Exploring Womanhood Through Film

According to Women's Ways of Knowing: The Development of Self, Voice, and Mind (Belenky, Clinchy, Goldberger, & Tarule, 1986), the kind of teacher many women students prefer is the "midwife-teacher," who assists them "in giving birth to their own ideas" (p. 217). An important concern of the midwife teacher is to "put the students in conversation with other voices-past and present-in the culture" (Belenky et al., p. 219). In designing a course on American society and culture for junior college women, I decided that a primary objective would be to put my students in conversation with the voices of American women, past and present, real and fictional.

I have found film to be the most effective means for students to enter into other lives and perspectives and most of my energy and efforts in developing this course have gone toward selecting appropriate media resources. In this article, I describe briefly the curriculum and methodology of the course and then in detail, some of the resources, particularly film clips, that I use.

Course Description

The American Society and Culture course is a year-long general education elective whose enrollment has varied from 80 to 120 students, mainly English majors with a few Japanese majors. The course themes and content have evolved out of a balancing of my understanding of student interests and prior knowledge, and my beliefs about what aspects of American life would be valuable for them to know and think about.

The background themes for the course are the U.S. as a multicultural society and the continuing struggle for human rights and equality in American history. The extreme heterogeneity of American society offers a contrast to the relative homogeneity of Japanese society, and the "dynamic, dialectical process in which different groups came together from different shores to create a new society in North America" (Takaki, 1994, p. 229) is of interest to students. In addition to European-American culture, the course introduces other American cultures, in particular Native-American, Japanese-American, and African-American. The contact and conflict of groups has led to the expansion of the concept of human rights in American history, from the original narrow view that all White male property-owners were created equal to a much more inclusive one. I believe that this second theme is one that could have great impact on students' lives.

I chose the text, The American Ways: An Introduction to American Culture (Datesman, Crandall, & Kearny, 1997) because it incorporates these themes to a certain extent and because its content fits my approach to culture teaching (Fujiwara, 1995). The text introduces the hidden culture of mainstream American values and then examines how these values are reflected in various aspects of American life. The aspects that we cover in the year-long course are immigration, changes in family life and women's roles, and education. The level of the text is a little difficult for some of my students so I cover only half of it during the year and try to illustrate the content with scenes from documentaries and movies.

I organize the students into peer tutoring groups of mixed language ability and overseas experience as self-reported in a learner profile completed in the first class. A typical class would include group discussion of the text reading and questions assigned for homework, viewing and discussion of film or documentary clips, and short lectures in English. When using media, I give a short introduction to the material, often referring to the information in the textbook, and then put a few questions on the board. The questions are to focus students' attention on the points in the text and to elicit their personal reactions to the information and ideas. The input is mainly in English, though I try to use films with Japanese subtitles when possible, and the written output on groupwork, semester tests, and evaluations is also in English but the processing in the group discussions is in Japanese. The method and materials are intended to stimulate students to construct their own pictures of American society, and to consider what relevance that picture has to their own lives.

Using Film to Explore Women's Lives

My teaching approach in this course has been much influenced by the approach presented Cinrossing Cultures Through Film (Summerfield, 1993). Film provides the most accessible and popular way for students to enter into and understand the lives of American women of different times, regions, cultures, classes, and situations. I use a number of criteria in selecting the resources, once again trying to balance student interest with my teaching objectives. The materials should illustrate and illuminate the course themes and topics and give students the opportunity to reflect on issues of personal importance. Another criteria is to choose films that are works of art or are based on novels and plays. I try to choose films that students are not familiar with or might not choose to watch on their own. In previous course evaluations, students said that they wanted to see the whole film so now at the beginning of the year, I explain that we are watching these segments not for the story but for culture learning and encourage them to see the entire films at the A-V library in their free time.

In the following sections, I will describe some of the resources I use in teaching about immigration, Japanese-Americans, changes in the family and women's roles, African Americans, and education. The background themes weave through these topics and the topics themselves often overlap.

The Immigrant Experience

There are many good resources for the immigrant experience. I usually use a segment from West Side Story in which Maria, newly arrived from Puerto Rico, goes to her first American dance. At the dance, the dancing styles and the clash of the Puerto Rican and the European-American youths give students a vivid nonverbal view of ethnic differences in both senses. After the dance, the Puerto Rican men and women themselves clash over the the merits of being in the USA, with the women taking a more positive view. We see Maria just at that point when her life and personality are being affected by a new culture.

