Worth: $14.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Various
Intro:
…a good resource for schools and for anyone interested in social history and in Australia more generally.
It is both the reward and curse of history that time moves on and the red-hot issues of yesteryear often seem tame or insignificant to the present. But, then, to quote George Santayana’s famous dictum, “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”, so, maybe there is some point in keeping in mind the struggles that got us here.
Documentarian Catherine Dwyer certainly thinks so in presenting this study of Australian Second Wave feminists in the 1970s. One suspects that Dwyer has mostly gone with the recollections of those that she knew and who are close to hand. Three or four women provide most of the interview clips. It has been said that the 1960s happened in the 1970s in Australia, and it is clear from Dwyer’s timeline that the second wave feminism really took off here in the 1970s. The film is essentially a series of solo interview talking heads interspersed with enjoyable handheld footage of the various events that happened in that formative decade.
Interestingly, it was a male prime minister – Gough Whitlam – who helped to get many of the reforms on to the statute book. Not least of these was ensuring that university education was paid for by the state (those were the days), which enabled many bright women for the first time to get into higher education. It is also perhaps hard for young men and women today to imagine how curtailed women’s lives were in Australia in the preceding decades. The women in the film, now in their sixties and seventies, remember the 1950s as a stifling time. As they tell us, women then were not only largely confined to the home, they were economically dependent upon men and socially positioned to seek their satisfaction in securing a good marriage and keeping their husbands happy. Clearly things had to change.
As implied, Dwyer’s chronology is fairly linear, taking us through the shaping of the movement from the early rallies (some heart-warming and nostalgic footage here), to the consciousness-raising groups and then the parliamentary campaigns such as the Women’s Electoral Lobby. As is widely acknowledged, the cracks started to appear when the radical feminists split away from their socialist-inspired sisters to pursue the path of separatism. Aboriginal women also provide an uncomfortable reminder that the early movement was mostly middle class and white.
This is a history that shouldn’t be lost. The documentary will seem quaint perhaps to young people today, but one could imagine it would still be a good resource for schools and for anyone interested in social history and in Australia more generally.
