This week we’d like to promote She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry by Mary Dore & Nancy Kennedy. This is going to be the first documentary to chronicle the birth of women’s liberation in the 1960’s. It’s actually quite surprising that a film like this hasn’t been made yet, but it’s definitely something we should all know about. The project is currently at $22,674 of their $75,000 goal with 17 days to go. Please show your support by donating here, and read more after the jump.
She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry tells the story of the brilliant and often outrageous women who challenged women’s roles in the late 1960’s, starting what became the Women’s Liberation movement. Back then, women couldn’t get birth control without a marriage license, job ads in the newspaper were divided between “Female Wanted” (meaning typist, nurse, housekeeper) and “Male Wanted” (everything else), and women couldn’t get a credit card or mortgage without their husband’s signature. In New York, a woman who was raped couldn’t bring charges without an eyewitness to the crime!
The women in She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry changed all that – by organizing. In the mid-1960’s, Betty Friedan and others formed NOW, the National Organization for Women. At the same time, younger women from civil rights and antiwar groups began meeting – dissatisfied with being treated like second class citizens within their own movements. Soon “consciousness–raising” groups popped up all over the country. What began as personal discontent became political action. A tsunami followed, where a women’s meeting might have started with a dozen women, and at the next meeting there would be a hundred!
