Women in Focus: Who Gets To Tell Women’s Stories On Screen?

Written by Taylor McDaniel, Mlitt Digital Journalism

This is the second of two posts by Taylor McDaniel, see her earlier post here on representations of women’s bodies.

Imagine the scene: a handful of women in West Dunbartonshire wielding video cameras documenting what it means to be a woman in Scotland. If you’re thinking this is one of the documentary series for the new BBC Scotland channel, you’re about 40 years off. In 1977, Women in Focus, a series of six television programmes ‘made by women, about women’ aired on local cable television.

 

Women in Focus by Frances Bowyer in Scottish Women’s Liberation Journal, issue 2, 1977: Glasgow Women’s Library archive

Frances Bowyer wrote about the experience of conceptualising and creating the series in the second issue of the Scottish Women’s Liberation Journal. While perusing issues of various women’s liberation newsletters and journals in the Glasgow Women’s Library archives, this article grabbed my interest. I have long had both a personal and an academic interest in amateur media production and women’s representation in the media, so this write-up of a grassroots media effort was right up my alley.

Cover of Scottish Women’s Liberation Journal, issue 2, 1977: Glasgow Women’s Library archive

In the article, Bowyer discusses how the ideas for the series came together, saying: ‘We spent literally hours talking   ̶ talking about ourselves, our experiences, frustrations, and fears, as women’. Though Bowyer insists throughout the piece that she was not formally involved with the women’s movement before working on the series, she described the process of talking with the other women involved and with the women interviewed as an eye-opening and consciousness raising experience. She describes the excitement she felt when talking and sharing experiences with the other women and only realising the process’s feminist nature after the fact.

Bowyer makes a point to focus on the rarity of women creating images of themselves on screen. She says: ‘We had access to equipment by which we were able to represent women, not in the roles that the media presents them, but as themselves, ourselves. For a change it was us, the women, who were creating the images’ (emphasis in original).

While it may seem obvious, that women should have a hand in creating representations of themselves in the media, it seems to be an issue that we are still grappling with today. In a December 2017 op-ed piece for The New York Times, Selma Hayek lamented the continuing struggle to get stories about women made by women in the film and television industries. ‘Why do so many of us, as female artists, have to go to war to tell our stories when we have so much to offer? Why do we have to fight tooth and nail to maintain our dignity?’ In an age where, according to a report by academics Caroline Heldman and Nicole Haggard, in 2017 women held only 17% of influential positions in the top-grossing films. Women in television fared slightly better, but still only held 30% of key positions in the industry. And that number has only risen from 21% since 1998.

‘Percentage of women in primetime TV by year’, in Heldman, C. and Haggard, N. (2018) Women in Hollywood: The Ongoing Fight for Equality [online], p.3. Available at: https://www.msmu.edu/media/website/content-assets/msmuedu/home/status-of-women-and-girls-in-california/documents/Collectif-A_hollywood_FINAL.pdf (accessed 6 March 2019)

Last summer, while attending San Diego Comic-Con, I attended a panel called ‘The Future of Film is Female’ about women working in production roles in genre film. During the panel, moderator Alicia Malone pointed out that the two directors on the panel, Susanna Fogel and Jennifer Yuh Nelson, were the only two female directors of films scheduled for release during that summer film season. That was two films out of around 50. It’s a disheartening statistic. During the panel, Mashable’s Deputy Entertainment Editor, Angie Han, said: ‘When [Malone was] introducing everyone, I kept hearing the words “first” or “only”. That tells you the state of women behind the camera right now’.

The Future of Film is Female panel at July 2018 Comic-Con, San Diego. Photo credit: Taylor McDaniel

When reading through Bowyer’s piece I was struck by how much of it can be echoed today. Not only are women not having their voices and experience represented in the media, it is still considered rare and challenging for women to take up the tools of media production and create those stories themselves. The barriers that were in place in 1977, barring female voices in film and television still persist today. And perhaps, these barriers are even more perilous today. We’ve now been echoing the same thing for over 40 years  ̶ women need to be seen on screen in the broad variety of ways in which they exist and live. And the gatekeepers of these institutions need to overhaul the process by which these stories are created. 

Read the next in our 2018-19 series of student blogs here