust and we were film buffs and opera buffs.

He promised a life of adventure

and travel and I was lusting for that.

He's the first man I slept with. I'm a nice Jewish girl,

you're supposed to do right by the first man you sleep with.

So...

I brought him home.

I brought him home to impress my family. My family freaked out.

He was the wrong religion, he was the wrong color,

he was from the wrong country,

nobody knew his family,�you know?

And... in retrospect, if my family had been a bit more cool,

I might have tired of him.

I believed that I would just meet his family.

He never told me...

that his father had three wives and 21 children.

Didn't mention it.

Knew this guy for three years, didn't say it.

He didn't tell me I would be living with my mother-in-law.

When we land...

there's an official at the airport...

who very smoothly says, "Madam, we need your passport."

I said, "No, it's my American passport."

And he said, "Well, it's just a formality.

You know, we'll send it to your home."

I never saw it again.

I instantly became the property...

of a large, wealthy, polygamous Afghan family

and the citizen of no country.

From that moment on,

I became a firebrand feminist.

Born in America but always with my eye on women's fate globally.

Back to London to meet the designer who may go down in fashion history

as the man who invented the new walk.

With one hand he puts back the clock to the days of the hobble skirt

and with the other, well, wait and see.

A few pins and the answer to "What's his line?" is "A straight line."

The only thing is will Sheila be able to walk at all?

I had several breakdowns

and actually was in hospital for periods of time...

and what they would do in these hospitals, really,

would be to retrain you to go back

to what you were doing before. You know, to be a good girl, to be a housewife.

I was in college

and I wasn't getting the best grades and I remember my father saying,

"Oh, she's just gonna get married anyway. It doesn't matter."

And that still rings in my ears.

I felt that I had something else to do...

other than just get married and be Mrs. Somebody.

But I ended up putting a husband through medical school

and I'd spent a lot of time alone.

I was getting more and more depressed...

and I kind of came to...

standing in our bedroom with a blanket over my head...

and I just said to myself...

"This is not me.

I can't live like this. I have to do something."

One particular weekend

there was one of these staged family picnics.

The only time we ever did stuff like that was if some photographs were being taken

to show us as "family."

All the dynamic is there.

I am hovering close to my father.

That was the start that would

bring me to salvation.

He was not paying attention to anybody,

everybody was kind of separate,

and my mother was leaning forward looking desperate.

Well, of course, she killed herself five months later.

I remember taking a whole bottle of pills...

you know, upset about some relationship thing and...

But also feeling... You know, sort of watching myself from above

feeling like a total idiot and...

I had better things to do. My mother was right,

don't give it up for love.

No. Love is all there is.

Love is all... Love...

People have asked me, "How long did it take you

to write Women and Madness?"

And I say, "My whole life." It was my first book.

FEMINIST PSYCHOTHERAPY: SEEKING TO REDEFINE 'HEALTHY WOMEN'

TOLD TO 'ADJUST', SHE ONLY GOT WORSE

I had made headlines because�I demanded a million dollars in reparations

from the American Psychological Association

on behalf of women who had been very badly treated.

Publishers came calling, I was consumed by the ideas in this book.

It's never been out of print.

It's gone through many editions.

Feminists became therapists.

Women patients signed themselves out of mental hospitals.

They wrote me letters, they told me.

They left abusive marriages.

They began to think like Amazons, they said,

because I used the Amazon myth.

And it changed the profession by 10 percent,

maybe by 15 percent.

That's not good enough for me but that is something.

In Chicago is where I gave birth

to my two little boys...

and after the second one

I sort of thought, "I replenished the Hungarians.

Two is enough." And, um...

...so I went to this church

because I had to have community somewhere

and... there was Father Taylor

who I got to confess to and I told him,

"Yes, that I'm using contraception now."

And he said, "Well, I cannot forgive you then."

And I just thought about it a moment and it hit me that...

I said, "Father Taylor, you father of nothing.

You have not having any children."

I just laid down my anger about, "How dare you telling a woman what to do?"

