Distance: 3.5 miles
"We live in a country that doesn't like to credit any of its radical movements," Susan Brownmiller says in the documentary film She's Beautiful When She's Angry. "They don't like to admit in the United States that change happens because radicals force it."
Ciwt, went to see that documentary today and is letting Brownmiller's quote and her relationship to it sink in. What Ciwt thinks of radicalism and agitation as mindsets and strategies probably doesn't really matter in the face of a well-deserved recounting and appreciation of the second wave of feminism (after the first wave suffragettes who, in 1920, finally won the 100 year movement to give women the right to vote). That complex, fractious, highly energized movement of the 60's - no matter its detractors - has given us much of the world in which we now live in terms of equal rights, equal pay, reproductive rights, domestic violence, women's health.
A few of the women who were most active are alive on archival film only, and other early activists are presented in those old films as well as in current interviews. And, living or dead, they are an impressive, impassioned, gutsy, determined, resilient, highly intelligent lot indeed. It is worth taking the time to listen to them.
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