Let's Go Full Crocodile, Ladies
A documentary that disappeared more than 40 years ago—available to everyone for the first time here—is a gift to modern-day feminists. It's belligerent, it's hilarious, and it reveals exactly what the Clinton campaign is missing

For only five nights in the fall of 1973, a documentary called “Year of the Woman” played at the Fifth Avenue Cinema in Greenwich Village. Crowds lined up around the block. Arthur Schlesinger Jr., described it as “the greatest combination of sex and politics ever seen in a film.” And then “Year of the Woman” all but vanished for 42 years, robbing us of a movie that captures–in its raucous, weird, unmistakably ’70s style–one of the most pivotal moments in feminist history.

The setting is the Democratic convention in Miami Beach. The time is July 1972. New York Rep. Shirley Chisholm has just completed a groundbreaking campaign for the presidency (“I ran because someone had to do it first,” she would later write), and the National Women’s Political Caucus, founded by icons including Betty Friedan, Dorothy Height and Gloria Steinem, is trying to leverage women’s power at a political convention for the first time. The feminist activists want Democratic candidate George McGovern to make the legalization of abortion a part of his platform. And it all goes terribly wrong. McGovern’s campaign instructs his delegates not to support the abortion plank and allows an anti-abortion activist to speak from the floor. The betrayal feels so deep that Steinem eventually tells Nora Ephron, through tears, “They won’t take us seriously. … I’m just tired of being screwed, and being screwed by my friends.”

As a journalist who covers women in politics, I’ve read the intense written accounts of what went down in Miami–including Germaine Greer’s, Steinem’s and Ephron’s (which we’re republishing here). But I’ve had to imagine what it felt and sounded like: the convergence of powerful women, the late nights, the arguing, the swearing, the marching, the drum circles. It never occurred to me that I would ever see it, that I could ever see it, since one of the enraging challenges feminists encountered in Miami was that the men holding the news cameras refused to accord them the respect of recording their project.

But it turns out there was a crew of women holding cameras the whole time. They were making “Year of the Woman.”

http://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/lets-go-full-crocodile-ladies/