The Women of THE CROWN

Elizabeth II    

 

 

 

 

 

Claire Foy, Olivia Colman as Elizabeth II     

 

 

With the array of powerful women inhabiting the television series THE CROWN, there is no question which one of them is the center of the universe. However, rather than present a hagiographic documentary of the current queen, Elizabeth II, the series offers insights into history by taking the viewer through scenes relating to world events beginning with Elizabeth's marriage and coronation. Elizabeth wears the crown, and in doing so, she accepts the weight of acknowledging it is her God-given right to do so. Right there, we lower-case democrats puzzle at the concept--which THE CROWN invites us to do. It is clear the writers have an agenda of illuminating the sometimes inscrutable behavior and attitudes of all the royals, and, as the 20th century unfolds before us in the series, forgotten tales and apparently insignificant sidelights take on new meaning.

We learn not only about Elizabeth and her nuclear family, but also of incidents in the lives of the women around her including her sister Margaret (portrayed by Vanessa Kirby and later by Helena Bonham Carter). Princess Anne, the royal daughter, is captured valiantly by Erin Doherty. Season 4, airing now in the U.S. brings us Emma Corrin as Diana Spencer, Gillian Anderson as Margaret Thatcher, and Emerald Fennell as Camilla Parker-Bowles. 

All these characters are known to us but not quite as they are shown here. This Princess Margaret, whom we have seen in newsreels as physically attractive and confident, if a bit rebellious, comes over as self-centered and small-minded, but always a trifle more vulnerable than anyone else, and perhaps consequently more human. To present the many stories, dialogues between two people that illustrate a relationship or further the story line, may be unlikely ever to have happened. Yet something similar surely must have--so we are drawn into the stories, scene by scene.  

At first, we are told it is all about Elizabeth. Her father tells her new husband, "She is your job now," and so it goes as the series proceeds. There are bumps in the marriage but the couple remain committed. Philip is complex and not always transparent or lovable, yet Elizabeth rises above the everyday conflicts and challenges as she must. Whether or not the real Elizabeth is as insightful is a question, but her ability to remain confident and unbending would be daunting to any adversary. She is disarmed by Jacqueline Kennedy, only to be hurt days later learning Mrs. Kennedy spoke rudely of her. She never masters the demands of motherhood, apparently because she has no tools to do so, having been raised in the bubble she was. Her needy son is a mystery to her, and not one she has much interest in solving. At one point she marvels that her husband has the ability weep, as shedding tears has never been possible for her. She is above it all, and that is difficult work for woman or man.

She is not unaware of what is happening around her, and there is a scene late in the series in which she asks her daughter Anne to give her the details about Charles and his unhappy marriage to Princess Diana. Anne lays it out precisely, mainly with the phrase, "Diana is young for her age and Charles is old for his age, and they should not be together." The conflict springs from the fact that Elizabeth was never a good mother, and being asked overtly, as she is in the series by Diana, for maternal solace and affection, she is as offended as she is perplexed.  There is an episode with scenes of genuine warmth and love between Diana and Charles, but the two are in reality so mismatched we know it will not last. We have, of course, the advantage of knowing how it will turn out--pleasant as the love scene is, we know better.

THE CROWN does present, in no small part through its female characters, a question of whether the reality is that royalty creates unconquerable pressures on all who surround it. We see a stoic Margaret Thatcher attempting to foist her fierce world view onto a frozen monarch trying to suppress her own shock. We see a princess sister throwing royal tantrums as a way to wrest power and significance on a par with her sibling, whom the state declared entitled to it years before. We see a prince as a lonely boy growing up confused about his own competence and yearning for the support of either parent. We see Elizabeth lavishing her concern and compassion only on her horses and dogs. 

We can marvel at the pageantry, the tradition--the beauty even--of having monarchs to observe the government of a nation without the ability to participate in it except ceremoniously. But what the institution of the monarchy itself does for anyone is left to ponder. They are just people, after all, who happened to be in a certain place at a certain time.  The only thing special about any of them is that they have been indoctrinated with the view from birth that they are special and demand respect without a clue of how to earn it and without any levers of real power. 

The moment early in the series when Elizabeth makes her vow to her god to defend the crown she will wear is probably the most important revelation we are to get. It is the solemn testimony, given by English monarchs for centuries, that endows this particular one with a kind of divinity that transcends time and feels completely anachronistic in the 21st century.

 

 

 

 

Finding Her Own Way

Anya Taylor-Joy as a Chess Prodigy 

Beth Harmon. a child left to navigate her own life when her mother is killed in an auto accident and she is spared, is eight years old, bright but not outgoing, and on her own. Her story, a fiction so bizarre that it rings true, is the basis of the Netflix 7-part series The Queen's Gambit. 

The series presents her life in flashbacks and straight narrative as Beth grows from confused childhood to extraordinary fame as an expert in the prestigious, challenging, masculine milieu of a highly-rated chess player, with its own rules and boundaries. A Dickensian tale, set in Kentucky in the early 1960s and the larger world, the title refers to a chess move Beth masters early on. 

We see in flashbacks young Beth being coached to learn to live her life by herself, by a mother who even she senses is a little off, an angry recluse who knows her time with her daughter is going to end—and by her own devices. Beth learns to harden herself as she observes the dark world around her. She is in an orphanage, and the grownups in her orbit are not supportive (much less loving). She happens upon the janitor in the basement, where she has been sent to clean erasers, and this man is playing chess by himself, every spare moment he has.

Forced by circumstances to find her own way through life, almost magically Beth persuades him (in an excellent acting turn by Bill Camp, spot-on perfect for the role) to play the game with her. Mr. Shaibel is noncommital to the point of being stern, but it is clear he is well aware that his student is light years better at the game than anybody he has ever played.  

There is something very appealing about this stony child, and we are swept into her life as she makes big mistakes and little ones--meets fascinating people but is not taken in by them--and travels the world of the early 1960s, enlivening the once-esoteric sphere of chess championships and makes us feel a part of them. A very moving section of her story is when, as a young teenager, she is adopted away from the orphan home and into a somewhat typical American home of the day, and ends up bonding with her adoptive mother, a very convincing trapped 1960s housewife, played by Marielle Heller. This mother figure is clearly flawed, but a dear, lost human being as much in need of mentoring as her adopted daughter is. Beth as a child is portrayed by two different actresses, so like Ms. Taylor-Joy I had trouble believing she hadn't played all three.We watch the men who crack the shell of Beth Harmon,  chess masters all, and see her development as a full person by the end of the series. Actress Moses Ingram helped humanize Beth by being a friend to her, and in their individual ways so did Harry Melling, Joseph Fortune-Lloyd, and Thomas Brodie-Sangster. All these characters taught Beth something, even if it was not what they thought they were teaching her. 

