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by
Alan K. Frishman
- (1) Lack of materials. In teaching high-school American history (from 1865-present) in New Haven, I have a dearth of materials—the core textbook is particularly lacking—about women.
- (2) Serving the student population. My school, Career High School, has a preponderance of female students.
- (3) Making school relevant. My students understand periods and movements in American history more readily through anecdotes, personal accounts and popular culture.
- (4) Breaking down the walls between subjects. I also teach English at Career High, often to the same students who take one of my American history classes. Furthermore, I am encouraged—both my own convictions and experience and by district policy—to develop units that are interdisciplinary. This unit, therefore, will be designed from the outset for that purpose. Film also lends itself very easily to an interdisciplinary approach.
- (5) Going with the flow. Students learn well, believe in, and are certainly accustomed to films. To my students, the visual image is credible.
- (6) Teaching how and why as well as when, where and who. Teaching in a magnet high school for the medical and computer sciences and for business, I find many of my students—while adept at learning bones, muscles and numbers—lacking in two critical areas: an appreciation for the liberal arts/humanities, and experience in dealing with more abstract concepts. Film provides an excellent vehicle to fill this void in an easy, natural manner: A film is, at the same time, a narrative, a series of pictures, a social commentary, a technical achievement and an indicator of cultural values.
- (7) Engaging students to be more rigorous in their viewing. At the same time, my students’ familiarity with film generally disguises a lack of appreciation for the components, structure and design of films. This unit will be designed to move the students in the direction of being more rigorous—and, hopefully, more participative—in their watching of films.
- (8) Increasing students’ awareness of how information can be manipulated and how society’s values are relativistic. Students are not generally aware that their ideas of good and bad—for behavior or appearances, especially concerning women—have been deliberately determined; that they have changed through time; that they reveal the prejudices of a particular period; and that they are subject to different interpretations.
Week One: Women and Themselves
*Their self-image
*Their identity and stereotypes
*”Good girl” vs. “bad girl”
*Love, career and maternal desires
Week Two: Viewing and discussion of Imitation of Life (1959 version)
Week Three: Women and Men
*Women, their age and men
*Men “dominating” women
*Viewing and discussion of Tootsie (1982)
Week Four: Black/white
*”Whiteness” as protection
*”Blackness” and sexuality
*The “tragic” mulatto
*”Blackness” as nurturing
*Viewing and discussion of the PBS video, A
Question of Color (1992)
More seriously, the image is senior to the word in that the referencing of the former, in most cases (philosophy, perhaps, and related cerebral studies excepted) is more immediate, more primal and—as politicians and advertisers have always known—more influential.
And consider the environment of the movie theater itself: larger-than-life images; a darkened, magical room; often the proximity of a “significant other” who is sharing the experience. An influential place, indeed, particularly for planting mental seeds, and especially to a young woman —seeds that could bear fruit years later. As Haskell observes:
It is fashionable to claim to have misspent one’s adolescence in a movie theater, in escape from the horrors of dating-and-mating rituals, studies, and other impositions of an insensitive society. . . Many of the divisive forces whose consequences we are only now [in 1973] beginning to feel took hold behind that impassive facade.1
And if the environment of the movie theater was not sufficient in itself to impress the impressionable, there was the added “effectivity of the cultural imperialism of Hollywood”2—the full power of the dream machine to change our lives. When Clark Gable takes off his shirt revealing a naked chest, sales of men’s undershirts plummet. When Sean Connery drives the little-known Aston Martin DB-5 in Goldfinger, sales of that exotic British sports car take off. Like my students, we believe what we see, and we believe it is important.
Questions for class discussion.
- 1. Neither Annie nor Lora have husbands. Who is bothered more by being single?
- 2. Both Annie and Lora have conflicts with their daughters. What is the nature of these conflicts? Who is primarily responsible for creating them? How are they resolved?
So what has really changed since Lombrosco denied the possibility of a woman being both a woman and an “offender”? An offender against whom, or what? Are men still voyeurs and women still vain? Or were they ever? After all, these assumptions of the past, and from the past, are true only if we believe they are. As Barbara Fields aptly points out, “An ideology must be constantly created and verified. . .; if it is not, it dies.”35 that sterotypical thinking invariably leads to a “form of intellectual apartheid.”36 As teachers, we need first to gauge the extent to which our own students continue the long, unfortunate tradition of sexual stereotyping—of intellectual apartheid —and then to show them there is another way.
Specifically, for purposes of this unit, we need to guide our students in their awareness of how films play a role in encouraging, if not outright creating, sexual stereotyping. And then we can, hopefully, accompany them down the path of clearer, deeper, more responsible thinking.
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