This commentary is by Elayne Clift, who writes about women, politics and social issues from her home in Saxtons River.
As a feminist writer, I often view the world through “the lens of gender,” a term that means looking through metaphorical glasses in order to see people and explore events with a special filter.
That filter reveals women’s experiences, needs and perceptions while also recognizing the realities, needs and perceptions of men in new ways. Our vision becomes clearer, more refined and acute, and more humane when we see things with increased compassion and greater understanding. By becoming aware of context, we find new meaning in our own and others’ experiences.
For example, looking at the world through the lens of gender allowed Jean Kilbourne to expose the world of advertising in a way that no one had done before her. She demonstrated through her writing and classic video series “Killing Her Softly” that women and girls were being objectified and sexualized by subliminal advertising that seemed clever until the gender lens revealed advertising’s alarming and violent subtext.
Another kind of gender lens with a more literal meaning gave us the work of photographers such as Dorothea Lange, Margaret Bourke-White, Diane Arbus and others. Lange and Bourke-White were social realists whose visionary work revealed what Henry James called an “air of reality.” These groundbreaking photographers valued accurate representations of the psychological and material realities of life.
Lange, best known for her Depression-era work for the Farm Security Administration, influenced the development of documentary photography and humanized the consequences of the Great Depression. She achieved this reality by capturing historically important events, including the Dust Bowl.
Committed to revealing the hardships visited upon poor migrants, she afforded her subjects dignity and respect. By applying a literal gender lens, she revealed what it looked like to be frightened, unbearably fatigued and marginalized. Lange’s images, like the iconic “Migrant Mother,” were often confrontational calls to conscience exposing the need to defend against a lack of interest or skepticism, especially among policymakers.
Margaret Bourke-White was the first woman allowed to cover combat zones during World War II. She covered the war as no one else had because she captured human moments in the lives of both the powerful and the poor in a body of work that included moving photographs of women and children who always suffer deeply in war.
As often as possible, they were among the people she photographed to connect picture essays to real lives and individual experiences in a human way.
Diane Arbus, whose work became well-known in the 1960s, helped normalize marginalized groups and highlighted the importance of representing all people. She photographed a wide range of subjects, including children, mothers and the elderly, along with others who were sidelined. She once noted, “There are things nobody would see if (we) didn’t photograph them.”
Thankfully, she and other women photographers viewed their work through a gender lens. Without that lens, we would never have known so much of the world or the historical events.
These innovative photographers, and reporters like Martha Gellhorn, along with others, paved the way for women writers and photojournalists compelled to address social justice issues and to humanize their subjects.
Marion Palfi, for example, combined her art form with social research which resulted in her iconic images, including the 1940s photo “Wife of a Lynch Victim.”
Social documentarian Mary Ellen Mark’s work explored homelessness, addiction, mental illness and teenage pregnancy, as seen from the inside. (In 1976, she spent 36 days in the women’s maximum-security section of an Oregon mental institution.)
I can’t help thinking now about women like these as we contemplate the suffering occurring in the world in our own time. What might we learn in larger social justice terms if unflinching photographs of the vacant stares and skeletal bones of children starving in Yemen, Afghanistan and parts of Africa were in our minds, or if we knew the stories and saw the faces of grieving mothers, themselves hungry and frail? Would we see the reality of famine differently?
Would we more fully empathize with the pain of incarceration, wrongful or otherwise, or the unending grief of parents who bury their children because of gun violence? Would we view addiction or mental illness differently? Would we be less judgmental of those who live in family structures unlike our own? Would we understand more deeply what it is like to lose everything in a natural disaster, or to grow old alone?
If we saw the faces of hopelessness, terror, marginalization, solitude and profound sadness in this moment, might we be inspired to show up at the polls to vote for change, to advocate vociferously, to press for more humane legislation?
As feminists know, context is everything. When the world is viewed through the lens of gender, social change becomes a political imperative. Stories of real people who live punishing lives for various reasons become compelling through a visual medium that offers powerful testimony to the reality of lives lived outside our own spheres.
In short, seeing is knowing. And knowing, it becomes impossible to look away.