But it's really all about Beth Harmon, a young woman who had to find her own guideposts and stumbling blocks, and with the outstanding actress Anya Taylor-Joy at the helm, The Queen's Gambit is a fine ride. Based on a novel by a man, Walter Tevis, and produced by two other men, Scott Frank  and Allan Scott, nevertheless I saw this as a woman's movie, life from the viewpoint of an empowered and brilliant woman, defining life on her own terms, and as that it was totally satisfying.

Bananas Revisited

 

Once upon a time Woody Allen was a witty comic with a burning desire to live the life he'd seen in the movies, and also to make movies of the kind he'd seen and grown up with--sophisticated New York movies, with glittering people doing mysteriously sophisticated things and living magical lives made real on the screen. 

He scored a career in show business as a teenager by submitting one-liners to newspaper columnists who inhabited the world he dreamed of, and gradually met and worked with some of the storied names in that business, like Abe Burrows and Danny Simon. He wrote for television comedians and had a turn or two of his own in standup comedy, bringing down the house with the paradox of his own image--a homely little klutz with a brilliant mind and the clear yearning to appear debonair while tripping over the furniture. He could articulate this like no one else of his generation and it wasn't long, in show business years, before he was starring in movies he wrote for this character, this Hugh Hefner wannabe who unfortunately looked more like Arnold Stang. Bananas was one of the first movies he made, and even then, he thought of it as meaningless slapstick. He says in his memoir Apropos of Nothing that he was astonished it was taken as a political satire in Europe--writing that his intention was nothing more than to make people laugh. There are shades of the Marx Brothers, all three personified in Allen himself, and the movie, seen today, even foreshadows some of the serious work he was to produce later. There are leering male-chauvinist jokes (and no doubt Allen is a typical male chauvinist of his day--remember I said Hugh Hefner rather than Cary Grant), visual gags--I can't even explain to today's audiences why his J. Edgar Hoover in Bananas was one of the funniest images ever in the movies--a love story with the actress who was his muse for years (Louise Lasser, who projects an earnestness shining through her waif-like dependency), spoofs of television's obsession with sports, jokes about breasts, jokes about child molesters, and an irreverent attitude about everything. Allen was adroit in his movements, graceful even. He runs, jumps, falls into manholes--and in the trial scene toward the end, cross-examining himself as the witness and prosecutor, leaps back and forth, switching character while doing a brief dual role .

Watching Bananas, I can see why Woody Allen makes some women uneasy. Men of his generation were pretty frank about what they found attractive in the opposite sex, and Woody joked about it openly and sometimes in a vulgar way. A man who looks like that and seems to have a healthy sex drive (and doesn't mind verbalizing it) is automatically suspect, especially today. In Bananas there is a split-second on screen in which he, as the director of the film, spoofs that very concept. The character Allen is playing has managed to find and seduce a girl, and he's way more in love with her than she is with him. She's kicking him to the curb and he's angry about it. In the locker room with his male buddies, who are fairly good-looking guys, Allen fumes to a cohort, "Can you imagine a guy like me being dropped by a woman?" The set-up has both men looking at the camera, and Allen not seeing the look on the handsome face of the man behind him. It's the perfect example of a person looking askance. That Allen wrote the scene and directed it as he did speaks volumes. I'm sure he didn't have to tell the actor how to look at him. I laughed out loud--and, as I said, it was just a few seconds of screen time.

This movie came out at the beginning of his transition from standup comedy to a film career. He dismisses Bananas today as pointless comedy, but it was much cleverer than anything of its kind at the time, and it launched him as a movie actor, a writer, and a director. Looking at it now one cannot help but think of what a brilliant career he has had and regret that, although he is still producing films, they are not distributed in the United States. Now in his eighties, Woody is a pariah in Hollywood, because of what is to me a step too far in the "MeToo" movement. The story of his downfall is juicy, and he does not come off particularly well, but he deals with it all in detail in Apropos of Nothing. He made some mistakes, and no doubt some of them caused some pain--but his child molestation rap was fraudulent, and he has been happily married for some 20 years. The body of his work is equal to anything Hollywood has ever come up with. He continues to work on movies that get a good reception in Europe.

If you don't know Woody Allen's movies, or if like me you saw Bananas in 1971 but have little memory of it, it's a good way to discover the Woody Allen who used to keep us laughing. The list is long, and worth exploring.

Hepburn Bends Gender: Sylvia Scarlett

 In 1935, elegant young star Katharine Hepburn was hot property. She chose challenging roles and on just about every front she conquered Hollywood. And then she made Sylvia Scarlett, a wacky mess of a movie that confused critics and audiences, but has held up over time and is still as confounding and delightful as it ever was. She and George Cukor, who directed it, said in an interview in the 1970s that it was the worst movie they'd ever done.

I beg to differ. I was in my 30s when I saw it--I had a place in my heart for the films of my parents' generation, and still do--and I was captivated. I recently saw it again and it still works. The concept is dubious; Hepburn and her father, (played by Edmund Gwynn) are broke, unprincipled, and down on their luck to the point of desperation. They decide as they are running from law, that their best bet is to have her, a nubile if naive beauty, disguise herself as a boy. Hepburn comes to life in drag, effervescent as usual, but liberated by having to suppress her feminine charm as much as possible. She look smashing in men's wear, but it takes some conscious suspending of disbelief to accept that she is getting away with it.

 

That, of course, is part of the fun. Another aspect of it is that the pair meet up with a successful confidence man, played by the young, athletic, energetic and acrobatic Cary Grant, who takes a shine to them and shows them the tricks of the trade. He is a cockney low life in this one, a bit of a charming rotter, and he plays it to the hilt. The chemistry between Hepburn and Grant is palpable and foreshadows their years of work together to come in more traditional material. 

