Three by Sheila Paige and the Miss America Protest

For the fifth screening in our multi-program series FILMS FOR SOCIAL CHANGE: REVISITED AND EXPANDED, join us at the FMC Screening Room (475 Park Avenue South, 6th Floor) on Wednesday, March 27th, at 7pm, for an essential lineup of films from the 1960s and '70s by feminist activist and filmmaker Sheila Paige, in addition to a Newsreel documentary about the 1969 Miss America pageant and resulting protest. Curated by Robert Schneider.

TICKETS

Program:

1. Testing Testing, How Do You Do?, 1969, color, sound, 4 minutes
2. Newsreel, Up Against the Wall Miss America, 1969, black and white, sound, 6 minutes
3. A Film on Street Harassment, 1977, color, sound, 12 minutes
4. All in Favor, 1979, color, sound, 15 minutes

Total Run Time: 37 minutes.

Notes by Robert Schneider:

Established in 1921, Miss America was conceived as a championship pageant for the winners of smaller, local feeder pageants nationwide. With its emphasis on looks and consumerism, it became a perfect representation of the patriarchal treatment of women in midcentury America. In September 1968, the pageant was held as usual near the boardwalk in Atlantic City, but was wholly unprepared for a 400 person strong protest led by the New Left feminist organization New York Radical Women. Frustrated with the overbearingly masculine aspects of the New Left movement, NYRW formed to pan and execute actions relating to their own needs for liberation as women.

The 1968 protest ended up being a major flashpoint for the integration of women’s liberation into the mainstream, including the popularization of the expression and stereotype of “bra-burners” despite the apocryphal nature of the myth. While no significant burning actually occurred, the threat of a trashcan that was filled with beauty products, magazines, and other patriarchal paraphernalia was enough to provoke a nationwide backlash. The following year brought about another protest by women’s groups, helping to solidify and cement women’s liberation as a significant and unmoving political platform.

The initial 1968 protest was partially inspired by experimental film-makers Gunvor Nelson and Dorothy Wiley’s film Schmeerguntz, a radical work inspired by Soviet Montage juxtaposing the reality of being a woman with the pop cultural fantasy of it. Sheila Paige, a recent college graduate, decided to go to the 1969 protest to make her first film. An early instructor in the Lower East Side based Young Film-Makers’ Foundation, documented in Jamie Barrios’s FMC distributed work Film Club, Paige was able to borrow their equipment to make Testing Testing, How Do You Do? on her own time. Driven by her sister-in-law down to Atlantic City in her brother’s car, with a roommate recording non-synch sound, Paige’s film is a sweet, funny document of an incredibly significant time in American history.

Along with Ariel Dougherty and Dolores Bargowski, Paige co-founded the film-making workshop Women Make Movies. Inspired by the work of The Young Film-Makers’ Foundation as well as radical political collectives like Newsreel, whose 1968 film Up Against the Wall Miss America depicted the earlier 1968 protest, WMM started as a way to get more women involved with the practice of making small scale films and to form a community. About 40 films were made by WMM between 1969 and 1980, and of that number, several were lost when labs holding the original materials closed over the years. Films like Paige’s A Film on Street Harassment show how exciting and entertaining the organization’s works can be while still being politically active and didactic. Mixing woman-on-the-street interviews with filmed self-defense classes and short sketches, the film acts as an incredible record of the rapidly changing social mores of the era.

The largest through-line that can be found in these films by Paige is a gentleness and sense of humor that makes them stand out as much more than your average political documentary. While the desire to showcase inequalities and new horizons is certainly there, the films are often concerned with the people themselves and how individuals are affected by systems of oppression larger than they are. The never before screened film All in Favor was made by Susan Zeig and Sheila Paige in the late 70’s/early 80’s as a promotional film for the Coalition of Labor Union Women. CLUW was founded in Chicago in 1974 as a support group to advocate for themselves as both women as union members and encourage women to move up within the ranks of the traditionally male-dominated unions. Situated within the AFL-CIO, CLUW is still active as an organization to this day. Zeig and Paige’s film provides fascinating insight into the worlds of women, labor organizing, and industrial film-making. By focusing primarily on the individual women within the organization, the film is an insightful and hopeful look into what the future could look like for women in the workforce without ever downplaying the day-to-day frustrations brought by sexism and racism. There is a measured optimism to be found in all of the films in this program, which has kept them fresh and relevant in the years since they were all made. With the digitization of All in Favor, we hope to keep these works in the conversation in a way that makes it possible for people to see the incredible groundwork that has long been laid for current labor and social movements.

Many thanks to Ariel Dougherty, Susan Zeig, CLUW, and Sheila Paige for making this program possible.