Growing Up Female

Growing Up Female is the very first film of the modern women's movement. Produced in 1971, it caused controversy and exhilaration. It was widely used by consciousness-raising groups to generate interest and help explain feminism to a skeptical society. The film looks at female socialization through a personal look into the lives of six women, age 4 to 35, and the forces that shape them--teachers, counselors, advertising, music and the institution of marriage. It offers us a chance to see how much has changed--and how much remains the same. Purchased by more than 400 universities and libraries.
A true and piercing look at American womanhood.
One of those painful experiences that’s good for you. The film shows how females are brainwashed into passivity, mental sluggishness and self contempt. I wish every high school kid in America could see this film.
The first major documentary about the experience of being a woman in America. Asking women to bear witness to the quality of their lives and to their options for self-definition, the film derives much of its painful authenticity from its structure – a series of encounters with six females. The filmmakers have wisely allowed us to meet real women, not merely cases in point. Strong, sometimes harrowing in its picture of self-contempt, the film outlines new terrain.
An articulate, frightening study of how in the process of growing up, girls are continually kept prisoners of oppressive social structures.
I was much moved by this film and its genuine picture of ordinary American women. In its unadorned truthfulness there is a sad and simple poetry, and a lesson about the lives of all of us.
From all the films I’ve seen, I mean films which attempt to deal with the question of women in contemporary society, Growing Up Female succeeds best: it tells more, it digs deeper, and it does so in the most interesting way
Not only a superb documentary on the oppression of women, but an intensely moving work of art as well. No rhetoric or “politics” in the traditional sense; yet the film is thoroughly political in its simple, straight forward, understated presentation of the suffering women undergo as we are being culturally conditioned into feminine creatures.