Sylvia become Sylvester, and although Cary Grant's character is suspicious, he goes along with it and the trio pair up with a lady who the old man is almost literally crazy about. Four con artists in a trailer, wreaking havoc wherever they go, and having a marvelous time until Sylvester realizes that he's really a woman and falls in love with a rascally artist (Brian Aherne)  who already has a woman or two or three. The plot gets very twisted as the movie goes on, but it doesn't lose its verve. I would recommend you watch this one--I'd like to see what a contemporary viewer would think, having little or no context for the complexity of the movies of the 1930s, and the inventiveness of young actors on their way to becoming movie stars when the medium itself was free and easy.

A BOMBSHELL of a Movie

(Inset: Megyn Kelly), Charlize Theron, Nicole Kidman, (Inset: Gretchen Carlson

From a Feminist Viewpoint:

 

You see them in their saucy 5-inch heels and revealing tight skirts, the female icons of sex and sophistication, striding through the offices of big money-making corporations for industries like publishing, fashion, real estate, financial planning, broadcasting, and other high profile, high powered international businesses. Bombshell is a movie about such women, in the field of television broadcasting. 

It’s not an accident that the setting for the film is the offices of Fox News. I confess to have little knowledge of Fox News and just a faint awareness of the performers who inhabit the newsroom. It is not the kind of television that appeals to me because of its politics, but it is in the peripheral vision of any American with a television set. It is a propaganda outlet, spewing the venom that the Republican party has been generating for decades, and doing it successfully, largely by exploiting the sex appeal of its female stars.  Bombshell lets us get to know those females and observe them in their daily lives, which are pretty extraordinary, like it or not. 

The dazzling Chalize Theron plays the dazzling Megyn Kelly, who topped the Fox News lineup of beautiful, steely women pundits for more than a decade. Kelly herself could have come from Central Casting as a hard-headed, hard-hitting and opinionated bitch-on-wheels type in any movie, and Theron’s transformation is pretty dazzling too. She looks like her, and has mastered the rapid-fire delivery of lines employed by purveyors of broadcast news in the 21st century. The movie opens with a cozy walk around the newsroom with Kelly (Theron) as a sleek, informative guide, and she wins us over from that intro, which captures the newsroom vibe and sets the tone for an exciting ride. In the mix comes Nicole Kidmann as Gretchen Carlson, the former Miss America already hitting her peak at the network and beginning a shaky ride downward. 

Margot Robbie, a playing a pretty little thing, (and fictional character) has just gotten her dream job starting at the network, and reveals that she and her parents adore Fox News and that she is desperate to make it big. She shares a cubicle with Kate McKinnon playing an outlier, keeping as low a profile as she can at the network because she is a lesbian, not a beauty queen--and may actually be a Democrat. She takes a shine to the Robbie character and they have a touching bedroom scene that reveals the heart of the film.

John Lithgow, as Roger Ailes, founder and CEO of Fox, is appropriately repulsive, knowledgeable, (“It’s a visual medium,” he says to neophyte beauties as he undresses them with his eyes in initial interviews, and asks them to stand up and “twirl” for him). Lithgow comes over as unscrupulous as the villain in any piece must be. The formidable Lithgow plays it to the hilt.

It’s fun to watch actors portraying real-life people, as Richard Kind does a credible Rudy Guiliani, Allison Janney give us Susan Estrich, and the newsroom swarms with semi-familiar faces as the story moves forward. Holland Taylor, uncredited for some reason, does a convincing turn as Ailes’ keeper of secrets. There is one sympathetic male character, also fictional (a composite of several real men, we are told) played by the very interesting Rob Delaney. There is a moment or two of poignant revelation, as both he and McKinnon say, at different times in the picture, that if Fox News drops them or is itself brought down, there is nowhere else for them to go. “Nobody will hire us--because we worked for Fox News.” 

Intrigue abounds as we see what’s under the rock once it’s moved. I found myself moved at the point in the story when the women at the network are speaking out about Ailes and his treatment of them. Robbie’s character calls her one friend, Jess (McKinnon) in tears because she’s talking with a lawyer about Ailes’ demands. This is a very convincing and heart-rending scene, superbly acted, yet I found myself thinking, “Why do I sympathize with this character? I don’t like women like this…” and then I realized that it was really what the movie was about.  

Its basic axe to grind is not the reprehensible behavior of Roger Ailes. It is about what happens to beauty queens when they achieve their goals. Practically all the female characters have spent their lives grooming themselves for the ultimate position they desire. Intelligent, pretty, ambitious, they have molded themselves into the kind of women who succeed, yet, at the pinnacle, they are shown the reality that the power they may have desired is going to be doled out in small portions by old white men who have their own prurient interests in mind. That dynamic is never on the screen, but it is clear who is participating, who is looking the other way, and why. 

The film was ably written by Charles Randolph and directed by Jay Roach, both males clearly with a hypersensitivity to the plight of women. It is snappily paced, superbly performed, and slick as a whistle. Its surface is glossy, yet for all its glitz it tells a tale of the ultimate betrayal of women in the workplace.  

Dirty John and His Women

Connie Britton and Eric Bana in Dirty John

From a Feminist Viewpoint:

John Meehan was a charmer. You could tell by looking there was something a little off about him, but if you were a vulnerable woman that "something" was easy to overlook--he was an accomplished spellbinder with a sordid past that he papered over quite deftly. He regarded the women he conned as projects, and he had the skills to pull off his myriad games until his ultimate comeuppance, which, in the Dirty John true-crime anthology now available on Netflix, feels inevitable but the series keeps the viewer on the edge.

For all the fascination of the creature at the center of this, the series is really about women. It's mother-daughter relationships, man-woman relationships, and the navigating of women's roles in the contemporary world. Eric Bana as John sashays into the life of the sophisticated interior designer Debra Newell, played by Connie Britton. The actors could not have been better in their roles--Bana, playing Meehan as manipulative and subtle, and Britton, playing his prey as calm, thoughtful, and just a bit dim. This Debra has the quality so many women have in the area of relationships: she trusts too much and needs too much--exactly what makes her a target for a manipulative and sly person. Basically competent and strong, she thinks she has it right, but she does not. She has been married four times and is actively dating men she meets at online sites. Her two daughters see through Meehan at once, and despise him, just as he, knowing they are onto him, casts them as his enemy as he worms his way into the affections of their mother. Debra confides in her mother, played to perfection by Jean Smart as kindly and forgiving--a Christian ideal of a mother--giving bad advice all around as she mistakenly falls for any man who gives her daughters the time of day. The interaction of this brood, revolving around a toxic man, tells volumes about the psychology of women raised in the 20th century living out their lives in the 21st. Debra and her mother are putty in the hands of a sociopath.