I chose Japanese-Americans as one of the groups to be studied in the course because students are familiar with the values and culture Japanese immigrants brought to the U.S. and, from a position of knowledge, my students can analyze these immigrants' adjustment to American society. The films I use are the first half of Picture Bride, about plantation workers in Hawai'i, and the last half of Come See the Paradise, about the internment of Japanese-Americans in World War II. Both films deal with important chapters of Japanese-American history as well as with universal immigrant issues, such as the cultural divide between the immigrant and American-born generations. The use of both Japanese and English in these films is intrinsically interesting to students and helps them understand the bilingual, bicultural experience of immigrant communities.

Both films feature strong women characters, who face the difficult realities of their lives with initiative and courage. One student wrote about Picture Bride, "In this movie, the old Japanese style showed clearly. Long time ago, mainly woman didn't have right to control her life. But now, the Japanese society changed a lot. It is wonderful. We must change the Japanese society for Japanese women!"

Family Structures in Contemporary American Society

A knowledge of the dramatic variety of family structures that has evolved in the last 20 years is essential in understanding contemporary American society. I start the unit on changes in the family and women's roles with a scene from I Remember Mama, as a (perhaps idealized) portrait of the traditional American nuclear family in which the father works outside the home and the mother does the housework and most of the childcare. Every Saturday night, the Norwegian-American family gathers to discuss the weekly budget and in this scene, the family discusses ways in which they can each contribute to supplement their income so that the oldest child can go to high school. One student who had watched the entire film at the A-V library wrote, "Mama's love for her children was very great. She said that a family should stay together and I think so, too. If I become a mother in the future, I want to be someone who is full of love and courage. But I also want to be a working woman. My concern right now is whether job and housework at the same time."

Next, I give the students a quiz on contemporary American women's lives, taken from one of the Choices series (Bingham & Stryker, 1987), an excellent resource, especially the book (Bingham, Edmondson, & Styker, 1991) aimed at American high school girls. Most students get every answer wrong and are startled by the new reality of American women's roles in the family and at work. The film segments I use for this unit explore aspects of this reality, such as divorce, working parents, single parents, and the blending of families. In the early 90s, only 8% of American families were in the traditional mold with the father solely responsible for financial support and the mother for childcare and housekeeping (Lehrer, 1995, p.184).

The first film segment I use is from The Joy Luck Club, the story of a Chinese-American woman who gives up her career and ultimately her identity to support her husband, the scion of a wealthy European-American family. The couple meet at college and fall in love. At a party given by his parents, his mother suggests that because of her ethnicity and class, the young "Vietnamese" woman is not a suitable match for her son.

The couple marry but the woman's self-confidence has been undermined and gradually, her own self is lost in her role as helpmate. The husband asks for a divorce and she is prepared to let him decide the property settlement. In the climatic scene, the Chinese-born mother urges her daughter to realize her own worth as a human being, not to devalue it because of her gender. The daughter's recovered pride and ability to express herself, which had attracted her husband in the first place, lead to a reconciliation.

This scene encourages students to think about gender equality in marriage, as shown in one sudent's analysis. "This woman found the discrimination of people's background, but she didn't find the predominance of man over woman, I think. It's difficult for us to get rid of a fixed idea." In fact, many students write that one of the most significant things that they learned from their textbook was the Scanzoni and Scanzoni (cited in Datesman et al., 1997, pp. 225-226) outline of the four stages of development of the institution of marriage in the U.S.: Stage I, wife as servant to her husband; Stage II, husband-head, wife-helper; Stage III, husband-senior partner, wife-junior partner and Stage IV, wife and husband-equal partners. Usually, I have groups write a response together to text questions about the four stages, such as which stage is most common in their country, which is best for men, women, and children, and which they consider ideal. The answers offer fascinating insights into students' perceptions of and attitudes toward marital relationships.

The next movies I use concern the situation of the single mother trying to balance the demands of working to support her family, raising children, and having a life of her own (usually represented in movies by romance). In 1990, a quarter of American families with children were headed by women (Lehrer, 1995, p. 186). In Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, a newly widowed European-American mother tries to revive her former career as a singer in order to support herself and her son. In the scene I use, the mother has to leave her son alone in a hotel room as she goes from nightclub to nightclub, auditioning for a job, mainly to encounter rejection and sexual harassment. A scene from The Accidental Tourist illustrates the issues of commitment and responsibility in blending families. The man, separated from his wife after the tragic death of their son, becomes involved with a single mother. He takes an increasing interest in her son but is reluctant to commit himself to a new marriage. Concerned that the boy is not receiving a good education, he offers to pay to send the boy to a private school but the mother rejects the offer unless he is willing to make a permanent commitment to her son and herself.