And that woke me up, how men tell women how to do babies.

♪ We must control our bodies To control our lives�♪

♪ If we have children We want them to be planned�♪

♪ What we want is abortion Abortion on demand�♪

It's important to understand:

you had to have the child. There were no options.

And so when I was off on my own after I got away from that first husband,

uh, literally, you know, I made a lot of mistakes.

But I had no money,

I got two abortions in Mexico,

one here where I almost died, uh,

with a balloon of something that they put inside of me.

But you were that desperate.

Was some of that before it was legal?

Oh, all of them were before it was legal.

I wanted to battle that. I wanted to take that on.

Birth control rights were very, very important to me,

because I went through an experience.

-What was that? -Well, I got pregnant.

Uh, from the boyfriend who didn't know anything about...

...how to make love but he knew how to get you pre...

So I used a diaphragm and I got pregnant in '67...

before it was legal.

Just word of mouth... found a psychiatrist...

um, I could bribe.

He told me what to say, you know.

He said "They can only give you a psychiatric

if you say you'll kill yourself."

So I said, "I'll kill myself. Okay. No problem."

And then I went into, um, the thing

and they said, "You should be out in like a half hour."

I woke up two days later

with IVs in my arm and I bled for two days straight.

So I'm alive now, probably, because I went to a legal abortion

in a hospital where they had transfusions.

This is a live picture of Fort Worth senator Wendy Davis

leading a filibuster until the session runs out.

Now, if it's passed, the bill would effectively shut down

most abortion clinics in Texas.

Our bodies, our lives, our right to decide.

Our bodies, our lives, our right to decide.

And that's what is so scary about losing this right that we have.

Because women will do it.

It's the only power they have.

That it's hard for men to believe women should have the right to control...

their own bodies.

Mentally the right-wingers are doing that

because they don't want women to have the freedom...

and they have a magical thinking about sperm, I think.

WOMANHOUSE

Will you help me do the dishes?

Help you do the dishes?

Well, they're your dishes as much as mine.

But you don't have a cock.

After a decade�of professional practice in Southern California,

I got sick to death of trying to "act like a man,"

paint like a man,

you know, not be myself as a woman.

The woman's movement was just starting,

some of the radical feminist literature is coming out in New York

and, of course, it's speaking to everything I'm feeling.�You know, like,

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...

Okay, I have a show, nothing would happen. I wouldn't sell anything.

You couldn't really talk at that time about sexism,

but I decided to start speaking out

and I decided to create a feminist art practice.

If I help young women...

Younger than me.�I was only 30.

But young women...

learn how to become professional artists

without having to disconnect from their impulses as women

maybe I can find my way back

to my own voice.

WOMANHOUSE WAS A FEMINIST ART INSTALLATION CREATED BY JUDY CHICAGO, MIRIAM SCHAPIRO

AND THE CAL ARTS FEMINIST ART PROGRAM IN 1972.

IT WAS VIEWED BY 10,000 VISITORS.

WOMANHOUSE

Men were having the experience

of seeing our point of view.

They were becoming an audience for the female gaze

in the same way women have been the audience

for�the male gaze for centuries.

Meeting Judy Chicago turned my life around.

And one of the things that had just happened for me

is at the end of the first year of graduate school,

they had a competition. First place was a thousand dollars...

and they gave me first place and the ribbon...

and they gave me 500 dollars.

And they gave the two men who were second place

500 dollars each.

I was like, "Well, how can you do that?"

"Well, you know...

they weren't as good as yours but they were as good as each other's."

So I told that story to Judy.

She says, "Nothing you can ever do...

is going to make you one of those boys."

I became much less interested in...

pleasing the world or trying to get the world to acknowledge me

and much more interested in how I could make a contribution

that fulfilled me.

I was receiving an award for a film

and so they handed the trophies to each director.

And when they got to me, they handed it to my actor,

who is a man.

And then, after that, they ushered the actor

onto the backdrop to take all the pictures

and I just remember standing there like, "Wow."

