CHICAGO READER
JUNE 10, 2005

Wake-up Calls: Reclaiming the F Word

It took a couple bad breakups and a documentary film class
for Therese Shechter to rediscover her values.

By Cara Jepsen

Filmmaker Therese Shechter
usually waits a few dates before she tells men about her new
autobiographical documentary, I Was a Teenage Feminist, which will
be screened this weekend at Chicago Filmmakers.

"I sort of have to pick the right time to tell them I’ve made this film,"
says Shechter. "I told one man about the film and he said, ‘Oh, are you a
feminist?’ I said, ‘Yeah, aren’t you?’ He didn’t call again, so I e-mailed
him. He said, ‘I really dig you, but I don’t think I could date a feminist.’"
Shechter, who’s 43, wasn’t always so quick to call herself one. Her documentary,
a 67-minute video that examines how the term’s connotations
have changed since the 1970s, is a result of the process that got her
comfortable with the word again.

"What happened to this movement that changed people’s lives, and now
it’s a bad word?" she says. In 1974, when Shechter was growing
up in suburban Toronto, Marlo Thomas’s popular TV special Free to
Be . . . You and Me had a big influence on her. "That was a time that made me
feel really empowered," she says.  "Nothing around me made me feel that
way when I started to make the film."

The video starts with a voice-over of Shechter saying she hadn’t
thought about feminism in years. "What happened to my feminism
and the power it gave me?" she asks. "Did I lose it, or did it lose me?"
That’s followed by an interview with Shechter’s mother, then one with Ms.
magazine cofounder Letty Cottin Pogrebin, who helped Thomas make
Free to Be . . . You and Me . Shechter tells her that she listened to the
show’s sound track a few years ago and cried because she felt she’d been
lied to. "Feminism . . . had said everything would be OK," Shechter complains.
Pogrebin doesn’t let her get very far. "All we said was, Let’s get rid
of the barriers," she tells Shechter. "We never promised you a rose garden.
. . . The rest was going to be up to you." Shechter responds in voiceover,
"That was the kindest kick in the ass I’ve ever gotten."

After interviewing such subjects as the Brooklyn man who makes Vinnie’s
Tampon Cases, the editors of Bust magazine, the Radical Cheerleaders,
and Jennifer Baumgardner, coauthor of Manifesta: Young Women,
Feminism, and the Future , Shechter concludes that feminism hadn’t abandoned
her—rather the opposite. She was living in Chicago in the
90s, working as an art director for the Tribune, when the breakup of a
long-term relationship made her reconsider the direction of her life.
"For a long time I’d been seeing my future in a certain way," she says,
"and then that went away, and I remember thinking to myself, You
can do anything you want to do.What do you want to do? And I realized
I wanted to go to film school."

She took a few film classes at Columbia College, and then in 1999
she got an internship at Robert DeNiro’s Tribeca Productions in New
York. She promptly took a fourmonth leave of absence from work;
halfway into it she called the Tribune and quit. "I knew that I
couldn’t keep going with my old life," she says. "I was too comfortable
and they were paying me too well. I thought, I’m feeling kind of
brave right now, so I took advantage of that."
She came up with the idea for the documentary after yet another
breakup sent her into a tailspin.

"This person I was dating just kind of broke up with me out of the blue,
and I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what happened," she says.
"And I really couldn’t. I had no idea." Reading Natalie Angier’s 1999 book
Woman: An Intimate Geography, which puts a feminist spin on traditional
theories of gender differences, made her feel better. "It changed the
way I looked at the world, which was exactly what Free to Be did when I was
13," says Shechter, who thinks she lost sight of her feminism sometime during
college. "I never took women’s studies, I never marched," she says. "If
there were things that were problems I didn’t quite notice. I just thought, Of
course I can do anything I want to do.

"But when you read something that’s real," she says, "something that
reflects how you feel about life, that’s an incredibly eye-opening experience.
And you just want more and more of it. That’s what happened to me. I just
kept looking for more of that stuff." She started doing freelance design
work to make ends meet and signed up for a documentary filmmaking
class at Union Theological Seminary that involved writing a movie treatment.
"I never planned to actually make the film," says Shechter. "I was
just doing the exercise, making stuff up. But halfway through class the
instructor said, ‘I think you need to make this film,’ and gave me his
video camera to use.’"

She learned how to use it while interviewing her mother, who grew
up in Romania. "She had her own awakening as she talked to me," says
Shechter. "She said, ‘I never needed feminism. We were always
equal . . . well, I wanted to be an astronomer, but my mother told me I
couldn’t because I was a girl.’ Her worldview shifted a little bit, which is
an incredible thing to see."

Shechter finished the project in November with financial help from
the Canadian government and the W Network, a women-focused
Canadian cable station, which aired the video in March.
Chicago author Paula Kamen was one of Shechter’s primary advisers,
and her interviewees include Oak Park activist and stay-at-home
mom Carollina Song, who along with Shechter will attend
Saturday’s screenings; they’ll both be available to discuss the movie
during a break between them, from 8 to 9 PM.

"For a long time she was the only person I knew who was politically active," says Shechter.
"You couldn’t say the word abortion around her without her going into
this long diatribe, so we wouldn’t mention it around her.
"But what I had once found occasionally annoying, I now found to be
a lot more inspiring. I’m sure I’m annoying now. People say now, ‘Why
are you so angry?’ My response is, Why aren’t you angry?"


[Reprinted with the permission of Cara Jepsen]