Down With Ordinary Ladies!

 Welcome back, everyone!


We are back for a few more weeks of film nights after our brief recess. I am happy to announce that we are also back upstairs in the Main Hall (or "Screen One" as I like to call it) now that the essential repairs have been completed. A great big thank you to everyone for your patience and understanding while we showed films in our "temporary accommodations" downstairs in the basement ("Screen Two"!).

I plan to show three more films in December before we break for the holiday season, and we will then resume on the 12th of January with a brand-new film series (more about that in due course, so stay tuned!).

For our first December screening (on Thursday, the 1st of December) I want to draw a line under our recently concluded series of Ordinary Ladies with a film that is, effectively, the antithesis of Ordinary Ladies.


The Stepford Wives (1975) is based on Ira Levin's 1972 novel, and plays out like Betty Friedan's darkest insecurity dream. The timing is not coincidental. It was Friedan's best-selling book The Feminine Mystique in 1963 that is generally thought to have kick-started the second-wave feminist movement (Women's Liberation, to use the terminology of the era). Throughout the 60s, feminists fought a high-profile (and remarkably successful) social battle for the right of women to exist as something more than housewives, mothers or sex objects. Women scored significant legal victories in battles for equal pay and access to birth control, and laws were changed so that employers could no longer fire women as soon as they became pregnant.


It was inevitable that there would be a pronounced backlash to Women's Liberation by the early 70s. That's just how these things seem to work. 

Again, and again. 

Sigh.

While many men were unquestionably supportive of women in their fight for equality, there were others who were threatened by a movement that sought to erase traditional gender roles. It was in 1973 that former tennis champion Bobby Riggs publicly voiced his contempt for female tennis players (and was thoroughly trounced by Billie Jean King). Around the same time, a proposed constitutional amendment in the US (The Equal Rights Amendment, or ERA) was unexpectedly scuttled by the efforts of Phyllis Schlafly, an ultra-conservative anti-feminist who convinced many Americans that the Women's Rights movement was declaring war on the "traditional family unit".


It was in this context that The Stepford Wives was released.


Using the framework of a science fiction story, Ira Levin's novel (and William Goldman's screenplay) brilliantly evoke the "blowback" that the Women's Rights movement was getting in the 1970s.

Our Ordinary Ladies film series looked at women who take control of their own narratives and refuse to fit themselves into the pre-determined gender roles imposed upon them by society.

The Stepford Wives is about what happens when women have that independence violently taken away from them.


We will be screening The Stepford Wives at 7.30pm on Thursday, the 1st of December, at the Victoria Park Baptist Church (upstairs, in Screen One!).

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