Is On Chesil Beach, the film based on Ian McEwan’s novel, a “period piece?”

 Sounds odd to call a film set in the sixties and seventies a “period piece,” but On Chesil Beach, based on Ian McEwan’s novel, so carefully and intentionally recreates the minutest details of the distinctive clothes, hairstyles, foods, furnishings and music of those years, that it could be called a museum piece. Attitudes too: young people who think nothing of walking seven miles each way, in “plimsols” and ballerina flats, to meet each other. Well brought up girls whose sole preparation for the conjugal night is a euphemistic sex manual. The central conflict of the story is equally inseparable from its era: the upheaval between the early sixties before the “Sex Revolution” and a decade later, the “Free Love” seventies. I enjoyed watching the film last night on Netflix.

How Gloria Steinem Reconciled me to Feminism

 How Gloria Steinem reconciled me to feminism.

My first encounter with feminism was a rude one: reading Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex as a twenty-year-old student in London in the seventies. Her seminal work, published before I was born, was a revelation to me, with its concept of “The Other:” the subordinate, the disempowered by gender, race or class. I suddenly saw familiar French authors through her eyes: Stendhal was a proto feminist, Montherlant a narcissistic, racist misogynist.

But in the mini-skirted, blow-dried seventies, dowdy old De Beauvoir with her turbans was a relic. Equally off putting was the grim, uncomprising feminism of Greer and Friedman, however impressive their intellectual constructs.

Only Gloria Steinem seemed relatable, with her straight, center-parted hair, her soft face, her stylish bell-bottoms and hipster belts. She gave you permission to be feminine and a feminist. None of the bra-burning, ungroomed armpits, man-demonizing radicalism. Steinem gave me permission to hold on to the loving, empowering legacy of my father and other “patriarchal” figures in my life, while acknowledging the injustice and inequality historically imposed on women.

Steinem was the gateway drug to feminism for many.