Hookers, Housewives and Bad Blood

DELORES DELUXE wiggles her way down the bar runway, wearing nothing but a large pair of earrings and a broad grin. Later, lounging in her dressing room with her co-workers she says she'd quit, but she has nothing else to do. "You know why we do these things? Because we're oppressed. It's this system; there has to be a change in this system. Then we wouldn't have to do this." The women beside her all nod in agreement.

These strippers appear in a film called Woman to Woman, one of six films being presented this weekend by the Women's Film Circuit. Directed, filmed and edited by Donna Deitch, Woman to Woman is a compelling documentary, a movie made by a woman who has overcome a predominant bias in the women's movement. Rather than limiting the film's perspective to the struggle of upper or upper-middle class women for self-awareness and self-determination, it encompasses a broad spectrum of American women. Hookers, housewives, mothers, old women and young girls, all are given the opportunity to speak freely about how they see themselves, the roles they play and why.

Despite the disparity of occupations and life-styles presented by Deitch, we find one prevailing theme throughout all the interviews. Almost all the women complain of feeling limited in the job opportunities and role possibilities open to them. Yet, as Deitch so powerfully shows us, a great deal of the limitations imposed on women are due solely to social constraints. Engrossing footage dating back to WW II is integrated into the film, and with it, Deitch shows us that women, when needed, are capable of doing anything men can do. We see women in long skirts and heels learning to fly, driving Red Cross trucks, working in ammunitions factories, harvesting wheat...Similar footage is used from WW II. But the post-war eras severely cut back on the opportunities so briefly open to women.

"What do they expect me to do?" complains one prostitute Deitch interviews in a San Francisco jail. "If they gave me some education or some job training, well maybe I could do something. But instead we sit here twiddling our thumbs or doing embroidery, with nothing to look forward to."

Another hooker explains that each time she's thrown in the can she emerges poorer than before, and she has a son to support. "I don't even have the money to try and find a job. So when I get out, I have to turn a trick as fast as possible."

Throughout the film women re-evaluate their lives and their patterns. Some, like the hookers, see little way out, but we also find women who have radically changed their direction, and we see a new generation growing with more hope than their mothers ever had. At the close of the film a young Chicano girl is asked what she wants to become. Whe she answers, the interviewer demands, "But what if they won't let you?" She thinks for a while, smiles, and cooly replies, "I'm going to fight it."

MAY THERE be more documentaries like this one, and even greater attempts to broaden the women's movement. The demise of the ERA in New York and New Jersey this fall proved that, to a certain extent, the forces of the women's movement have isolated themselves behind upper-middle class goals and rhetoric. The promoters of the ERA--mostly well-off, independent women--made a pathetic stab at communicating with women whose economic status, life-style and roles differed from their own. And Woman to Woman demonstrates how patently absurd this schism is.

Women's film-making, like recent women's literature, is, by and large, dominated by those with a penchant for subjective reporting--documentation of a personal struggle, digging into one's past for an explanation of the present. At times, this genre, this "let-me-spill-out-my-guts-to-you", can become tedious and self-indulgent (witness Ms. Magazine). At times, however, it can be extremely effective.

Jan Oxenberg, in Home Movie, chronicles her gradual realization that she is a lesbian, narrating her story as we watch old home movies of her playing mother with her doll, tap dancing away, and at a later age, cheerleading.

"What I really liked about being a cheerleader," she says, "was being with the other girls. The guys who were playing football were really irrelevant." But, she adds, she became a cheerleader in the hope that if she were "a cheerleader on the outside, I'd be a cheerleader on the inside," and her sexual desire for women would disappear.

By the close of the film her quandary has been resolved. She has come out and found a happy and stable life among other women, and her personal declaration of contentment serves as a testimony for the happiness possible for all women who love women.

Barbara Hammer is a feminist filmmaker with a rather bizarre sense of humor. Her short film, Menses, supposedly takes a wry, comic look at the disagreeable aspects of menstruation. There are, indeed, a few amusing moments in it, but for the most part the film consists of naked women standing on a hilltop, legs spread apart, with a most unusual, watery, lurid pinkish substance gusing down their legs. The humorous highlights are a mock communion scene in which codeine tablets are taken in place of wafers and menstrual blood is drunk in lieu of wine, and when some woman with a sanitary napkin hooked up over her clothing, leaping about, stomps up and down on a box of Kotex. It's all rather artsy, but in the end there's too much fake blood and not enough wit.

The six films presented by the Women's Film Circuit are among the finest feminist films today. They differ tremendously in vantage point, style and statement, but they have one common bond--they are films by women, for women. Hollywood's portrayal of women has always left a lot to be desired. For now, if women want to see a true image of womanhood on film, they'll have to do it alone. And if feminists want to understand themselves and others better, they'd do well to take Woman to Woman's cue and look beyond themselves.