Wonder Women

Ms. has pushed the dial on feminist ideals. So did early Bollywood movies — subversively.

The first cover of Ms. magazine drew on Indian iconography to comment on the pressures faced by modern women. This time on the show, an executive from the magazine offers a retrospective view on the publication’s half-century of influence. And about that Indian motif — a scholar of Hindi-language cinema has much to say.

Ms., 1972

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S7 E4. Wonder Women

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Coming at you live from Light House Studio’s Vinegar Hill Theatre in Charlottesville, our fair city: Emily and Siva welcome Jennifer Weiss-Wolf and Samhita Sunya to the stage, as part of the Karsh Institute’s Democracy360 forum. Sunya, a cinema expert, and Weiss-Wolf, a pioneering advocate for women’s rights, discuss the power of film and print media to shape global feminism. From Bollywood to Ms. magazine, we look at why the women’s movement and its representation matter for the health of a society.

The Nixon years, as it happens, were an exciting time for women’s liberation. This march took place in Washington, D.C., in 1970, from Farragut Square to Layfette Park.

Warren K. Leffler / Wikimedia Commons

Ms. magazine appeared on newsstands for the first time in January 1972. It was labeled as the “Spring” issue to ensure the new publication would not seem stale, but this debut sold out in days, and it set a template for what would follow — stories and commentary on women’s rights, sexuality, feminism and American politics. Weiss-Wolf calls this “movement journalism.”

Sunya, meanwhile, walks us through a brief history of Indian cinema and its influence around the world, even before it became known as “Bollywood.” While some have critiqued the 1960s era of this film genre as one of excess, Sunya’s analysis points to crucial ways in which the stories they told subverted, at times, ideas about caste, gender and national belonging that dominated women’s lives.

Meet

Jennifer Weiss-Wolf

Jennifer Weiss-Wolf is executive director of strategy and partnerships at Ms., where she is also a regular contributor. She runs the Birnbaum Women’s Leadership Center at the New York University School of Law. Previously, Weiss-Wolf served as the inaugural Women and Democracy Fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice. Her groundbreaking work Periods Gone Public: Taking a Stand for Menstrual Equity (Arcade, 2019) help popularize critiques of the “tampon tax.” Her next book, Period. Full Stop. The Politics of Menopause, is due out from NYU Press in 2025. Follow her on the platform formerly known as Twitter @jweisswolf.

Samhita Sunya

Samhita Sunya is an associate professor of cinema at the University of Virginia. Her work examines the history of world cinema, with an emphasis on Hindi-language films and the gender dynamics they depict. She is the author of Sirens of Modernity: World Cinema via Bombay (University of California Press, 2022). Sunya is currently at work on a new project, chasing spy thrillers across the Global South, and across covert channels of film distribution. Tweeting @sunyalog.

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Weiss-Wolf has been on tour promoting 50 Years of Ms., a retrospective volume about the magazine’s first half-century at the forefront of American feminism. It collects some of Ms.’s strongest — and boldest — work on women, men, marriage, motherhood and much more, from authors like Toni Morrison, Billie Jean King and Allison Bechdel.

A frequent contributor to the magazine, Weiss-Wolf is also a co-editor of the new volume.

Earlier this year, she directed the interactive digital series Women’s Rights and Backsliding Democracies for NYU Law and Ms. Writing for the Brennan Center, Weiss-Wolf has argued that access to affordable health care, including abortion, is critical to women’s full citizenship.

Periods Gone Public sought to de-stigmatize menstruation and open a conversation about women’s bodies and public policy. Now Weiss-Wolf is on to a new topic: what happens when your periods stop. In a 2022 op-ed for the Washington Post, with co-author Sharon Malone, she drew attention to the country’s flagging research on menopause.

On May 2, 2022, Americans learned of leaked a draft opinion in the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that ultimately overturned Roe v. Wade. Thousands took the streets around the country to protest the impending decision. This one took place outside the City Hall in Omaha, Neb., on May 3.

Shutterstock

Many new restrictions on abortion in red states rely on a poor understanding of how women’s menstrual cycles work, Weiss-Wolf argues. This essay was part of a recent series in Ms. that she helped direct, called “Abortion Is Essential to Democracy.” You can hear her summarize that argument on the show, in response to a listener’s question.

Or read another compelling version, in Time: “Democracy Is Feminist.”