I had to push my way onto the backdrop

to get in the picture and I felt really stupid

as if I was making a big deal out of it.

But it was a big deal. You know, I was the director.

If a man says something that's clearly sexist

or does something that's sexist,

oftentimes my first reaction is to kind of like...

...like, laugh it off and like make the man feel comfortable.

It's just such a reflex.

And then afterwards, I'll be like, "Damn it, that was... I'm not a feminist.

That was not a feminist response.

I should have really, you know, spoken my mind to that guy."

But we're so conditioned to be like, "Are you okay?"

You know, like, "I'll go bleed later but, like, how are you feeling?"

You know, so, um...

I'd of course had heard about the movement,

then I started reading Kate Millett...

reading a A Room of One's Own.

I just had this incredible sense of relief

that what I had suffered and struggled with alone...

somehow I realized that it was not my problem,

that it was just more a social problem.

And, I remember being in bed...

Like, you know, because I never have slept very well

but I get a lot of ideas when I'm tossing and turning.

And I remember thinking about, "If the education of the girl child

was the kind of education that told us that we have all possibilities,

that there are no limits to our possibilities,

then the world would be a better place.

EDUCATION OF THE GIRLCHILD (1972) MEREDITH MONK

In a sense, I feel more like a humanist.

I think that if there's an advance in half of the human race

then that also helps the other half of the human race.

CHILDREN NEED DAY CARE

I was teaching in CUNY at Queens College

and there was a lot of organizing among the students of color

and the faculty of color.

You know, against racism and access and that sort of thing.

We were working with some of the welfare mothers

who had gone into City University

under a special program�to help bring in poor and minority students,

and there were various problems,

including the fact that the women needed childcare.

There wasn't any.

We went into the Women's Center

and got space in the Women's Center.

Now that was frowned upon by the men...

who were...

Considered themselves, you know, these third-world revolutionaries

and academic heavies. It's like, "Why are you going in?

You know, you're separating yourselves from the black community

by going into the Women's Center?" Because we know there are

a bunch of white women over there and a bunch of them are lesbians, right?

And we were like, "So what? We don't care."

There was that tension and we had to make that fight

to say that, yes, we are anti-racist

and we are for women's rights.

You have an asking of black women to silence their gendered experience

for the sake of addressing racism. We have to look at race,

we can't talk about anything else, and we can't divide the troops.

I met a black man and he seemed real woke.

An ankh around his neck, a scent of Nag Champa smoke, he said,

"Queen sister, mother of the earth, black girl,

let me treat you like goddess.

Gender binaries are an illusion and patriarchy is a crook.

It is our duty to fight like

it is our duty to win, like...

How much can we complain?

We had a black man in the White House. Look how much we've gained.

Who's really woke?

As a black woman, it is oftentimes difficult...

to identify as a feminist

because it's so stigmatized in our communities

that the idea is that once you announce that you're a feminist,

that you are against the black man,

and it's just not true.

And, really, the way that feminists in general

are stigmatized as being against and anti-man,

instead of acknowledging the complexity and fullness of being woman.

There were movements.

It was very different for women of color...

it was very different for working-class women,

and some of the strongest, smartest people I met

were union women.

We were sisters, yes. Sisterhood is powerful...

but the sisters came from very different families

and that had to be recognized.

The "Ah-ha" moment was discovering that I was a lesbian.

That this was...

a difference you had not expected...

and this was a despised difference.

Listen to me!

I have loved you the way they said.

THE CHILDREN'S HOUR

There's always been something wrong.

Always. Just as long as I can remember.

But I never knew what it was until all this happened.

Stop it, Martha.

Stop this crazy talk!

This was bad.

This was bad.

I would feel...

closer to my girlfriends than they felt towards me...

and I didn't know what to do with that.

And I remember one night, I got a hold of a Free Press

and in the back of the Free Press were all these ads.

And it said, "Women's consciousness-raising groups."

And I took down the address.

Actually, I think it even said, "lesbian."

And I couldn't say the word.

