Everyday Heroines

Silkwood, Rabbit Proof Fence, North Country

When International Women’s Day comes around, it is always a little depressing to think about where women stand in our society in terms of empowerment, participation, health and image. And, as it relates to this blog, where they are and how they are portrayed in the media and films.  We’ve come a long way, the optimists will say; we’ve got a long way to go and we’re even sliding back, the realists will counter.

The United Nations developed the Gender Inequality Index (GII) to measure women’s disadvantage across 146 countries. The index looks at three dimensions—reproductive health, empowerment,and the labor market. Health is measured by the maternal mortality ratio and the adolescent fertility rate; empowerment by things like secondary and higher education attainment levels or share of parliamentary seats, and labor by participation in the work force. With respect to just this last indicator, in the United States women’s participation in the US labor force reached 60 percent by 2000, however this figure has declined to 46.7 percent and the Department of Labor does not expect it to increase by 2018. It is no wonder that while the United States ranks 4^th among the “Very High Human Development” countries in the United Nations’ Human Development Index, it ranks 47^th  in terms of Gender equality.

It shows. The media and movies certainly reflect this. The Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film found that only 5% of movie directors were women in 2011; this is a decrease from the reported 9% of female movie directors in 1998. This is important not only in terms of women’s presence in the different spheres of movie making, but also because, this source finds, when there was at least one woman involved with directing or writing for a film, there were more female characters on screen.  And this is very relevant: in the 100 top grossing films of 2007, 2008, and 2009, women represented only one-third of speaking characters for all three years.

 Women actors, the report indicates, are relegated mainly to genres like romantic comedy and romantic drama, some documentaries. But what is more, female characters are more likely to be depicted wearing sexy clothing or partially nude, and young women in particular are cast as hypersexualized in films. Historically, female characters are typically younger than their male counterparts, white and more likely to have an employment status that was undefined.

 How important is all this? It certainly helps perpetuate the more demeaning and negative stereotypes of women. This rises to levels of great concern when we realize that, according to the same source, American teenagers spend an average of 10 hours and 45 minutes absorbing media in just one day –including TV, music, movies, internet and magazines. The influence, then, is tremendous. [For more on the media and women, I recommend the web site: http://www.missrepresentation.org]

Thankfully, movies are a wonderful and powerful source to denounce gender inequality and, though  not many, there are some very good films that do just that.  Of growing importance are those films that speak of gender inequality in countries that rank the lowest on the Gender Inequality Index:  films like A Separation, The Circle, Two Women or The Stoning of Soraya M., from Iran; Latin American films like Madeinusa, New Zealand films like Whale Rider, or African films like Moolaadé about female genital mutilation.

There are also some fascinating and strong female characters in films. In the world of fictional characters, we only wish there were more like Alien’s Rippley, Winter’s Bone Ree, Clarice Sterling in The Silence of the Lambs, Louise Sayer in Thelma and Louise,  Lisbeth Salander in the Swedish Millennium Trilogy (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest), and for a younger generation, Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games.

But top most among my favorite films about strong and fascinating women are those based on the outstanding feats of real life, everyday heroines, women like Karen Silkwood  on whom the movie Silkwood was based, exposing blatant worker safety violations in a nuclear plant; Josie Jenson that inspired the film North Country, the woman who brought the first major successful sexual harassment case in the United States, against a mining company; or the three aboriginal girls, Molly Graig, Daisy Graig and Gracie Fields, in Rabbit Proof Fence, who set off on a trek across the Outback, defying the racial cruelty of their time.

Certainly these women, their stories and the films they inspire are what brings out the hopeful and optimistic in us, and make International Women’s Day worth celebrating!

 

 

 

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