- [Giles] Often, in the 40s films and this applies to Hepburn. - [Janet] I think Barbara Stanwyck- and Joan Crawford did some of this. - [Chuck] Yeah, and whenever they're in these roles, then they're considered as, once again, threats to their male counterparts almost entirely and end up either because of their ambitions- sacrificing their romantic ambitions or else, they in the end, sacrifice their career for their prospective husband. - [Giles] Katherine Hepburn always you know, she'll be very tough in "Eastern School Girl" and "Crisp And Brittle" up until the moment when Spencer Tracy has a, demands a showdown at which point she goes all cuddly and the film ends with everyone satisfied that marriage and maternity win out. - [Narrator] Well Chris, Betty Friedan in "The Feminine Mystique" looks at women's magazines of about the same period and the decade after and sees exactly that sort of thing. Earlier in the century you know, in the 30s and early in the 40s, lots of stories in magazines, women's magazines about career women, often described in such a way as to make them seem very attractive and appealing and vibrant and all the rest of it. But again, always just saying, this is far below the level of Katharine Hepburn we're talking about. Always at the end they decide that it's best to retreat to the vine covered cottage and all the rest of it. So the career women they're either miserably unhappy because they pursued their careers or they give up their careers and they become mothers. So it's the same thing. Again, the thing about images of women is that they're repetitious universally in no matter what you're talking about or where you're looking. - [Janet] As far as literature goes, I found something that gives me hope and that is in the area of nonfiction. Recently we've seen some biographies. - [Narrator] Yeah. - [Janet] Well the latest installment of Anne Morrow Lindbergh's diary, the books about Eleanor Roosevelt after Franklin's death, Margaret Mead's autobiography. - [Narrator] No that's very true, I hadn't really thought of it in those terms, but last last year when I first started teaching women's studies courses and I've sponsored or taught in lots of others besides the one that I mentioned or as much as I can squeeze in one year. It got so depressing because you know, because there was this repetition. You read 20 good sized works of literature and you go back to the medieval period. You go forward into the 1960s and you don't seem really to be getting very far at all. And I was reading an article by a woman who happens to be a friend of mine who teaches women's studies at University of Massachusetts and she pointed out that a good antidote to studying images of women in literature is to read especially autobiographies because it gives one hope that there was something else there besides what you saw in whatever variety you were looking at. I think that's very true. - [Janet] Does this hold true for films also, as opposed to fictional and commercial films in the area of documentary or art films? Will the image be changing at least do you think? - [Chuck] I really can't think of any good examples of biographical documentaries on women that have been done. - [Giles] Madame Curie. - [Chuck] Yeah but the whole point was that her great husband, Professor Curie. - [Narrator] And besides she died of radiation poisoning. - [Chuck] Exactly, exactly, Women should stay in the kitchen, not in the laboratory. - [Narrator] I don't think Madame Curie would have done very well in the kitchen. - [Chuck] She would've died of food poisoning. - [Narrator] Yeah. - [Giles] The only think I could even think of comparable has been that the Cinéma verite studies of couples. What was the one, a married couple - [Chuck] Yeah, yeah. - [Giles] Or something out of Canada. - [Chuck] Yeah, yeah. I know what you mean, I haven't seen it. - [Giles] I haven't seen it either. And so all I can say is- at least that would offer the merit of being somewhat realistic and certainly much less stereotyping than you get in your average theatrical release. - [Janet] I think one interesting thing too- I can't say anything about it, but it's an idea that's just been brought to me recently, but an interesting thing to study in film and in theater as opposed to fiction or poetry and in ballet would be, or in dance, would be the images of women who are actresses, or dancers or whatever. In other words, women who are playing roles, in other words, women are already playing roles, but then if they're also playing professional roles on top of that- and you get a very nice you know, I'm not sure it's nice, but it has an extra complication to things. There's somebody who's probably interested in working in this area. Women who are portraying in a very self-conscious way certain fictionalized or theatricalized images. But then the whole idea of the actress in film, so many films or plays are about actresses. - [Chuck] What's interesting with that, and this goes back to the group of 40s actresses we're talking about, is by and large- at least in the I'm sure there are many exceptions, but it seems to me that Hepburn, and Stanwyck, and Russell, and Crawford, all of them pretty much project one image when you think of the name and the only person I can think of that might be different from that might be Bette Davis. - [Giles] I'm not so sure if she's different. - [Chuck] Well I can at least think of a couple sides of the coin with her as opposed to Hepburn who is pretty much always- - [Janet] Hepburn. - [Giles] Exactly. - [Narrator] I think we have a call. Let me remind our listening audience that the open telephone number is 864-4530 and we welcome your questions and