I went... Le...

I just could not say the word.

And I remember going to that consciousness-raising group...

being petrified...

sitting cross-legged on a couch, looking at everybody

and trying to figure out, "What does this all mean?"

And they talked. They just talked about feelings.

I was like, "Oh, they're just humans."

I'm thinking I might have been either planning

to come to Broadway for the first time

or was on Broadway at that moment. That would be 1977.

Every time I see a yield sign on the highway I feel sexually threatened.

I've actually seen a man walk up to four women sitting in a bar and say,

"Hey, what are you doing here all alone?"

My brother and I both are gay,

so my brother, uh...

he probably was treated less kindly than I was,

uh, because he was somewhat effeminate as a boy.

The '40s and the '50s were a very rough time,

uh, gender-wise. I mean, I was a tomboy

and I could run and jump on things and jump off roofs

and, you know, my brother wasn't as rough and tumble as he should be,

according to standards...

and he paid a big price for it, too.

I don't really identify with being aware of being gay so early in life...

but I was always aware that there was something different about me.

I had relationships with men and they did... did very little for me.

And these were men I really liked and was really close to.

Once I had been with a woman it all came clear to me...

but I never felt...

that something was wrong with me for it.

There I am in my little loft apartment

and I'm juxtaposed across from a woman who is completely naked

and I can see that I am naked too, but I...

I don't actually see that when I look at the picture.

I see my intensity with the violin,

I see the purity of the moment.

The woman's naked body

was no longer reserved to pornography...

but the body was a source of pride... and of health.

The body was to be celebrated...

and to be enjoyed.

I loved being nude.

I think that women should be proud of their bodies,

no matter what they look like.

Back then, you could get me to go out�in Sheridan Square and take my clothes off,

I'd think nothing of it.

BARBARELLA

I couldn't believe when it opens up

and there you are, hanging upside down,

almost nude.

-Almost. -Well. Basically, I mean--

I was nude except that the titles were covering my tits and my...

-pussy, that's all. -I appreciate that.

-So did I. -And you're upside down writhing.

-You were like a sex toy. -Right.

Yeah, it was pretty interesting, especially given the fact

that I hate to be naked.

But Vadim had great imagination.

And I thought, "Well, this could...

It could be a really funny way to open the movie."

But that's the least of the things that I did that I didn't really want to do

because I didn't know how to say no.

I've only known for ten years that "no" is a complete sentence.

I had no interest in becoming part of a musical group.

I couldn't think of anything I wanted to do less.

But he said,�"Yeah, you're going to be in the new group."

I said, "But...

I... I can't sing."

He said, "You sing just fine."

And that was that.

[The Mamas and the Papas "California Dreamin'"]

John and I had just written a song called "California Dreamin'."

When we started singing with Cass and Denny,

we started pulling out...

...every piece of material that we had.

I was having a lot of fun,

making a lot of money.

I had equal pay,

I had fame...

I was very innocent.

Actually, I was fired from the Mamas and the Papas...

because I was having a relationship outside of my marriage.

Um, he was too but, you know...

I never thought that he could fire me.

That was a...

moment for me, when I realized...

that I was powerless...

without John.

END THE WAR MADNESS

WARS WILL CEASE WHEN MEN REFUSE TO FIGHT

I had started demonstrating because of the Vietnam War

and then I met very strong women connected to that.

The women were all starting to group together and do caucuses.

It was like, there's the wave

and I'm getting on it.

1970.

Women's strike for equality.

Edie and Marge and I were there marching with 50,000 others down Fifth Avenue.

The Senate held ERA hearings for the first time since 1956.

We thought we were going to change it all.

I sailed into the second wave of feminism as if I was born for it.

The fact that the leaders among us may have been strong-willed

and rebellious and already bent on accomplishment

with a ferocity,

but women were no longer just competing

one against the other for a man.

Women were now all part of a team fighting for all women's freedom.

We were now Amazons.

We were now sisters.

The power of our sisterhood.

Oh, I feel such a rush.