I recommend watching all the series, so I won't give away any spoilers. Much of it is fairly easy to see coming, but there are ups and downs and sideways twists. As in most narratives these days, the story is told through flashbacks and flashes forward so there are scenes that give backstory long after we'd given up on learning it. It's well written and believable and it's easy to see that there are a number of women at the helm. I would think a man watching it might say, "I hope they don't think all men are like that," but I'm pretty sure we've all, male and female, known this behavior in lesser degrees in real people. Dirty John is the beginning of a long-overdue conversation, and will prompt (I hope) more evaluation of personality types and more cautious behavior all around.

The second entry in the series is The Betty Broderick Story, which came to an end in July.  The next season will begin with more episodes about Broderick, whose tale is ongoing. She too had the wrong idea about a man being her salvation, but she is the toxic one in the relationship--and her thinking is baffling and sociopathic. Trying to redeem herself in the public's eye she is probably not a bad subject for contemplation of just how twisted a mind can be--and how cleverly such a mind can manipulate others.

The Fascination of Betty Broderick

From a Feminist Viewpoint:

In the middle of the night in 1989, she made her way to the bedroom of her ex-husband and his new wife and killed both of them in their sleep. She never denied having done it. The question all these years has been "What is wrong with her?"

Elizabeth Ann Broderick clearly had something wrong with her. She had been a beauty and an A student in high school, married a promising medical student she adored and put him through med school and then law school, bore him children, and lived the picture-perfect married life as expected of children born in the post-WWII baby boom. He rose in his profession, the family vacationed in Aspen--and she had all the money in the world she wanted.  She was charming and beautiful, if a bit of a drama queen, and swore that all she had ever wanted to be was a "mommy."

There were cracks in the marriage all along, and nothing either she or her high-powered lawyer husband Dan did much of anything to resolve issues. Buying something, having another baby, moving to a more prestigious neighborhood--none of the traditional solutions did anything but fan the flames of her discontent.

Watching The Betty Broderick Story series, a part of the Dirty John on USA Network, I was thrust back to the 1992 series A Woman Scorned, starring Meredith Baxter-Birney as Betty Broderick. The earlier series did not give much time to Dan Broderick, but focused on Betty, and portrayed her as irrational, on the surface almost as much as deep down. Baxter-Birney's rage burned through the small screen, and her ability to display a cool exterior whenever it was needed was extraordinary acting indeed. The new series shows us that Dan was no paragon of mental health either, but at least balanced enough to see that his home situation was getting out of hand. He tried to limit the children's exposure to her, the more violent her moods and language became, and it would seem he hoped that at best one day she would leave them and him alone. Betty was unpredictable; Dan was rock-hard but at least better at human transactions.

In 2020, with the tightly-wound Amanda Peet playing Betty Broderick, we see a young couple working hard to fulfill the American fantasy of married life, and it takes a while before the picture becomes a horror movie with the ring of truth. Betty is a Jekyll-Hyde character, female 1980s version, who cannot sleep at night and feasts on the rage she holds for her husband. She goes to their former home, yanks his expensive clothes out of the closet, and burns them in the backyard. She drives her car into the front of his new house. She calls him hundreds of times, leaving obscene messages on his answering machine, and when talking to her children on the phone uses vile language about their father and his fiancée relentlessly, all the while they, in tears, beg her to stop.

This is more than a story of the worst marriage known in U.S. history. It is more than a story of a woman becoming unhinged at losing her husband and children. It is more than a story of what Betty Friedan called "the problem that has no name," a woman  who bought the myth of marriage being the most rewarding career she might have and finding herself depressed and unfulfilled. These factors are all part of it but is something else here--two people living out the same madness, a folie a deux, feeding each other's mental illness in the only way they can understand. She fears losing him and she drives him away. But it's more than that; he acts out her fears by having an affair with a younger, more desirable version of her. In the real-life story, Betty gained weight and her anger made her physically unattractive--how they will achieve that in this nuanced reimagining of the earlier series I do not know. (The final episode on Season 1 airs tonight, July 14, and the series will continue with her story next season.)

Betty's illness is at the heart of the story. She becomes a different person through her mental deterioration. She cannot accept her part in Dan's inevitable choice to leave her. From the 2020 vantage point one cannot help wondering why this woman did not get help sooner--even though we do know that the personality disorders (Wikipedia says narcissism and histrionic personality disorder) she had are not exactly curable. Today there are anxiety drugs and antidepressants that probably would have helped, and maybe a brain scan and a few months at a rehab-spa would have done some good. As it was, she rejected therapy and chose to indulge her obsession with her own anger, fear, and hatred until it won out, once and for all.

We don't understand all we know about the tawdry tale, but it will fascinate us until the day we are able to put a name to it.

What Is a Male Chauvinist?

From a Feminist Viewpoint:

Whether or not you ever heard of a male chauvinist, you do need to know about them. The phrase has been all but replaced, but it still rises to the surface occasionally.

Nicolas Chauvin was a legendary soldier in the First Army of the French Republic and in the Grand Armee de Napoleon. He is said to have been wounded in battle 17 times, resulting in considerable maiming and disfigurement.  A noble fellow, Chauvin adored his commander and loved his homeland even more--if that were possible--so much so that Napoleon personally granted him a Sabre of Honor and a pension of a few hundred francs. He is thought to have served in the Old Guard at the Battle of Waterloo, and to have shouted "The Old Guard dies but does not surrender!" implying that ultimate blind and unquestioned devotion to one's country was not only a good thing, but the expected thing.

 

There is some doubt the real Nicolas Chauvin ever existed, but is, rather, a folk hero emblematic of a kind of fanatic patriotism whose zealotry bordered on a personality disorder rather than genuine heroism. The French word Chauviniste was coined to cover extreme patriotism, but, as Bonaparte fell from favor, the term evolved to mean a mindless bias on almost any topic.

