Womanhouse Revisited

I. GENTLE FOLK

A young woman wearing high-waisted jeans and a sweater patterned with jumping reindeer, a quintessentially 1970s folk singer, accompanies herself on a grand piano. “You try so hard to tame me,” she croons in a gentle voice, “so the preacher can rename me / and then put me on a shelf.” Her performance opens Womanhouse Is Not a Home, a documentary that aired on Los Angeles public television in 1972. The film was produced and directed by thirty-year-old Lynne Littman (though the film erroneously credits Parke Perine as director), one of a handful of women working in television production at the time, and its subject was an unusual art installation called Womanhouse. Executed by a group of young art students and two renegade professors in a derelict mansion in Hollywood, Womanhouse was a first among firsts—the first exhibition of self-identified feminist art in the country, and the inaugural project of the first-ever university-sponsored feminist-art program. Feminist art in 1972 was an avant-garde, fringe movement; several members of Littman’s crew found the material disturbing enough that they asked that their names be removed from the film’s credits.

The stars of Littman’s film, however—the young female artists who made Womanhouse—strike the vie­wer as more winsome-naïf than threatening-militant. They may be the representatives of a major social movement, but they also titter and smile, reclining personably on pillows to chat. They marvel on camera at beginning a life that promises to be different than that of their mothers, at having become artists, at being interviewed for television. The novelty and self-consciousness of their feminism are unmistakable. Littman’s subjects are the antitheses of the bra-burning militants who populate much of our historical memory of feminism. They are gentle and tentative where the stereotype is dogged and strident, vulnerable where the stereotype is severe. Robbin Schiff, for instance, pauses and stumbles over her words. “I really do feel that the things I want to show are valid,” she tells her interviewer. “The scariness, the fear, the pain that I want to make in my art is valid, and it doesn’t have to be aesthetically pleasing.” However jaded by feminism contemporary viewers might be, it’s impossible not to feel the quaint charm of this young woman coming into her own.

Littman’s film is ostensibly a documentary about Womanhouse, but it also captures an Edenic moment in the history of feminism and feminist art, and a moment when the two were inextricably intertwined. The definition of feminist art was art that evinced feminism, and to practice feminism...