And anything we said or did made the headlines.

KATE MILLET OF WOMEN'S LIB

As feminists, what we believe in is very simple,

and that is the social, economic and political equality of the sexes.

Now, therefore, we are in politics, you see,

because the relationship between the sexes is in fact a political relationship.

Join us now!

Sisterhood is powerful! Join us now!

What do we want? Equality! When do we want it? Now!

For those who think...

that the women's liberation movement is a joke,

vaguely connected with burning bras and getting in the men-only bars,

I disabuse you of that notion.

It is about equal pay and equal opportunity in the job market.

We wanted to win our autonomy,

we wanted to win our body,

we wanted to win the right to our voice,

we wanted to get our bills passed in the legislature.

We wanted to get...

women behind the camera...

we wanted to get our poems on the page... we wanted what Gloria and Leti

and the others did, to set up our own magazines,

and we wanted them to be successful.

We wanted to win.

Now, thanks to the spirit of equality in the air

and to the work of many of my more foresighted sisters,

I no longer accept society's judgment

that my group is second class.

There was a group of about 30 women

who came to Los Angeles,

as a result of Judy Chicago, Arlene Raven and Sheila de Bretteville

soliciting women to come and join this new program of feminist art.

We all showed up having paid our tuition,

and there was no school.

There was 34 women sitting on the floor in Sheila de Bretteville's house.

Women were shocked...

and, you know, a lot of them were saying, "Well, what am I paying for?"

Judy very succinctly said...

"You're paying for the opportunity

to do your art�and get support for it.

You're paying for the opportunity to change the rest of your life.

You're paying for the opportunity to change the world."

We did have to build that...

we couldn't go rent that.

It didn't come with the building,

it came with the building of the building.

Women really�benefited...

from having a place

where they could say what they wanted, build what they wanted...

and be seen as strong

and powerful and competent.

We will not be equal.

In this world, we will not have our stories told,

we will not have our stories preserved,

we will not have our stories recognized

until we have our institutions to pass on our culture.

Because that's what institutions do.

THE WOMAN'S BUILDING 1973-1991 LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA

1977 Houston,

International Women's Year.

ERA YES!

THERE'S A BETTER WAY! THAN ERA.

Never before in our history

has there been such a women's meeting

in numbers,

in preparation,

in diversity,

in long-range effect.

Let us celebrate womanhood

and let us celebrate democracy

and let us celebrate woman power.

This is the time that we will make women and men share equally

in the greatness of America.

Thank you very, very much.

I was part of the first congressionally-mandated

U.S. Conference on Women held in Houston in 1977.

Women of color got together and ran a slate.

We felt that the concerns of mothers on welfare of poverty,

of the forced sterilization of women of color

wasn't really getting a look in.

I got to the floor to raise a resolution...

opposing the forced sterilization

of black, Native American and Puerto Rican women

and my mic was shut off.

We were told not to raise these issues because if we did,

it would jeopardize choice,

which we all supported choice, the right to abortion.

You know, we all supported it.

We were saying, "No,

you can't do that on our�backs."

Women are going into hospital, they come out and they're sterilized.

How the hell are we supposed to keep our mouth shut about that?

We did ask that we not be segregated

into minority women, on your own,

that we�wanted to be part of�the mainstream of women

and that we wanted to be included in every part of the plan�that affected us.

It's all well and good to say you're for all women...

but if you're not listening�to the voices of the women of color

and telling us that we have got to put our concerns and issues on the sideline

for the greater good...

That's part of what happened there

and, unfortunately, it meant that some people fell into separatism.

"Oh, yeah, we can't have nothing to do with these white women

because they're going to sell you down the river."

So, where, then, do black women exist in this conversation?

If you can't talk about, within black spaces,

you can't talk about your gender,

and within women's spaces, you can't talk about your race,

but you are both, equally, every day when you wake up, what, then, do you do?

There were others of us who took another approach

because, at the end of the day,

when you look at the abolitionist movement

and you look at civil rights movements

you saw that, of course, white women were there.