 

It was not until the late 19th century that chauvinism took on the meaning "excessive or prejudiced support for one's own cause" and came to used in contexts other than nationalism. As the Women's Liberation movement grew in the early 1960s in the United States, the phrase "male chauvinist" was born. A man who patronized, disparaged, or otherwise denigrated females in the belief that they were inferior to males and thus deserving of less than equal treatment or benefit was termed a male chauvinist by women who were in the vanguard of the fight for women's rights. The word "pig" was added to the phrase, as more people used the word pig to describe a group perceived as the enemy--as the counterculture of the day used the term pig to characterize brutal police. 

 

Now, rather than male chauvinist, we're more likely to use the word misogynist, which means a man who hates women. A male chauvinist was likely to deny he hated women--frequently responding that, to the contrary, he "loved women too much," which indicated an extremely skewed definition of the word love.  If they, as healthy heterosexuals did, participated in sex with women, such men equated the act with love, in spite of the fact that the two are hardly one and the same. Misogyny manifests in numerous ways, including sex discrimination, overt hostility,  patriarchy, male privilege, the belittling of women, the disenfranchisement of women, violence against women, and the sexual objectification of women. This behavior had been rampant in the 20th century, and women's objections to it came as a total surprise to the men who were criticized for it as women began to revolt in mid-century. In the 1950s and carrying over to the 1960s and 70s, women were portrayed in advertising and pop culture as objects, playthings, and obedient mental deficients. We were either overtly sexual objects or happy housewives. Billboards and bus cards used images of women to sell all manner of items, from wine ("Had Any Lately?") to automobiles. Throughout the 60s many of those ads were critiqued by graffiti saying THIS INSULTS WOMEN. If an attractive female office worker in a major city walked past a construction site on her way to the office, she was likely to be bombarded with catcalls and profanity by the macho men operating shovels and heavy machinery. They were male chauvinists, all--exercising their right to exert their masculine impulses. The fight for women's rights and the subsequent movement against male domination and exploitation was sometimes confusing.  

 

Society has made great strides since then. However, male chauvinism is not dead; it's not even asleep. It survives in many guises, and the exposure of more of its facets does boggle the mind. We've lifted the stone to uncover sex trafficking (known in the days of the Feminism of the 19th century as "white slavery," yet not spoken about much for almost a century.) We are pondering the value of pornography. We know about the psychological grooming of young girls--and boys--and the exploitation of them by their teachers and priests. Today we can examine the phenomenon scientifically. But at the root of it all is the acceptance of male supremacy and power. This stems from the prevailing Victorian attitude of male superiority, which we are bound to find out is a baseless concept that has been allowed credence for a couple of centuries too long. 

 

We are inundated with new names for things. New phrases for old behavior pepper our conversations. Machismo has become toxic masculinity, simple courtesy and civility ia now known as political correctness, and is not seen as a good thing. 

 

Things have changed somewhat, and at least we are talking about them differently. We are offended by the overt exploitation of women for the pleasure of men. We cringe at the portrayal of women as merely sex objects in the films of the 1950s and 60s. The man of those days was almost invariably a male chauvinist, and who could blame him? Hugh Hefner was a hero to them, and young women actually vied for places in Playboy Magazine. An examination of this phenomenon is still ahead of us, as strip clubs abound, the porn industry is thriving, and plastic surgery has become an art of body reconstruction.    

Too much emphasis on physical appeal has led us to this. We human beings are naturally sexual creatures. But that is not all we are. One gender is not superior to the other and it does not require force to support the idea that it is. If there is a battle of the sexes, there will not be a victor. The Old Guard may have to surrender, or at least compromise.

 

 

 

On the Wrong Side of the Battle

Left, Phyllis Schlafly; Right, Cate Blanchett

From a Feminist Viewpoint:

The mini-series "Mrs America," which aired recently on FX and Hulu, chose to focus on the woman who was hellbent on destroying the Women's Movement of the 1960s and 70s, and they cast the charismatic and talented Cate Blanchett to portray this fierce human being as an elegant, soft-spoken and smart. I don't remember her that way.

Not that I knew Schlafly personally, but I was an early recruit to the Movement, stimulated by the watershed book The Feminine Mystique, by Betty Friedan. In a period when women's rights had been ignored for decades, Friedan eloquently described the dilemma young American wives faced. Conventional wisdom dictated they should be content--happy even--with life in the background while their husbands rose in the worlds of business, politics, power, and glory. I was a mother at the age of 23; the year was 1963. My baby was precious and precocious, but something told me tending her and my young husband's needs was not quite what I had expected when I walked down the aisle. I was experiencing what Friedan identified as "the problem that has no name," meaning I was not fulfilled by being a passive participant and cleaner-upper while all the attention and all the rewards went to somebody else.

Schlafly was one of those housewives who, married to a powerful big-city lawyer, found it offensive that anyone would suggest that she was not living the ideal life. A practicing Catholic, she had six children and proclaimed them the greatest achievement any woman could ask for. While espousing the glory of being a "homemaker," she dedicated her life to Republican politics, in hopes of being granted an appointment to office after years of hard work on building her base of support, women who bought her version of their reality even though her own was quite different. Her message was to housewives: You are the fortunate ones; you have that powerful man to do the difficult work while you are privileged to stay at home and raise the next generation. She was a throwback to the Victorians who not only believed a woman's place to be in the home but also that they should love it.

My first reaction when I heard about a TV series dedicated to this creature was an incredulous jaw-drop. Who would want to see a series about her? Trailers of the project revealed that the series was to be about the Women's Movement, however; and that featured in it would be actresses portraying Friedan, Bella Abzug, Gloria Steinem, Shirley Chisholm--and all the women I had admired as a young and "trapped" housewife. I thought it might be fun to revisit those days of upheaval and hope, even though I knew it did not end well, and that the reason it didn't lay at the feet of Phyllis Schlafly.

Watching the episodes of "Mrs. America" I experienced an eerie sense of deja vu. I saw the confabs at Ms. Magazine, with Gloria Steinem (Rose Byrne) at the helm and the very vocal participation of Betty Friedan (Tracey Ullman), Bella Abzug (Margo Martindale), and others. My recollection of Steinem in those days was that she wasn't as wispy as Byrne plays her--she always had a strong presence although she was very feminine and sexy. Byrne seemed a bit delicate in the early episodes, but as the series went on she grew into the role, rather as Gloria herself seemed to do. I don't like to think of Betty Friedan as being that contentious and volatile, but Tracey Ullman had her looks and style down pretty well, so I could have been wrong.  I never saw Betty looking as disheveled and disgruntled as Tracy did, but I admit I didn't see her when the cameras were off. I used to see her on television, holding her own with confrontational male interviewers and working very hard to appear gentle and ladylike. I remember once she wore a feather boa which wafted in the televisual breeze as she spoke of women's rights. She did get emotional occasionally, but I am not sure that was her default position.  Once when an English actor deliberately pushed her buttons on a daytime talk show, she blurted out a phrase I had never heard before, "You, sir, are a male chauvinist pig!" 

