Vanessa Engle on why women still do too much around the home

By Naomi West Published: 6:34PM GMT 04 March 2010

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American writer Marilyn French. Photo: BBC

This was a immeasurable and really fast amicable revolution," says filmmaker Vanessa Engle of the Womens Liberation Movement. "Its conspicuous that such thespian new story should already be so not pertinent to people. Its all rather paradoxical…"

Engle has done a trilogy of documentaries, entitled Women, about this transformation and this antithesis airing on BBC Four from Monday (International Womens Day). With an proceed that is observational rather than polemical, she focuses on the larger-than-life women who propelled the array (in an part entitled "Libbers"), todays middle-class mums ("Mothers") and the dedicated 21st-century agitators ("Activists").

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She speaks to those for whom feminism is a "religion" and to those for whom it is not even a footnote; as one operative mother, an ear, nose and throat surgeon, says unapologetically: "Im not definitely certain what feminism is."

Certainly, Engle has incited her camera on feminists at a "confusing" time: "Legislatively the games have been won, broadly speaking. Yet there are still so majority causes for concern: the climb in internet pornography, the actuality that there is as majority harlotry if not some-more than there ever was, that lap-dancing clubs are excusable on the high street…"

It was the hurdles of family hold up not executive to feminist campaigns ("Both in the Seventies and now, full-time activists lend towards to be immature women but children," says Engle) that stirred her to enter upon on Women, her three-film plan for the BBC (previous array embody Jews and Lefties).

"I am in my forties and a mom of dual immature kids [sons elderly 10 and 13]," she says. "Its in my margin of prophesy all the time that I see women operative as well hard. Women do still appear to be you do the bulk of the made at home work. Its a definitely required end for women to solve down and have a family. Yet the the majority unbelievably perfectionist hold up to lead."

She has managed her career and family hold up by being "extremely, intensely organised" and wonders if this is an unavoidable side-effect of women gaining belligerent outward the home: "In sequence to grasp a turn of autonomy, have we had to essay so tough that weve turn a era of madly over-controlling women?"

Engle was concerned in the womens transformation whilst at Oxford study languages in the 1980s; she protested outward porn shops, assimilated the Reclaim the Night impetus opposite masculine violence. She had well known of the feminist total featured in "Libbers" such as Robin Morgan, Ann Oakley, Kate Millett given celebration of the mass key books in her late teens.

On movie they arise as nuanced human beings whose enrichment of womens rights mostly came with substantial personal sacrifice. Engle buries the old classify of the humourless feminist, capturing New

York-based Susan Brownmiller chortling at her own genuine expectations of the time her book Against Our Will was published in 1975: "I thought Id be some-more popular. Thats what happens to masculine writers… I would contend definitely men arent captivated to women who write books on rape."

The majority noted talk is with American writer Marilyn French, who subsequently died last May of heart failure. French speaks eloquently of her own feminism, her unfortunate matrimony and the rape of her daughter in 1971. "She liberated herself from sanatorium to give that interview. There was a clarity that she was going on the jot down for the last time," says Engle.

One growth that the 1970s sisterhood would not have dreamed of in their misfortune nightmares is the blast of "raunch culture". Engle is assured by arguments that this unreasonable womanlike self-objectification is a effect of the feminist transformation the target of 1970s feminism to free women from hardship became perplexed with Thatcherite ideals of personal freedom. "Feminism never argued women should be free to do whatever we wish together with removing the t--s out in the newspapers," she says. "I think the the majority unimaginable and distressing misunderstanding."

Engles third movie shows that the immature women protesting opposite these issues are strikingly couple of but to her this is less a pointer of feminisms demise, some-more a thoughtfulness that the domestic landscape has definitely remade given the libbers initial spoke up. "Good out-of-date criticism doesnt appear to do the pursuit any more. The subject is: how do you criticism now?"

* Women starts on Monday on BBC Four at 9.00pm