You know, because they were considered property.

Do you not believe the woman's place is in the home, right?

Of course not. It's a very oppressive concept.

It's being used to oppress women and to make them think

they're lucky to be slaves.

How many women in the home are slaves?

All women are slaves.

One of my best friends was organizing female office workers.

Over the years, she had told me stories about what happened

and how women were treated in large, especially in institutional offices,

insurance companies, banks and so forth.

We went to Cleveland to meet with all these secretaries

and went around and the women all told their stories

and then Colin Higgins asked them,

"Do any of you ever fantasize what you'd like to do to your boss?"

Oh, well.

And that became the movie.

["9 to 5" Dolly Parton]

Dolly wrote the song and that became

the anthem for the movement of secretaries

and it was the biggest money maker that year.

And it was one of the most glorious experiences...

of my life.

I knew about sexism but I didn't think about it that much...

and then as soon as I became conscious of it,

I started to notice it everywhere, more and more.

I'm not a very aggressive person by nature

and so wanting to pursue my career

has taken me a lot of work, emotionally. You know,

I've had to exercise�muscles that I didn't naturally have.

So, you know, being able to speak up for myself,

be louder than the person next to me or be able to assert...

my voice in the room.

You know, those are things that I really had to learn�the hard way

because I really care about becoming a filmmaker.

The violin was something that my parents had set up for me to have

when I was being a housewife

and raising children, that I would have something for myself.

I gradually realized and then I kept realizing that

that was myself...

the violin had been myself from the beginning...

and...

And that I loved it.

I have a career now.

I have this amazing life.

And that picture of me...

is me beginning�to listen to my inner voice.

When John and I got divorced,

I had never written a check in my life,

he cleaned out our bank accounts,

I never received any child support

and I never received any alimony.

I had to fight for my money,

money that I had already earned.

I was going to have to take care of myself, of my life.

I came to this moment

where I said, "Never again.

This will never happen to me again."

And it never did.

TURTLE DREAMS (1983) MEREDITH MONK

There was a time

that I did a number of pieces that I would call apocalyptic pieces,

where I felt that the artist's role was to state the problem,

to be kind of mirror of the society.

So, then I... I thought, "You know, I'd rather offer a kind of antidote."

You could think of art as healing in that way...

and that people do seem, as far as I can tell,

people do seem to be inspired by that.

I had the good fortune to perform in Damascus in 2009 with my ensemble,

and I just love these people, I loved my students so much

and I just loved the people that I met in Damascus, the Syrian people.

So utterly generous.

I mean, I've gone to 50 countries in my life,

but I think I will never forget that time in Damascus as long as I live.

So, when the trouble started happening in Syria,

I just was undone.

I would literally listen to the radio and be sobbing.

And this happened also after 9/11.

We were all questioning, "Why are we doing art?

I mean, what difference does this make in the world?"

I think that when you are doing something that you love...

it's like throwing a rock in the pool because that love is hitting the pool

and then it starts radiating out...

and so, when you're doing something that you love

and sharing it with other human beings, you are doing something of benefit.

HABEAS CORPUS (2015) LAURIE ANDERSON

The last few things

that I've done, I've learned a lot of things about the audience and one is,

never underestimate the audience and what they can do with things.

I particularly found that in a work I did a few months ago

called Habeas Corpus, in which my collaborator was Mohammed el Gharani,

who was the youngest detainee at Guantanamo.

Most of the people in the United States know more about Al Qaeda than this guy.

He's a kid who was studying computers at his uncle's school in Pakistan

and for seven years, from the ages of 14-21, we�tortured him

and did... very bad things.

I watched people...

looking at this, uh, statue,

and we had a camera that connected...

New York to West Africa, where he was.

I did see a number of people who came up...

and made eye contact with this on the delay to Africa and went...

"I'm sorry, I'm sorry."

I'm sorry.

I love taboos�and I love to see how I can push them around

and make them interesting and visible,

um, because I think that, uh,

when you become aware of the rules, it's easier to break them.

