(no subject)

[pat]

I just caught part of Mona Lisa Smile on television. I hadn't seen it before. It's just as well. And I'm glad I didn't see it in a theater -- I would have walked out. As it is, I could only stand about ten minutes of it.

I want to present a couple of facts that people can keep in mind if they see it:

Madeline Albright and Judith Martin were both Wellesley alumnae from the fifties. (Hillary Rodham Clinton was from the '60s.)

The president of the college at the time period the movie was set was Margaret Clapp, who had a Ph.D. from Columbia in history and, oh yeah, a Pulitzer prize.

The president before her was Mildred McAfee Horton. That would be Captain Mildred McAfee Horton. She had become president of the college in 1936, and left the post to become the Navy's first female line officer. She was the first director of the WAVES, and fought to get more opportunities for women in the service. She returned after the war to the post of Wellesley's president, which she retained from 1946-49.

During the post-War period, the College had to field complaints from the town of Wellesley that some students were coming into town dressed poorly in grungy overalls and generally looking scandalous.

When I went there, admittedly twenty-five years later, a woman on my floor who wanted to be an elementary school teacher was criticized by quite a number of her classmates as "wasting her education."

So this portrait of Wellesley women as frail things mostly concerned with finding a husband and keeping their place, needing people like Julia Roberts to liberate them? What a load of crap.

Although it was really nice to see the inside of Houghton Chapel again. It is staggeringly lovely, and actually the movie doesn't do it justice.

Comments

[klwalton.livejournal.com]

I hated that film. I'm glad I didn't pay to see it (except indirectly, as I pay for HBO). I couldn't put my finger on *why* I hated it so much, but I think you've just explained it. I didn't have the facts at my fingertips, but I certainly knew, on some visceral level, that it was bullshit.

[patgreene.livejournal.com]

I am trying not to engage in gender stereotyping by pointing out that two *men* wrote the screenplay, as it could just as easily have been two women who were not really familiar with the College. Also, not only from what Diana Chapman Walsh wrote in her letter to alumnae but also elsewhere, I've read that the script was changed during shooting to make the women (they kept calling them "girls," which drove me up the wall) seem weaker, no doubt to underscore whatever "message" they seem to be hoping to impart.

I know I went to Wellesley a quarter-century after the movie was set, but institutional mores last a very long time in colleges, and at Wellesley we were told we were capable of taking over the world if we should choose to do so. But in a nice way, as we were also supposed to care for the world: "Non ministrare sed ministrari" -- not to be ministered unto but to minister -- was the College's motto.

[epi-lj.livejournal.com]

I saw it and didn't mind it. I think that part of this was that I didn't see it as a portrait of Wellesley women (of any sort). I'd never heard of Wellesley, so I took it just as a movie about a bunch of people at a school, like any other movie. In that context, it did a couple of things that I thought were interesting. In particular, I was impressed that they acknowledged that the teacher was influencing these kids externally just as much as the societal pressures she deplored and that if some of them did want to stay home and raise children, that that was as legitimate a choice as any other, and no more to be quelled by the teacher than the desire to be a lawyer was to be quelled by family or spouses or society or whomever.