To me the actors coming closest to the real life people I followed in the movement were Uzu Abuda as Shirley Chisholm and Margo Martindale as Bella Abzug. These two had voices and personal appearance down pat. It was a time when solid characters emerged--women with personalities, substance and at least the appearance of clout. They weren't beauties, these Women's Liberation Movement founders, but they had brains, humor, and courage.

I enjoyed looking back at those early days at the resolve and intellect of the women who had such an influence on my life, but it was poignant seeing them again as young and so very determined. It was painful, however, to see them trying to work within the system, trusting the powerful politicians who gave lip service to supporting them all the while apparently looking for ways to weasel out of any real action to help, backing the women for their own part, hoping primarily to manipulate them to get an even stronger hold on power for themselves. There were details of the battles they fought--some I didn't know about, some I did--portrayed in the series in a no-nonsense way.

"Mrs. America" was well produced, slick and beautifully written and acted, but, gripping as it was at times, it ended up minimalizing the women who threw themselves into the work of gaining an equal foothold in a man's world. 

Because its emphasis was always on Phyllis Schlafly. The series exposes her family life, her husband, her devoted sister-in-law and all those children who certainly provided at least as much stress as most children do. There was Phyllis' own personal ambition to get a law degree and get into politics, all the while claiming to be a housewife, and also claiming that was the most important job a woman could hope for. Her life was actually a model for a liberated woman--her husband supported her goals and backed her financially, women worked for her without pay, yet she made a name for herself through public appearances agitating against Women's Liberation by misstating its goals and its methods. She truly despised the movement and did what she could to create a counter movement celebrating women who did not dare to assert themselves. Cate Blanchett is one of the best actresses working today, and one of the most sympathetic ones. Her version of Schlafly is perhaps too much like Blanchett herself; where Schlafly was strident and sarcastic, Blanchett brings more class to the role than the real one ever had. Her polish makes her appear a bit two-faced where Schlafly's rage was never far beneath the surface.

It would be possible to watch the whole series and come away disliking Phyllis Schlafly, but I think it would also be possible to come away wondering what that whole movement was about. However, if you lived through it and believed it was going to change history, the real question is, what was Phyllis Schlafly all about? With all the power she amassed, what did she accomplish? And why is there a series about her at all?

The Highest Office in the Land

Victoria Claflin Woodhull

Victoria Claflin Woodhull was a woman like no other. She has a place in history—being the first woman to run for president—but her own story was so complicated, her own adventures so diverse, her own background so questionable, it is remarkable she managed even to live to her 88 years, much less achieve some fame and respectability.

She was born into a family of charlatans, liars, and dirt poor crooks in the middle of the U.S. in the 19^th century. There were seven children and two of the worst parents in American history, living in a chaotic house on bare land. Her mother, Roxy, was probably certifiably insane. At best she was schizoid and cruel. Roxy tormented and laughed at her children, and sent them to the neighbors to beg for table scraps to eat.  Victoria’s father, Buck Claflin, did odd jobs and looked for schemes to make big money, including selling patent medicine cooked up by his wife of alcohol, laudanum, herbs, and molasses, and setting up his daughters Vicki and Tennie, as psychics and fortune tellers, and likely prostitutes as they grew up.  

Even in childhood, even with this squalid background, little Victoria had a way about her. She was a pretty, soft-spoken child, and when she went to the neighbor’s house she did not ask for food but asked if there were some work she might do around the house. Rachel Scribner, the kindly neighbor, was touched by her innocent appearance, with her sincere blue eyes, and asked her in. Victoria was to remember her experiences with Rachel all her life. Entering that house, with red gingham curtains and clean floors, was the first time she had seen a semblance of a normal home. Rachel taught her to read and write and presented a picture of a balanced and somewhat prosperous existence. Rachel was taken by cholera and died suddenly, and dealing with this death gave Victoria her first brush with spiritualism. She was literally struck down,  passing out, and experienced a vision of a changed world, a paradise. After this she occasionally consulted with the spirits of a variety of bygone heroes, including, most often, Demosthenes, who told her of the future and consoled her in times of stress. Her sister Tennie, too, had a certain spiritual talent, saying she could read minds. Buck Claflin played these traits his daughters shared for all they were worth in an era when séances were common and crowds flocked to religious revival meetings.  

Victoria and Tennie made a small fortune as faith healers. Victoria married Canning Woodhull when she was 14. He was a small-town doctor who unfortunately had a serious drinking problem. The couple had two children. The first born was mentally defective, and Victoria, probably correctly, thought this was because of Woodhull’s alcoholism. The second was a girl they named Zulu (or Zula). She divorced Woodhull after the second child was born, but kept his name. Victoria nurtured these children, and the sick father, all their lives, but she was to go on to much grander things.

She had a variety of careers before deciding to get into politics. Having lived as a woman abused in many ways, she fought for the rights of women and admired the women who were working in the movement. In their travels as spiritualists and faith healers, she and Tennie came in contact with influential men, and began to advise them on the stock market. They opened the first women’s brokerage firm, at a prestigious address in New York City, and became darlings of the press and basically the talk of the town, advising the likes of Cornelius Vanderbilt, who was said to be contemplating marrying Tennie. Both young women were comely—Victoria was seven years older than her sister—and she had a line on stocks from other clients, giving her an edge with her advice to Vanderbilt. He was convinced that the tips she gave him were coming from the spirit world and believed her totally. However she got her information, Vanderbilt made millions from the deals she proposed.

Susan B. Anthony visited the brokerage house and was very impressed with the beautiful, competent Victoria, who espoused the Feminist cause of the day. Anthony had only good things to say about the future of the movement with such sleek young women involved. The suffragist movement was beginning to come to a head.

