Word: rebellion
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Torvald, for instance, is limned as the stuffed-shirt the more to accent Nora's radicalism. Torvald is the petty bourgeois straight arrow with no doubts about his superior sex role. But her rejection of empty role-playing is primitive and barely conscious. Her rebellion against what she knows to be wrong does not give her a clue as to what else is right. She sees no farther than the either-or choice confronting her directly: either she submits to the futile prospect of a life spent fortifying the egoism of her man, or she rejects men. Never does...
Unlike Nora, a contemporary feminist realizes the larger dimensions of her rebellion. Unlike Nora, she is not alone in her struggle and not an individualist idealist. She has the force of a history of public outcry to fire her collective faith. And because of this, she can dismiss Nora's dilemma without too much agonizing...
...audience who applauds the movie claps for a world which their own situation has rendered irrelevant. It is finally a highly conservative applause. For the message that romanticizes the female rebel, but balks before the women's rebellion, is anathema to any committed feminist. It feeds nothing but a counter-revolutionary fervor, one barren of relevance, one that lowers rather than raises consciousness...
...against the Look, and donned shapeless Indian prints that defied the Hollywood wasp-waisted ideal. They sat with legs widespread in mockery of Propriety and wore tattered jeans to taunt Ladylike Deportment. And they stopped shaving and stopped bathing to exult in the smells they trailed in the air. Rebellion against the Look was merely the easiest way to protest the Role, since the Look, be it slickfigured or heavy-breasted, was primed for seduction, for capitalizing on your assigned status as a sex object. It was this objecthood, having one's identity consigned to the status of an object...
THEN, A FEMINIST could scream out against what she knew was wrong. But that didn't make anything else right. And nobody knew for sure just what was right. Moreover, nobody really knew how to go about finding it out. Robbed of a relevant past and in rebellion against it a feminist lacked any model by which to structure her future. Activism was the only tool she had. But after four years, when that activism has aroused significant political change, the personal problem of self-definition, the question "What does it mean to be a woman?" remains...