[Traversing the rise of second-wave feminism, Catherine Dwyer’s
documentary is an important contribution to an overlooked past]
[[link removed]]

PORTSIDE CULTURE

BRAZEN HUSSIES REVIEW – RECLAIMING THE HISTORY OF AUSTRALIA'S
WOMEN'S LIBERATION MOVEMENT  
[[link removed]]


 

Kath Kenny
November 4, 2020
The Guardian
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
* [[link removed]]

_ Traversing the rise of second-wave feminism, Catherine Dwyer’s
documentary is an important contribution to an overlooked past _

The International Women’s Day march in Sydney in 1975. Brazen
Hussies director Catherine Dwyer has uncovered terrific archival
footage and photos in her documentary. , Photograph: Anne Roberts,
courtesy Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales and Search
Foundation.

 

Three years ago I went searching for historic sites of the Sydney
[[link removed]] women’s
liberation movement. A Glebe terrace that was briefly the movement’s
unofficial headquarters was now an unremarkable cafe where you could
sip one of Sydney
[[link removed]] cheapest coffees
($2.50) and browse old Women’s Weekly magazines. The site of
Sydney’s first public women’s liberation meeting now appeared to
be a massage parlour.

If these places had been the birthplace of a political party, I
thought, these buildings might now be museums. There would, at least,
be plaques on the street. Brazen Hussies, a new documentary about the
Australian women’s liberation movement, is an important contribution
to redressing this absent history. As second-wave activist Margot Nash
remarks in the film’s opening minutes: “History has to be told
over and over again.” First-time director Catherine Dwyer was a
co-producer on She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry – Mary Dore’s
2014 documentary about the US movement, prompting Dwyer’s
realisation that film-makers hadn’t chronicled Australia’s
movement.

An International Women’s Day march in Melbourne (date
unknown). Photograph: Anne Roberts, courtesy Mitchell Library, State
Library of New South Wales and Search Foundation.

Brazen Hussies adds depth and breadth to the second-wave stories of
our popular imagination: consciousness-raising circles in the suburbs,
femocrats seizing power in government, Germaine Greer urging a female
orgasm-led revolution. The film’s focus is the movement’s key
campaigns. While their brothers and lovers were dying in Vietnam,
early women’s liberationists organised against women perishing in
backyard abortions. Covering domestic violence, equal pay and
childcare battles, it also reminds us change can be glacial.

Images of Merle Thornton and Rosalie Bogner chaining themselves to the
men-only public bar at Brisbane’s Regatta Hotel and Zelda D’Aprano
chaining herself to Melbourne’s Commonwealth Building demonstrate
how performance and spectacle were key to many of the movement’s
successes. Protestors holding aloft a “Glory Box” coffin, or
boarding trams and paying 80% fares, helped draw attention to
women’s liberation ideas, which spread (as one interviewee says)
like “wildfire”.

[Elizabeth Reid sitting with Gough Whitlam]

Single mother Elizabeth Reid with Gough Whitlam. Reid became the
world’s first government advisor on women’s issues. Photograph:
ABC Library Sales

The preview session I attended began with a short film about the punk
rock group Pussy Riot and their stage show about their invasion of a
Moscow cathedral and imprisonment. The two films’ juxtaposition led
me to reflect how rarely (if ever) the women’s liberation movement
is credited as a punk movement. But women’s liberationists squatted
in vacant Anglican church houses to establish a women’s refuge; they
graffitied slogans (“Lesbians are lovely”) and threw bras on
statues at Parliament House, and they gave police the name Vera Figner
(a Russian revolutionary) when they were thrown into paddy wagons to
avoid prosecution.

There was a DIY sensibility to the movement. The 1970s saw an
explosion of women’s creativity as women wrote poetry, started bands
and taught themselves how to use movie cameras and stage plays. But
while airtime is given to the poet Kate Jennings, and to the
film-makers Martha Ansara and Jeni Thornley, Brazen Hussies doesn’t
explore their creative works. Bands such as Toxic Shock and Clitoris
Band do, however, feature in a rousing soundtrack, and we do get a
look at a short film by Margot Nash and Robin Laurie. Gloriously
naming themselves the Anarcho-Surrealist Insurrectionary Feminists
(ASIF), their film featured a stark-naked Nash and Laurie hurling
tomatoes at their camera lens.

Brazen Hussies adds depth and breadth to the second-wave feminist
stories of our popular imagination. Photograph: State Library of
NSW/Peter Dobrovits courtesy of Mitchell Library, State Library of New
South Wales and Courtesy Peter Dobrovits.

Rightly picking up on today’s preoccupations, Brazen Hussies ably
shows the women’s liberation movement’s ongoing failure to address
black women’s concerns. In the 1970s as now, a racist “justice”
system sees Indigenous domestic violence victims facing a double
jeopardy. In archival footage, Dr Naomi Mayers takes a movement
meeting to task for ignoring the oppression of black men and women,
while in a contemporary interview Pat O’Shane discusses the
movement’s “unconscious” racism. At just 90 minutes long and
covering 1965-1975, it inevitably tears through many key events, with
a focus on Sydney and Melbourne stories. The role migrant and
working-class women played (an important one, as the recent Women
[[link removed]] of Steel documentary
shows) is skirted around.

The film balances critique with celebration. While Asio files talked
about the “Women’s Liberation Army”, many of these
“warriors” were 20-something single mothers. Single mother
Elizabeth Reid became the world’s first government advisor on
women’s issues, and we hear Reid confessing to wearing knickers
emblazoned with a woman’s lib clenched fist symbol to her job
interview with Whitlam. The movement was, however, generally sceptical
of stars and leaders, and appropriately many interviewees aren’t
well known (Anne Summers features though, and in 1970 footage, an
aviator glasses-wearing Summers looks like Australia’s answer to
Gloria Steinem).

Dwyer has uncovered terrific archival footage and photos to complement
contemporary interviews shot in a traditional documentary style of
talking heads in serene lounge rooms. This approach gives these
figures and events their due, cementing their place in the canon
alongside_ his_ stories. But as an insurrectionary movement, I
craved a cinematic _form _that embodied punk’s up-yours,
rebellious spirit. This important film (supported partly by
crowdfunding) will, however, be a defining work for some time. And I
suspect my criticism says less about the film than it does about the
impossible expectations we can place on a much-anticipated work about
women.

_• Brazen Hussies is out in Australian cinemas now_

Support The Guardian

Available for everyone, funded by readers

Contribute
[[link removed]] 

Subscribe
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
* [[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web [[link removed]]
Submit via email
Frequently asked questions [[link removed]]
Manage subscription [[link removed]]
Visit portside.org [[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 



########################################################################

[link removed]

To unsubscribe from the xxxxxx list, click the following link:
[link removed]