African-American Women

The unit on African-Americans is perhaps most effective in expanding concepts of womanhood because the lives, struggles, and voices of African-American women offer the greatest contrast to common ideas of women's role and image, both in middle-class European-American society and present-day Japanese society. This unit starts with Sojourner Truth barging on to the stage at a women's rights convention in 1851, at a time when few women dared to speak publicly, even at meetings for their rights. In her powerful voice, Sojourner Truth asks the participants to expand their concepts of womanhood through her famous speech, Ain't I a Woman? (Kerber & de Hart, 1995, pp. 215-217). In the Smithsonian recording (Donovan, 1973), the speech is read by an African-American woman whose majestic voice recalls that of Sojourner Truth and is remarked upon by students. In the speech, Sojourner Truth recounts her experiences as a slave and the complete contrast of those experiences with accepted ideas of womanhood at that time.

The movie Sounder vividly portrays the life of an African-American sharecropping family in the South in the 1930s. The father is sent to a prison workcamp for stealing some food and the mother and children have to bring in the crop themselves. The oldest son of the family sets out on a journey to find his father and after unsuccessfully visiting several prisons, stops at a one-room Black school run by a woman teacher. The teacher is similar to the Black women elementary school teachers described by Black feminist theorist, bell hooks; these teachers provided the best education she received at any level and remain her models of good teaching. By "nurturing" their students' intellects, bell hooks' teachers and the teacher in Sounder "were enacting a revolutionary pedagogy of resistance that was profoundly anticolonial" (hooks, 1994, p. 2).

Maya Angelou's teacher in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings has a similar sense of mission to develop the talents she finds in her students. This TV movie based on the first volume of Angelou's autobiography tells of her childhood in Stamps, Arkansas where Maya and her brother were raised by their grandmother, a woman of formidable strength and business sense. In one scene, the grandmother is teased by some "po white trash" girls. To Maya's disappointment and disgust, the grandmother does not get angry with the girls but responds by singing a spiritual, thus creating her own territory through song, a tactic often used to great effect in the Civil Rights movement. However, Maya herself has not resisted the influence of the dominant society. When she reports to her brother that her teacher has said that she has a precious talent for poetry, she also says that she is a bewitched white girl with golden curls who will soon wake up from this nightmare of a black face and kinky hair. Students are touched by this example of Maya's hatred of her own appearance because of the standard of beauty espoused by the larger society.

The follow-up to this scene is a segment of a Bill Moyers' interview with the real Maya Angelou (Grubin, 1981), as he accompanies her on her first trip back to Stamps after decades away from the place where, as she says, she was much loved and much hated. Maya goes to the Black church, to which she had gone nearly every day with her grandmother, and sings a spiritual for the small congregation, telling them that her worldwide travels have taught her the power of African-American music and culture. She also goes back to her now integrated school and tells the children that they can be and do anything they choose by developing their minds. These words have comforted and inspired students who have found it difficult to find a job.

The Long Walk Home is one of the few films I have used in its entirety. This film shows the involvement of two ordinary women in the Montgomery bus boycott at the beginning of the Civil Rights movement. A White middle-class woman and her Black maid slowly develop a bond across barriers of race, culture, and class. This film is a fine example of the power of story to involve students in a different time and place and to impart information in an engrossing way.

Reflections

Reading students' evaluations and their comments on the A-V materials that impressed them in the semester tests is time consuming but gives me valuable feedback. On the final evaluation, I ask students what new ideas they have gotten about women's role and image. The most frequent answers center around changes in women's roles, the growing strength and independence of women, women's right to have both a family and a career, and the need for equality in the home and workplace.

In reflecting on student comments, a number of things strike me. One is their empathetic identification with the characters in the movies. Human stories seem to be the most effective way to stimulate my students' interest in social issues and their sense of social justice. The majority react strongly against racial or sexual discrimination, expressing their sadness and indignation. A few go on as this student did to analyze the social construction of attitudes: "Black people were really discriminated for just their skin is black. Now I understand that discrimination is bad. But I think if I was born in such age as white people, could I understand that discrimination is bad? I afraid that I do the same thing without I notice."

Another thing which impresses me is students' willingness to learn from another culture, to think seriously about what aspects they would like to adopt or avoid. Many say that they want to be able to express their opinions as American women do or become as strong as the women we studied. On the other hand, many hope that the rate of divorce in Japan will not increase as it has in the U.S. because of the pain that it causes children.

Through the decisions I have made in regard to the curriculum, methodology, and materials for this course, I have tried to implement my understanding of feminist pedagogy. Putting students in conversation with the voices of American women gives them the opportunity to reflect on their own culture, experiences, beliefs, and choices. The lives and achievements of American women, both unsung heroines and what Alice Walker calls human "jewels" (interview in Lanker, 1989, p. 24), offer students role models and inspiration. Studying the lives and voices of women from a different society enables students to explore and expand their concepts of womanhood.

I would like to thank Donna Fujimoto, Michael Furmanovsky, the editors, and the EAB readers for their helpful comments on this article.

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