Growing Up Female

While putting together my last newsletter of covers from the feminist underground press, I came across an interview with documentary filmmaker and activist Julia Reichert in Woman: A Journal of Liberation, January 1972. At the time, Reichert had just co-directed (alongside her partner in work and life Jim Klein) and released her first film, Growing Up Female: As Six Become One (1971), which followed six girls and women between the ages of 4 and 35 to interrogate “female socialization through… the forces that shape them—teachers, counselors, advertising, music and the institution of marriage.” As Klein puts it on his website, the film “spurred both controversy and exhilaration. It was widely used by consciousness-raising groups to generate interest and help explain feminism to a skeptical society.”

Interwoven with the womens’ stories are interviews with those institutional forces, among them a kindergarten teacher who shows just how early gender roles are specified and reinforced—calling small girls jealous and competitive, with “nasty little ways.” Reichert and Klein also interview a male advertising executive (as seen in the clip from the documentary below), who Ruth McCormick described in Cinéaste (Spring 1972) as “so gloriously obnoxious that you have to wonder if he isn’t just possibly an actor.”