comments. Hello? - [Caller] Hello? - Hello. Go ahead with your question, please. - [Caller] It may be that Mr. Fowler said this, I'm not sure, but I wondered about it since he said it. As I took the comment down it was, "Women may not be what people think they are, but that's what people think they are." And I guess whoever it was that said it, I'd be interested in knowing more- what was meant by people as opposed to women. - [Giles] I knew the moment I said that, that I had put my foot in it. No- actually it's not so inaccurate as I suppose a moment ago. I think women, I referred to women as they themselves and men think they are. And I think in general, women are as much you know, suckers of their own image as they are victims of the male image of them. So I meant that literally, women as people think they are. - [Caller] Not just Elaine May, but all the women who- mostly men who do all of the producing and all of the directing. - [Giles] Oh it is, oh yes. Yes, yes, indeed it is. One could count women filmmakers on one hand I think probably those who've made anything large. - [Janet] But you know, in a way I sort of agree with you because I'm thinking in just very personal and really very limited terms but, I was talking this afternoon with a friend who was an officer of a women's club in this area, which is an organization mostly devoted to married women, and they were sending something out in the mailings and one woman wanted to be addressed as Ms on the mailings and the reaction of this other woman, it was not my friend, was that this was something that would only be used by women who couldn't catch husbands, that was the phrase quote unquote. And so my friend had to say well that was not true at all, but you know, women who are comfortable or at any rate perhaps simply clinging to socially defined roles then feel very threatened by the idea that these may be limiting in any way. - [Giles] Sure and let's bear in mind too that women represent a good half the film going audience. - [Janet] That's true. - [Giles] And if the films are made to, they're made for the most you know, commercial possible reasons on the whole and certainly most Hollywood films are- and if someone could demonstrate to a producer, however- you know pig like, sexist or whatever he was that women simply were demanding you know, all at once a new image, well I'm quite sure he'd come up with one. - [Janet] Yeah right. It all boils down the the pocket where that sort of thing is concerned. This is not the same- - [Giles] But they're not demanding a new image, at least not in sufficient numbers I think to assure one. - [Janet] But in large you have to go to the movies 'cause there's nothing else to do. - [Narrator] All right to our telephone listener, does that answer your question or would you want to go on? - [Caller] Yeah, it's pretty much does. If we could just say maybe- women are not what most people think they are- - [Giles] Very well. - [Caller] But here's at least one woman who's really asking for another image. - [Giles] I approve of your idea and I'm prepared to break the generality and say most people. - [Giles] Fair enough, thanks a lot. - [Narrator] Thank you for calling. We're going to take a brief station identification break now. Let me remind you our telephone number is 864-4530. We'll be back with, "A Feminist Perspective" in a moment. Hello, welcome again to "A Feminist Perspective." Our topic tonight is the third installment of a three-part series, "The Image of Women in the Mass Media." We are exploring the image of women as presented by contemporary literature and films. Our guests tonight are Dr. Janet Sharistanian, assistant professor of English here at KU. Mr. Giles Fowler, Kansas City Star film critic and Mr. Chuck Sack, who is in charge of the classical film series here at KU. I think that our caller brought up an interesting point that I'd like to pursue a little further about the participation of women in creating this image. Do indeed women make this image of themselves? And I think we've pretty well established the nature of the image during the first part of the program. - [Chuck] Well I guess maybe the place to start on- on an answer to that question might be with cataloging a few of the women that are currently in involved with making film. We've mentioned Elaine May and other directors are really hard to come by. Agnes Varda would be one- - [Giles] Shirley Clark I was trying to. - [Chuck] Yeah right, Shirley Clark. Susan Sontag- gives us a total of four directors I can think of off the top of my head. - [Giles] Lots of writer's- Eleanor Perry is one, Penelope Gilbert again. - [Chuck] Yeah and in editing, certainly I think it's generally recognized that one of the best editors is a woman, Dede Allen who is responsible for the editing on Arthur Penn's film, "Bonnie and Clyde." But still there are relatively few- in fact even stronger word than few, there are almost no women involved in a film production at the higher levels. - [Giles] Also, Joan Didion made an interesting point in a recent article in the New York Review Of Books, when she wrote about the social structure of Hollywood. It isn't merely a male dominated society, but it's a society that believes that things like polite marriages and all are- you know the real moral verities. It's a society that demands conventional attitudes of its own people. She made the point that the idea of Hollywood society is a free swinging creative for many places- is entirely wrong. It's a stuffy place full of conventional values of all kinds and always has been. Family values. It's full of family ties. This man's son becomes an editor in the film produced by his uncle and so on and so