And... And to be free.

That's my main goal as an artist is freedom.

There was this curator at the Museum of Modern Art, a good guy,

and a curator at the Metropolitan Museum

who talked about when they were in their respective positions,

they were always trying to bring women's work

to the acquisitions committee,

and they did in fact make...

Have some successes, as long as the work was small.

THE DINNER PARTY (1979) JUDY CHICAGO

THE DINNER PARTY IS A SYMBOLIC HISTORY OF WOMEN IN WESTERN CIVILIZATION

TOLD THROUGH CHINA-PAINTING AND NEEDLEWORK.

VINDICATION OF THE RIGHTS OF WOMEN

THE DINNER PARTY WAS EXHIBITED IN SIXTEEN VENUES, IN SIX COUNTRIES,

ON THREE CONTINENTS,

TO A VIEWING AUDIENCE OF OVER ONE MILLION PEOPLE

Look at this garbage.

Now we have this pornographic art.

I mean, three-dimensional ceramic art

of 39 women's, uh, vaginal area, their genitalia

served up on plates that requires a whole room.

In order to display weird, sexual art.

"Thirty-six thousand, five hundred NEA money."

"Thirty-nine elaborate place settings depicting female vaginas."

I'm a poet and I do have trouble with this because it's not art,

it is not art. It's pornography.

During the period The Dinner Party was being vilified...

for the first time, I visited my father's grave in Chicago...

and I told him he had told me a lie.

That he had told me I could be myself and be loved.

In the recent show in Spain, Why Not Judy Chicago?,

the curator, Xabier Arakistain, his premise

is that my career can be understood

around two concepts:

deficit and disobedience.

That is, that as a young woman,

I awoke to the deficit of information on women's history,

woman's art,

women's experiences in the cultural dialogue...

and I wanted to change that.

But in order to change it,

I had to become disobedient.

And he's right, I've been a very disobedient woman.

If there is one message that echoes forth from this conference,

let it be that human rights are women's rights

and women's rights are human rights

-once and for all.

That feminism has a future is inevitable.

It has seized the imagination of the world.

Lift your head up!

Egyptian women don't get stripped!

You have women under dire death threats

who are asserting their rights.

When you're discriminated against as a woman,�when you're not allowed

to go to school in a country because you're a woman...

or when you're shot because you've gone to school...

then being a woman is a primary part of your identity.

What's going to get you killed?

The extremists...

were and they are afraid of books and pens.

The power of education frightens them.

They are afraid of women,

the power of the voice of women frightens them.

Because there were and they are

afraid of change,

afraid of equality that we will bring into our society.

That's gorgeous.

It's like an audacity.

I get it.

I get it.

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.

That part of a lot of girls goes way subterranean.

It's not that it disappears.

It doesn't get lost.

It goes underground.

And the goal of our lives...

is to bring her back up.

I try not to focus too much

on how feminism has only moved the world a little ways.

Because I see it...

in the next generation already.

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.

In the feminist movement, you know, politically correct is a good thing.

I didn't think it was fair to just open the door�to every kind of,

uh, you know...

prejudice and stereotype

and I just like to believe that there's something higher that we could be.

Yes we can! Yes we can!

You know what? I'm done playing nice. I'm done going along with...

the way things are.

We're all uniting and we're building solidarity

across these different struggles.

Saying this is a woman's issue and then this is an environmental issue,

we can't do that anymore,

because that still, again,

creates division, creates hierarchies. And that's what patriarchy does.

EQUALITY FOR MY GRANDMA MOTHER SISTER NIECE =

Women are raped, women are denigrated, women are marginalized,

even in this... The 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.

NASTY MAN

LOVE WINS

All of us gained from the fact that there was a women's movement.

It's how are we moving forward,

keeping our autonomy,

but realizing also that we better find our way to each other.

We need each other

because we are all on this planet and we are all in trouble right now.

FOR KATE MILLET (1934-2017) AND ALOMA ICHINOSE (1943-2018)