Victoria took it upon herself to speak to the Senate Judiciary Committee about women’s rights in 1870. It was unheard of that a woman would invade men’s domains in such a way, and she was shaky and terrified when she started her speech—but she did so, with help from Demosthenes and her other spirit friends, and made the point to the committee that women already had the right to vote as the 14^th and 15^th amendment stated that citizens of the United States automatically had that privilege. By now Victoria had several brilliant male allies, and had married Col. James Harvey Blood, a Civil War veteran. She and Tennie published a newsletter with a circulation of over 20,000 readers weekly. The main thrust of the newsletter was to promote Victoria as a candidate for President of the United States, but it was fearless in espousing such causes as sex education, free love, and spiritualism. Stephen Pearl Andrews was writing editorials, and he and Blood both wrote speeches for her as she began to make the lecture circuit. She had quite a following as a public speaker, and both Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony were pleased with her for a time. She ran for president as the nominee of the Equal Rights Party, and chose Frederick Douglass as her running mate, although he had not been consulted and never attempted to run. He was an acquaintance and had been a supporter of her efforts in women’s suffrage.

Victoria abhorred hypocrisy and made an enemy of the powerful Protestant minister Henry Ward Beecher by uncovering his sexual affairs with a number of his parishioners. She believed in free love and advocated for it, and called upon this man to reveal his own proclivities on the subject but he would not.

At one of her speeches she veered into the taboo territory of free love and someone in the audience called out, “Are you a free lover?” to which she replied “Yes! I am a free lover!” and then the wheels began to come off her otherwise promising campaign for women’s rights. Her ugly family roots came out, with her mother, definitely off the rails now, denouncing her and some of her sisters and in-laws coming forward to spread falsehoods about her and her intentions. Stanton and Anthony pulled away, fearing for the degradation of the movement they had worked so diligently for.

Politics was pretty much a shambles at this point. Running for re-election, Ulysses S. Grant was on shaky ground, and his opponent, Horace Greeley, was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Stanton and Anthony reluctantly backed Grant, and both were arrested for voting and Susan spent a night in jail—but Victoria and Tennie had a much harder time of it in the court system, for unrelated reasons.

The Claflin-Woodhull weekly was declared to be obscene and the sisters were jailed for their part in passing its distribution through the U.S. mail.  Victoria, Tennie, and Col. Blood were in jail in November, and couldn’t have voted if they tried. Despondent in a jail cell, Victoria wrote to Stanton, calling on her to speak what she knew to be true about Beecher, but Stanton didn’t respond.

It took some behind the scenes work by a number of people to get Victoria and Tennie back but six months later their conviction was overturned by a technicality. They were marginalized by society now and Victoria’s bid to become the first woman president was soon all but forgotten.

In 1876, in hopes of cleansing her reputation, she divorced Col. Blood. “The grandest woman in the world went back on me,” he was reported as having said at the time.

A surprise was in store for her and her sister at the death of Cornelius Vanderbilt. After the reading of the will, it was clear there were going to be disputes among his heirs, and his son William Henry called on Victoria to inquire if she had certain letters in her possession that might create problems for the family. She played her last card pretty well, ending up with a thousand dollars (about $24,000 in today’s currency) for her and Tennie, enough to get them started on a life in a new place. They set sail for Southampton and both finished their lives in England.

According to Wikipedia, “She made her first public appearance as a lecturer at St. James Hall in London on December 4, 1877. Her lecture was called "The Human Body, the Temple of God," a lecture which she had previously presented in the United States. Present at one of her lectures was the banker John Biddulph Martin. They began to see each other and married on October 31, 1883. His family disapproved of the union.”

Her sister Tennie married Francis Cook, chairman of Cook and Son drapers, and also Viscount of Monserrate in Sintra on the Portuguese Riviera. Claflin was correctly known "Lady Cook", and in Portugal was also Viscountess of Monserrate. She lived a long and happy life from then on.

Victoria never gained the presidency, but by her unique gifts and tenacity she overcame incredible odds to rise from a childhood of impossible anguish to heights a lesser person might not even imagine.

Much of this information comes from the book OTHER POWERS, by Barbara Goldsmith; and from THE SCARLET SISTERS, by Myra MacPherson.

Working Women

The Road to Equal Rights Required Strength

  

Reform was in the air in the mid-1800s. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony responded, both espousing support for abolishing slavery, and Elizabeth also for the rights of women. Elizabeth had befriended the Quaker progressive Lucretia Mott, and went to hear her speak in public, a privilege heretofore afforded only to men.

  "When I first her from her lips that I had the same right to think for myself that Luther, Calvin, and John Knox had, and the same right to be guided by my own convictions, I felt a new born sense of dignity and freedom," Mrs. Stanton said of Mrs. Mott. Conversations between them bolstered her confidence and set her on her path toward leadership of other women. The idea of a big Women's Rights Convention was hatched in 1840 but it was not until 1848 that it came to fruition. in a meeting that brought together women and men in the cause. Elizabeth and a committee of like-minded women drafted a document they called the "Declaration of Sentiments, Grievances, and Resolutions," which contained a section advocating for the right to vote, a radical idea that even her husband objected to. He made sure to leave the area when the convention happened, and her father, a judge in the Upstate New York town of Jonestown came down to Seneca Falls to see if she had lost her mind.

The convention was attended by 300 men and women and 68 women ad 32 men signed the Declaration, including the formidable Frederick Douglass, a free man of color who fought for women's rights as well as for the abolition of slavery. Douglass had befriended Elizabeth and her husband Henry in the cause of abolition, and he also became a supporter of women's rights, including that of suffrage.

A few years later Elizabeth Cady Stanton was to meet her lifelong compatriot and partner in battle, Susan B. Anthony. Susan came from Rochester, NY, where she was active in the temperance movement as well as the anti-slave movement. There was always a close connection between the cause of women's rights and the cause of civil rights for the black race--the more the women gathered at abolition meetings, the more they came to realize that symbolically at least they were slaves too. They did not have the right to own property (and if a woman inherited money or land, it was automatically transferred to her husband's name), to attend universities, or to participate in the political process, including the right to vote. Stanton and Anthony were a powerful duo, both as speakers and organizers. They wrote newsletters and traveled across the country giving lectures when lectures were a popular form of diversion and education. They worked together for years, forming a close friendship, even though there were many periods of time when they disagreed on a crucial topic and didn't communicate with each other for years.