on and so on. - [Chuck] Which brings us to the second half of the answer, or at least the way I would answer it and that is any of the aforementioned women that are involved in making films, or even more than that, any that would become involved in film are ultimately answerable to their producers. And as far as I know, producers are all probably 99.9% male. And actually at the level of finances, sex matters very little. - [Janet] But money matters a lot when you don't have much money. - [Chuck] Yeah and consequently, well, because of the material factor here, the women that do make it are not going to be in any position really to immediately begin making feminist statements. If Elaine May were so inclined, she certainly would have done so in her second film, "Heartbreak Kid" because a new leaf was kind of shaky at best. - [Giles] Jane Fonda is doing her best, but so far she's not quite in the position- she maybe is driving director's crazy these days. - [Narrator] Well what about films made by women strictly for a feminist point of view? - [Giles] There's no such thing. - [Narrator] Well I don't mean at a commercial level. - [Giles] I think there is no such thing on a non commercial level. - [Narrator] Oh I think that there is such things. In the office, we have lists of films and where they are available, films specifically for women and about women including some films that were completely produced by an all woman crew. But they have not achieved any sort of popular success. - [Janet] I don't even think they're meant to achieve popular success. I think that's all gone by the board for these people. - [Narrator] I was reading an interesting article in the Saturday Review from August of 1972 concerning a woman's film festival held in New York City where they had some European films that had been acclaimed as critical successes. They had some art films done by women. Some films strictly stating the feminist point of view. They suggested that they were boycotted by the press in New York City. That The New York Post critic didn't attend, the notice in The New York Times turned up on the obituary page with the feature commentary "Disappearing between coins and gardens." And even with this sporadic attention that some of the films were acclaimed as very, very good and armed with these reviews, the women filmmakers still couldn't get support to make a second film. So would you gentlemen care to comment on the possibility of a conspiracy against some of these types of films as was suggested in the article? - [Chuck] I think a conspiracy might be too strong- - [Janet] That's a bad word these days. - [Giles] Yeah. - [Chuck] But well, instead of going with conspiracy, let's say that chances are very good that this type of a thing, had it been on another topic, would not have received very much attention anyway. That by the board, nonetheless you know- why were these things done? And I think yeah. Again I would say not conspiracy. I think individually probably, The New York Times editors thought, well this has relatively little- - [Giles[ Disinterest, disinterest is better. - [Chuck] Yeah and it you know, it ended up where it still, if the the films were all that good, I'm sure that someone would have chosen to release them theatrically in New York if they felt there was an audience for them. And so you know, it's really hard to say without- - [Janet] It's hard to say since we've never seen any of them. - [Chuck] Without the films coming up for public viewing. - [Giles] I think it's a question of news judgment. I mean, there is simply- we've got to admit that there's relatively little interest in most of these films- you know in just a very quick scan of this thing. I can't imagine a film critic suddenly leaping in the air and saying, "Oh my gosh we've got to get over there and really look this over." It just doesn't look that good really. - [Narrator] I think I'd like to go into the film critic a little bit more deeply but right now we do have a caller. Let me remind our audience the number is 864-4530 and hello, are you still on the line? - [Caller] Yes. I've been trying to think of films that portray women as- that I've enjoyed- that have portrayed women in fairly intelligent ways. And I can think of three or four films that I think have been quite good, that I've really enjoyed or appreciated. But in each case, the women have not been portrayed as very happy women. But my thought on this, was that for the most part, films, that's with contemporary films, which deal with current issues never portray people as very happy. They don't portray men as very happy either. And I was wondering if you could comment- well let me first tell you of what films I'm thinking of. I'm thinking particularly of two Joanne Woodward films. "Rachel, Rachel" a couple of years ago and more recently, "The Effect Of Gamma Rays On The Man In The Moon Marigolds" And I'm also thinking of two Gwendoline Jackson films. "Women In Love" and then a more recent film, which I can't remember the name, which involved the triangle- two men and her. Maybe one of you can remember the film. Anyway I was just wondering if you could comment maybe particularly on the films which I feel treat the problems of women fairly intelligently, but do not portray the women as happy women or content women. - [Giles] Let's see. I'm not sure what kind of comments you want. I don't think it's necessary to portray anybody as particularly happy or content if you're dealing with a situation that's not a happy situation. I'm not entirely sure what the question is. - [Caller] Well, if any of you are familiar with these films- - [Giles] I'm familiar with these films. - [Caller] Or these particular