A Girl Like Her, the movie

I dragged the GF to more movies in the Mpls St Paul International Film Festival over the weekend.  The first was short (40 minutes) but really packed a feminist punch.

 A Girl Like Her played the oral stories of women who were forced to stay in homes for unwed mothers and have their babies, then sign them over for adoption, often without seeing or holding the baby at all, prior to the convergence of Griswold v. Connecticut, Roe v. Wade, the pill, and, last but hardly least Title IX.  And the Second Wave feminist movement, though that was not the focus here. 

The audience for this movie is clearly your average Joe and Jane, since the length and format is geared for a hopeful future broadcast release.  However, I found this movie both unexpectedly informative, despite having read a whole book on the subject several years ago, and emotionally devastating, despite, you know, the butch facade.

I have a direct link to the subject matter, admittedly.  The family link between white blonde girl me and my 2 years younger brother, who is African American, is the sea change in social mores and laws that made blonde babies scarce and African American children a possible option for white liberals, until the questions were raised about Best Interest of the Child with that.

But as much as I knew about the individual pieces that went into creating the situation where a "dorm room accident" like myself might end up in adoption, and I knew about the 9-month enforced stays in homes for unwed mothers, I had not put two and two together in the way this movie does.

The way the oral stories are told over stock footage from 40s and 50s propaganda films and TV ads is very powerful in creating a sense of the coerciveness of the culture as well as laws and the central role families played in reinforcing and reproducing the coercion.  In light of the desire of some to return to those good old days... this is a very timely movie.  (There's an older book as well.)

Things I had not considered in this light were the effect of Title IX in ending the ability of school and universities to expel pregnant women (without expelling the fathers) or the effect this had on even the grooviest feminist with a supportive boyfriend and family due to this.  The way this movie interrogates the concept of choice pre-1972 is a needed correction to the flabbiness of the way we (who were not there, or who were sheltered from certain facts of life) are often led to look back on the period from the 40s thru 60s. 

Well worth making the effort to see or bring to your town...