In 1872, Anthony was arrested for voting and was put in jail, which was what she wanted--as a way of publicizing the cause. She never married but put all her energy into the women's rights movement, while Stanton stayed married and was the mother of seven. Stanton had the charm, the writing talent, and both shared the wholehearted commitment to the movement. They both were adept at public speaking, but basically Susan did the organizing, and often came up with ideas she asked Elizabeth to write about. Throughout their work together they both often felt on the verge of seeing suffrage for women made into law, through a Constitutional amendment. They threw themselves into lobbying for the 14th amendment, about to pass, include a woman's right to vote as well as that of black freed slaves. This was not to be in their lifetimes, but they carved a niche for it, all the while thinking a victory was at hand.

Uptight and Victorian as the 19th century was, it did spawn generations of offbeat characters, and Elizabeth and Susan encountered any number of them in their journey to liberate women. One was an almost-forgotten flamboyant young man named George Francis Train, who had a ton of money and liked to wear outrageous clothes. Train traveled with them and appeared on the lecture circuit, espousing the liberation of women but spewing racist comments at the same time. He funded a feminist newsletter, Revolution, which Elizabeth edited. She and Susan found his anti-abolition rhetoric harmless as long as he backed their principle cause, and he amused them until he didn't. He was rich and charming, but basically a charlatan and their friends thought him insane. Another con artist who beguiled multitudes and won Elizabeth and Susan's admiration for a time was the fascinating Victoria Claflin Woodhull, who deserves a special place in the history of women's rights. She had a checkered career, at last forming her own political party and running for president of the United States in 1872. I'll post about her in my next entry. 

If you're interested in reading more about Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, I recommend In Her Own Right, by Elizabeth Griffith and Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony by Penny Colman. Victoria Woodhull is the subject of many books too, but the best of them is Other Powers, by Barbara Goldsmith.

Wonder Woman

Elizabeth Cady Stanton, 1815-1904

Ideas are like people, they come and they go, and sometimes an extraordinary idea takes an extraordinary person to embrace, embody, and articulate it. Such was the case for the idea of equality of the sexes, and such was the role of Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

She was one of eleven children (eight surviving) in the days of large families--in Jonestown, New York. Her mother, statuesque and queenly, was an enigma to young Elizabeth, a bright child who apparently was born wanting to break boundaries. Her father was a judge in Upstate New York at the beginning of an era of revolution and reform. He spotted considerable intellect in his daughter and educated her himself, telling her he wished, with her remarkable brain, that she had been born a boy. She graduated from Jonestown Academy in the days before women were allowed admittance to universities. She had a neighbor who taught her Greek, a brother-in-law who taught her the equestrian arts, and law students of her father's to teach her to debate. After graduating from Emma Willard's Seminary for Women in Troy,  she continued to read omniverously and take classes. She read her father's law books and questioned him relentlessly about why the law favored the male sex exclusively. He had, of course, no answer, but he saw the rightness of her arguments and probably saw a wave of rebellion in her eyes.

After a brief foray into the Great Troy [religious] Revival in her teen years, Elizabeth settled into a rational view of religion. She combined the fervor of revivalist Charles Grandison Finney with the reformist mood of the times and questioned the hold religion had on society and the role it afforded women in particular. She spent a good deal of her time thinking about religious matters and decided that “…all religions on the face of the earth degrade her [women], and so long as woman accepts the position that they assign her, her emancipation is impossible," Elizabeth later wrote in her book The Women's Bible.  She came to believe the natural course of studying theology would result in rejecting religion altogether, as she felt religion itself simply a delusion. But she continued to ponder and write about it until her last years.

Elizabeth was pretty and petite when she was young, and always brilliant and brimming with ideas and personality.  As she reached what was considered the marriageable age, she apparently fell in love with her sister's husband, who was a mentor to her and a guide in her self-propelled studies. The two knew their relationship was unwise at best--and, both smitten, they thought better of it and he and his wife removed themselves from the scene and moved to another city. She decided to marry Henry Stanton, an attractive man with a bright future in the law and in politics. Elizabeth asked that the minister remove the phrase "promise to obey" from the wedding vows, whom she had met through her work on the Abolitionist Movement . Henry was ambitious and shared many of her political passions, however, he never supported the cause of women's suffrage. His focus was on abolition and a place for himself in politics. He was impressed with Elizabeth and felt she could be steered away from the life as a belle she was entering. He sought to influence her to be his partner in the cause of the emancipation of slaves, but he did not comprehend or embrace the cause of women's rights. Elizabeth was in love with the handsome, eloquent, and serious fellow, and she looked forward to marriage as a shared adventure for two independent adults. He was ten years older, and she was just 23. She would find a life with him different from what she anticipated.

Shortly after the marriage, both she and Henry were elected as delegates to the World Anti-Slavery convention in London. When couples gathered in London, Elizabeth met, among other American women in the delegation, the formidable Lucretia Mott, a Quaker abolitionist who would join her in the fight for women's suffrage in future years. The most exciting controversy at this convention was that of the eligibility of women to be seated in the hall. They were not considered to be serious delegates and it was said that seating them would be--ahem--promiscuous and inappropriate. Henry made a stirring speech in support of seating the women, but it is generally thought he voted against it when the time came. The convention did little to promote anything to do with abolition of slavery, but it was important because it brought Elizabeth Cady Stanton in touch with Lucretia Mott, and launched her into the burgeoning women's rights movement.

Mrs. Mott was 22 years older than Elizabeth, a practiced speaker in the days when women were not thought to be proper public speakers. She got her experience in the Quaker church, which was ahead of the world in all areas of human rights, and she was in the vanguard of the movement toward woman's suffrage. She was a Quaker minister, an abolitionist, and a feminist. She always dressed and spoke in the modest Quaker mode, but in her heart she came to rebel against the orthodoxy of the sect. Elizabeth found her "a peerless woman," and stated, "...my soul finds great delight in her society." Together in London they not only attended the convention sessions, but also went shopping together, inspected schools and prisons and found time for sightseeing. In a letter, Elizabeth later wrote, "Wherever our party went, I took possession of Lucretia, much to Henry's vexation."

Elizabeth's gifts were many, but perhaps her superpower was her stamina. She was to live a long and rich life, and to get into and out of many scrapes and remain optimistic in spite of many setbacks and outright blunders on her part. I'll deal with some of those in the next entry, but so far I hope I've piqued your interest in one of the fascinating and charming American women in the history of this or any other country. Hold onto your hat.