actresses and the parts that the play, I would just be interested in your comments on what's wrong with these images of women. - [Giles] I'm not sure that anything is, except that I suppose my feminist viewpoint, there might be and certainly in, "The Effects Of Gamma Rays On The Man In The Moon Marigolds" the woman is sort of, destroying bitch Goddess type. It's indicated- suggested that it's not her fault at all and she has good instincts, but I can see how some might take issue with that. And Rachel, Rachel" is a woman who's fundamental loneliness is not having a man. And I can see how some issue might be taken with that. She's a school teacher, she has a career. - [Janet] Yeah but that's relevant to "The Effect Of Gamma Rays" too. - [Giles] Yeah. - [Chuck] Well, I think in both cases, that the characters are limited by their own ambitions certainly. So what they want is so limited that they you know, they don't even see any possibilities for themselves and their situation. And so it's hard for these characters who are so limited to be looked upon as being admirable people. - [Janet] Yeah well that's true. But then of course on the other hand, that's almost logical that goes round circles. Cause if you wanna talk- you have the mother in "The Effect of Gamma Rays"- what she wants is simply some sort of decent existence for herself and of course it's so appropriate that she has two daughters and not two sons or a son and a daughter. And no that's not very much but that's what every woman with a husband takes as a birthright essentially or marriage right I guess you'd say. So really, it just circles back on itself you know, and she's stuck and so is the film. And I thought the ending of that film was really sentimental, but I can see that they couldn't, again- they couldn't figure out what to do. It seems where film makers can't figure out what to do with women, they you know, they go into sentimental fantasy. And where novelists can't figure out what to do with women, they drown them. - [Narrator] I think I might be hearing a split across the table here as far as what the men saw in these films and what perhaps what the women saw. - [Janet] I haven't seen that- - [Giles] I'm not so sure. - [Janet] I don't really think so. I think we see the same thing. - [Narrator] I'm thinking for example of "Rachel, Rachel" When I saw it, I saw the 35-year-old school teacher who was very limited but not limited in her own capabilities, but limited by society, by needing to take care of her mother, by teaching in a small town with the role expectations put upon her so that she was forced almost into a childlike existence and tried to break out. And all of this I saw as very true. And then again, they had the ending- she needs a man to help her break out of this kind of role, of this kind of existence. - [Chuck] Well part of your problem too, is not having to do these things for her mother, but the fact that she chooses to do them and that she chooses to stay there. Again, this may be folly memory but as I remember the film, and maybe this is my viewpoint coming into play here. But it seemed to me that, part of what the film kind of suggested was that earlier in her teaching career, she could have gotten away and decided no for herself. She would stay and be the noble child and help her mother. And suddenly she's you know, at this turning point in her life realized that's not what she wants at all but the most you can think of to do to break out of it is not to leave the home, or not to leave her mother but instead to go out and begin at least some type of social life. - [Giles] But she had been living up to social expectations for herself as a teacher with an old mother and so on. - [Janet] It's interesting- that I just finished a teaching with an independent study student in an anthology called "Images Of Women In Literature" and it's edited by Mary Anne Ferguson. And this is an interesting anthology because it's very fat and it has lots of selections in it that you would never stumble across anyplace and by writers that I have literally never heard of, many of them women. And there's a section- it's divided into images, and one section is on the old maid as a spinster. And one of them is about a school teacher who sits in the park on a Sunday and watches everybody go by and feels in a kind of illusion it's just participating in existence because she's watching them. And she, you know, it's the same sort of thing. The single school teacher is always seen in that way and that- there's a young couple at the edge of the park- at the other end of the park bench and they are very rude, and to make remarks about how she's real bitty and what she doing spoiling their Sundays. And the narrator seems to take the viewpoint that indeed she's missing out on life. But in fact she's really rather happy. In other words, if you look at it from her point of view, she's not unhappy. But if you look at it from society's point of view, she's supposed to be unhappy therefore she's gotta be unhappy. But that's especially a ticklish situation because I think even women writers are afraid of dealing with the idea of the aging single woman as opposed to the single woman who's just striding out into a new world at the age of 22 or something like that. - [Chuck] There was another single school teacher that I remember in the film "Billy Jack" and again, if I remember right, Pauline Kael thought that this was one of the few film roles she'd seen that treated the woman intelligently and specifically- the specific problem there was the rape scene in it. And yet the rest of the film was for me, very unsatisfactory. And yet in preparing for this program, I was trying to