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| Killing Us Softly [VHS]
34 minutes, 2000
Description: Killing Us Softly 3 offers a new generation of students and ordinary television viewers a chance to share Jean Kilbourne's uniquely empowering critique of advertising's image of women. One of America's most persuasive media critics, her previous best-selling videos Killing Us Softly (1979) and Still Killing Us Softly (1987) have changed the lives of millions of women by helping them recognize the devastating impact of advertising on their self-image. Now, at the start of a new millennium, Killing Us Softly III summarizes twenty years of research and lecturing to alert women and men to the insidious new techniques advertisers use to get us, quite literally, to buy into gender stereotypes. Killing Us Softly III also shows how much advertising for women has become blatantly sexualized, simultaneous magnifying and trivializing the role of sex in women's lives. Frequently humorous, never sanctimonious, Killing Us Softly III will convince anyone that the portrayal of gender in the media is serious business. |
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Work and Family (Part I)
95 minutes, 1994
Description: This video deals with the struggle of women trying to have it all -- work, marriage and motherhood. The balancing act of labor and love is not an invention of the '90s. For many women, in the early years of the century, it was a matter of life or death. From the Founders of the PTA to the early union leaders and First Ladies, this program details stories of women as wives, mothers and workers.
Sexuality & Social Justice (Part II)
95 minutes, 1994
Description: A comprehensive look at women's efforts to shape their own destinies and establish a system of justice for not only themselves, but for all Americans. The issues touched upon range from the valiant Margaret Sanger's crusade to provide all women a means of birth control to the Women's Liberation Movement. Erica Jong, Gloria Steinem, Grace Slick, Shere Hite, Barbara Boxer and Joan Baez are among the contributors offering their insight in this definitive program about women and their role in shaping America. Image & Popular Culture (Part III)
95 minutes, 1994
Description: This video explores the changing concepts of "ideal beauty" and how women see themselves. From the silver screen to television, through music, dance and art, the changing image of women is an important and entertaining part of the 20th century. Roseanne Arnold, Carol Burnett, Twyla Tharp, Chris Evert, Linda Bloodworth Thomason and Maya Angelou are among the contributors offering their insight in this definitive program about women and their role in shaping America. |
The Chilly Climate for Women in Colleges and Universities [VHS]
28 minutes, 1992
Description: Examines, through interviews with college and university faculty and staff, the subtle discriminatory practices which, despite equity legislation, create a climate "chilly to the point of toxicity" for women employed on Canadian campuses. These narratives illuminate the cumulative effects of such behaviors as stereotyping, exclusion and isolation, devaluation and trivialization, harassment and violence, which illegally "poison" the working and learning environment and prohibit women from achieving their full potential in academia. Designed as a catalyst for change, and featuring remarks from Dr. Glenda Simms, President of the Canadian Advisory Council on the Status of Women, the video explores various strategies for improving the climate including role modeling and promoting feminist research.
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Dear Lisa: A Letter to My Sister [VHS]
45 minutes, 1990
Description: Dear Lisa is a film that speaks to all women about the dreams, hopes and reality of being female in the 1990s. It is a personal documentary that provokes and inspires by bringing discussions of equality and gender issues back to life. The film shows how things have changed- and how they haven't- for contemporary women. Topics covered include childhood play, sports, careers, motherhood, the "second-shift," body image, sexual assault and self esteem.
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Dreamworlds: Desire/Sex/Power in Rock Video [VHS]
55 minutes, 1990
Description: There has been a great deal of concern in recent years about the negative and dangerous representations of women contained in music videos. This tape presents an accessible way to be able to talk about these representations and the role that they play in how young people, especially, think about and behave in everyday life with regard to sexuality and gender. It uses the images of music videos themselves, rearranged and recontextualized, to highlight the precise nature of this world. It concretizes the issues by examining the relationship between video images of women and the very prevalent problem of date rape and sexual violence towards women on college campuses.
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Inequity in the Classroom [VHS]
28 minutes, 1992
Description: Inequity in the classroom profoundly affects all women. Research shows that subtle and often inadvertent sexual and racial discrimination by male and female instructors can undermine women's confidence. It poses a serious impediment to their potential for academic and professional excellence. In the past few years, educational institutions and organizations have shown increased concern with this problem and are seeking ways to remedy the situation. This project is one step toward the elimination of inequity in the classroom in universities, colleges and adult education settings.