In 2018, Sunya curated a film series featuring three zany comedies from Egypt, Morocco and Turkey. They showcased some common threads: journeys to South Asia, lots of allusions to Hollywood and Bollywood and a resistance to “a reductive conflation of the Middle East solely with violence and turmoil.”

She co-edited a special issue of the journal Film History in 2020. Writing with Kaveh Askari, Sunya introduces the issue — on the dynamics of transregional cinema — with the story of the 1981 film Suraj Bhi Tamashai (The Sun Is Also a Spectator), a pathbreaking Pakistani-Indian-Jordanian-Iranian co-production that has nevertheless been all but lost to time … and politics.

As labor migration across the Indian Ocean expanded rapidly in the 1970s and ’80s, so too did the movement of Indian film, under the auspices of Oman TV. Sunya examines this phenomenon in a 2021 article for the Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication.

Get a sneak preview of her latest research, in “On Location: Tracking Secret Agents and Films, between Bombay and Beirut.”

Learn

Gloria Steinem, depicted in this photo-illustration, won the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2013 for her activism and advocacy on women’s lib.

James Housand / Shutterstock

Gloria Steinem was among the founders of Ms. and suggested the figure of Kali for the magazine’s inaugural issue. In a recent interview with The New York Times, she recounted how for more than a decade the newspaper referred to her as “Miss Steinem of Ms. magazine.” When the NYT changed that style, she and others went to see Abe Rosenthal, then the paper’s executive editor, and brought him flowers.

In October 1975, Ms. published its first special issue on men and masculinity. (See what it looked like — No. 11 in this list — along with more iconic covers.) The magazine revisited that theme this year and posed the question, “Did ‘Ted Lasso’ Change the Way We View Masculinity on TV?” The short answer: maybe!

Meghna Bhat, writing in 2019 about the #MeToo movement’s arrival to the Indian film industry, unpacks what it means to do feminism in Bollywood. In Ms. magazine, of course.

If filmmakers show a 14-century Hindu queen throwing herself, and her followers, into a pit of fire as a foreign army invades, are they asserting new ideas about women’s agency — or reproducing old ones? Nikkei Asia analyzes the changing portrayal of women in contemporary Indian film, including that scene, from a 2018 hit. The queen was played by Bollywood star Deepika Padukone.

Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi visits the National Press Club in Washington, on March 29, 1966.

Warren K. Leffler / U.S. News & World Report

India is the world’s largest democracy, and among the first to elect a female head of state. Indira Gandhi’s time in office, however, was marred by authoritarian moves. And in 1984, she was assassinated by her own bodyguards. One takeaway that this history suggests: women in leadership signal be a step forward, but feminist ideals this ensures not. In the blog Feminism in India, Harshita Kumari considers the paradoxes of Gandhi’s time as prime minister.

Solomon Armar makes the case in Forbes that not only is the future female, but that everyone wins in that world.

The Spring 2021 cover of Ms. reimagined the magazine’s original issue. It featured a cover story on race, gender and the undervaluing of child care made so evident in the covid pandemic — as women left paid work in huge numbers.

Ms., 2021

In 2021, Ms. revisited its first cover with a new version of Kali, this time under the banner “The Nation’s Moment of Truth.” Especially salient is her new look: as an overworked African American mother caring for a girl going to school online, surviving amid the covid pandemic.

Over the years, the magazine has devoted more and more copy to the special place of black feminism in the struggle for gender equality — and racial justice — in the United States.

Finally, an alternative take. Not all scholars agree that Ms. has lived up to its revolutionary program, in part because of the financial constraints of the form itself: a mass media enterprise in an increasingly neoliberal world. Commenting on the occasion of the magazine’s 40th anniversary, scholar Amy Erdman Farrell looks at Ms. and the problem of low-wage journalism.

For an in-depth critical history of Ms. in its early decades, check out Farrell’s 2000 book Yours in Sisterhood.

Heard on the show

Sunya shared two film clips with our audience during our recording, the audio of which you’ll hear on this episode. The first was Chintu Ji, a 2009 homage and parody to an earlier time of Indian filmmaking.

The other came from Pardesi. An Indo-Soviet production from 1957, it’s a love story based on the travelogues of a 15th-century Russian merchant who falls for a young Indian woman named Champa. (The movie was released for English audiences as A Journey Beyond the Three Seas.)

In the podcast version of this episode we added some voice-over translations of the key dialogue from a dream sequence in Pardesi, with some terrific help from Paul and Ellen Reyes. Paul is editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review and a longtime friend of the show.

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Transcript

Coming soon!