think of recent examples of realistic women that you know- and their problems that might made somewhat acceptable to feminists and that was the only one that I can think of that would even come halfway close. - [Giles] Did you see "Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here?" The picture about- - [Chuck] Yeah, yeah. - [Giles] As I recall, there was a sympathetic and strong minded- sort of schoolmarm and that one wasn't there. - [Chuck] Yeah played by Katharine Ross. - [Giles] Yeah, that was it. - [Chuck] Yeah but, I dunno there again- maybe the actress is getting in my way there. - [Giles] By the way I'm reminded that, if you want to see any films now that the take a really outrageous position in opposition to everything that the feminist movement's about, well you really have to look at the works of Sam Peckinpah and especially his latest, "The Getaway" in which the educated woman, who is presumably being intellectual equal certainly to her very macho gangster boyfriend, is made into kind of a gun ball and- - [Janet] Well the actress gets in the way there too. - [Chuck] On Peckinpah, I might point out that in the case of "The Ballad Of Cable Hogue" he drew a very fine character out there. - [Giles] All right I'll grant you that, but in "Straw Dogs" though let's- - [Chuck] Oh yeah but that seemed to be a function of her character. I mean her husband is no more admirable than her. - [Giles] Yeah, yeah. - [Janet] Yeah, but that's an interesting kind of dichotomy that you find, where men and women are shown in a relationship to one another where the woman is a troublemaker, the man is never without strength. And so in other words, it becomes an either or kind of thing, Either women are subservient or women are dominating and destructive, but rarely do you find any sort of simple attempt to deal with the possibility that women and men might simply be equals and stuck with the same problems, and you know, the same world. - [Chuck] An interesting counterpart to this would be I think Truffaut who we were talking about before who's women always seem to be much stronger than the men in the couples. - [Giles] Yes, yes. - [Chuck] And particularly maybe, an example of one of his women that might be acceptable would be Catherine in "Jewels And Gems." I've seen it argued in print that she's the- chronologically the first liberated woman to show up in the films. I doubt if I would agree with that myself because I don't think she's that liberated, but at least it's a character that a woman would argue in favor of. - [Giles] The women in "Two English Girls" however, have a very different position toward the man. He's decidedly the dominant character here. Well with one of them, he is decidedly the dominant character- with the other, rather less so, but still in the triangle, he's the strong corner I think. - [Narrator] I think we've been criticizing films and literature for most of the evening and I would like to get into the critic- and the critic's influence on the image of women at this point. I think specifically, I'm addressing this to you Giles, but I think everyone else can have a viewpoint. I have a review here given by Lewis Funke from The New York Times news service. He was reviewing "The Revival" on Broadway of Claire Booth Loose's play, "The Women." And essentially he said that, "This is a feminist play and the performance is rather mediocre." And then he goes on and says, "Well, no matter, the girls are usually nice to look at, if not to listen to". This is in his criticism of the play. It resorts to, "The girls are usually nice to look at if not to listen to". - [Giles] Lewis Funke is about their 19th string critic and- - [Narrator] That's good to hear. - [Giles] And I mean the fact that he could say "The Women" is a feminist play is I think pretty well suggests that, his own intellectual level- it's anything but a feminist play. It's a play that every woman in "The Women" is terribly dependent on a man. The one career girl as I recall, is desperately unhappy. Almost all their conversation revolves around men, home, how to treat their husband, how to keep their husband when he runs off with the other girl and all this kind of thing. They're with fashion, with hair salons, with the places where you go and exercise your body into a firm, trim, man loving perfection and it's in no sense- in no sense a feminist play. It's an absolute outrage against the movement if I can possibly imagine a pro-feminist perspective. - [Narrator] Well this was what I was going to ask you. As a man, as a critic, can you look at a film and imagine it from a feminist perspective? - [Giles] Yes, yes I think so. I don't make a habit of it. I try to look at a film from a- from a perspective of its honesty of its treatment of all people and of all relationships. And if it doesn't seem to live up to some kind of honesty, I don't usually like the film. But I mean- I don't consider myself as a voice of feminism. Perhaps Pauline Kael might qualify or perhaps Judith Crist or the other women who are very big in film criticism. - [Narrator] All right. I think that our time is about up. Right now I'd like to thank our panelists very much tonight. Janet Sharistanian, Giles Fowler, and Chuck Sack. I'd like to invite you to tune into "A Feminist Perspective" next Monday evening and invite you to attend a lecture on the KU campus Thursday evening. Garrett Harding who is lecturer from the University Of California at Santa Barbara will be presenting a lecture on abortion, contraception and ethics. It's Thursday at 7:45 in the forum room of the student union at KU. And now, until next Monday night, thank you for listening. This has been "A Feminist Perspective."