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Science and gender with Evelyn Fox Keller [VHS]
28 minutes, 1990
Description: When Evelyn Fox Keller set out in the 1950's to become a scientist, she discovered it was a man's world, not only because most scientists were male, but also because the language of science itself reflected masculine metaphors and values. In this episode, Keller discusses the significant role that gender plays in the language that scientists use to describe their work. Keller says, "There is no magic lens that will enable us to see nature uncolored by any values, hopes, fears, anxieties, desires, goals that we bring to it." Discussing the beginning of modern science, Keller says, " The central metaphor for the scientific revolution was a marriage between the mind and nature- a patriarchal marriage, the purpose of which was the domination of nature, the bride (symbolizing) nature." Keller says," I'm objecting to the language of laws and also to the notion that they are 'as free of human values as the rules of arithmetic.' It is a fantasy that any human product could be free of human values. And science is a human product." Evelyn Fox Keller is a theoretical physicist in the Department of Rhetoric at the University of California at Berkeley and author of Reflections in Gender and Science as well as the biography A feeling for the Organism: The Life and Work of Barbara McClintock.
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Union Maids [VHS]
48 minutes, 1976
Description: The 1930s were a landmark period for the American Labor Movement, marked by sitdowns, scabs, goon squads, unemployment, hunger marches, red baiting and finally the energetic birth of the CIO. Union Maids examines this history through the personal stories of three women who were there.
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What Does She Want (6 programs featuring 25 of the most innovative women working in film, video, and the visual arts). [VHS]
I. We are not sugar and spice and everything nice.
(72 minutes)
Description: ...takes us from teenaged girls with their mothers, to a teenaged girl who leaves home; from girls constructing themselves in the "image" of women, to women deciding on a different image; and from the family that stays together, to the couple that is dissolving its marital bond, revealing many different views of relatedness and relationships.
II. Bad Attitude
(90 minutes)
Description: ...looks at politics as a broad range of social and cultural expressions from political campaigns to domestic violence to personal grief and struggle. It comprises a survey of sorts, tracing artists' responses to some of the events that make up our lives, events that are also influenced by representations of them.
III. Fact Is Stranger Than Fiction
(90 minutes)
Description: One person's fact is sometimes another's fiction and vice versa. Fact is Stranger than Fiction anthologizes seven videos which comprise worlds made up of Fantasy, Illusion, Fact, and Speculation, all of which address the sticky questions of what and how we believe.
IV. A Crack In The Tube
(90 minutes)
Description: Television: It's been with us about forty years, and it's hard to imagine America without it, as if America were its invention, not the other way around. A Crack in the Tube looks closely at our TV dreams, with the underlying suggestion that a greater variety of visions ought to be possible.
V. Variety Is the Spice of Life
(75 minutes)
Description: ...imagines a more generous world in which a variety of love and lovers is not just permitted but welcomed. Circumventing the traditional Battle of the Sexes is at the heart of these tapes, where a sense of humor and an understanding of the construction of sexuality underlie their conception.
VI. Women With A Past
(70 minutes)
Description: It has been said that history is really the record of living persons; a sort of collective biography of an era, a movement, a place. Yet all too often the subject is obscured by a biography originally intended to illuminate it. Likewise, in critical texts, one learns to read both the critic/author and the artist lurking somewhere behind the surface. While such studies form the mainstay of art literacy, both tend to blur an image of the artist as an actual historical or contemporary figure. The person gives way to the myth. Women With A Past intercuts four accounts by artists of their lives into one very heady mix. Their stories not only provide basic training in the arts, but dispel the myth of the inarticulate artist indifferent to the social complexities of her time.
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A Word in Edgewise [VHS]
26 minutes, 1986
Description: Explains the role of language in shaping behavior. It is a good synthesis of all that has been explored by linguists about sex bias in everyday speech and writing.
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One Woman, One Vote [VHS]
Description: From Elizabeth Cady Stanton's electrifying call for women's rights at Seneca Falls in 1848, to the last no-holds-barred fight in 1920, this film illuminates the story of the fledgling alliances that grew into a sophisticated mass movement.
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