November 15, 1994

Linda McCarthy
Women Make Movies
462 Broadway, 5th Floor
NY, NY 10013

Dear Linda,

Regarding your letter about Women Make Movies . . . I did not contact you regarding your series. I was contacted about you by Mary Lee Sargent in Illinois. She said she would like to put you in contact with me because of a film you were working on—that somehow in all your extensive research about feminist activism you had not managed to have heard anything about my twenty years of radical feminist activism and 49 arrests in behalf of women's rights.

    
It's true I haven't done lots of actions in New York City . . . But, if you are interested in receiving a packet about my political work I will gladly work something out with you if you want to give me a call. There's lots of documentary footage that is available from news archives about the work, but I have no duplication equipment. Also, I do not have the time or resources to make a video. Also, I think you are going to be excluding a number of activists if you require video presentation for participation, too.
    
Your documentation of the feminist movement is so important and as far as I can see you are reaching high and in most respects doing it right. However, after reading the materials you sent I have several major concern about what you are doing that I'd like to deal with here. In your promotional materials you write about race, class and sexual orientation: “Rather than divert or hide from these issues The Second Wave will confront them head on, and provide a public discourse which may lead to greater understanding.”
    
It sounds good, but where is your mention of pornography? Is your omission of the very public struggle that hundreds of radical feminists have waged against pornography for the last decade and a half an accident. Or is it censorship? From where I stand it looks like this: If it's accidental, it indicates some shoddy research on your part, and if there is an intentional exclusion, it indicates an intolerable bias on your part.
    
Though there are several token mentions about violence against women in the intro, you make no mention during the description of your four part series about dealing with rape or violence against women. In your questions about making a video you fail to mention violence against women at all. So, what about pornography and sexual exploitation on this list and in your documentary? You mention Clarence Thomas in connection with the EEOC, education, employment, and class and the national crisis of the feminization of poverty. What about Sexual harassment! Where is the place for Catharine MacKinnon in your video? What about Andrea Dworkin? No matter what the mass media and pornographers say, there ain't no better example of more dedicated—and, yes, radical—feminist in this country than these two women.
You may not be aware that besides the early protests in Atlantic City there have been an additional decade of protests all across the country with a distinctly anti-pornographic/anti-sexual exploitation slant, including in Dallas, Texas; Bellingham, Washington; Lansing, Michigan; Santa Cruz & San Diego, California.

    
After some very formidable protests waged, spanning nearly a decade, we finally ran the Miss California pageant out of Santa Cruz (where it had been for 60 years) to San Diego. Women tossed meat on the stage during the bathing suit contest, poured blood across the entry way, vomited Nestle Crunch Bars (sponsors of the pageant) into rotating toilets through hoola hoops labeled “Beauty Obedience School,” the year it was called Weight Slavery women dragged bathroom scales by their ankles. One year men leapt on stage and chanted, “Men resist sexism. Men resist sexism” and prevented the crowning.
    
The protests culminated when michelle andreson, one of the protesters, had the brilliant idea of trying out for Miss Santa Cruz, which she won. A year later, on the stage of the Miss California pageant in San Diego she unveiled a banner from her bra that proclaimed, “Pageants Hurt All Women.” Where is the place for the thousands of protesters of the Myth California pageant in your video?
    
Besides those protests there have been many more that make for a very rich history of humorous, creative and, yes, radical feminist activism. We've chained ourselves across the Playboy Foundation and demanded that Hugh Hefner get naked; and been arrested for refusing to cover our breasts while tearing up pornography.
    
I hope there is the place for some of the afore mentioned efforts in your documentary. The anti-pornography movement and specifically West Coast and Midwest actions have been more than incidental in comprising the so-called Second Wave of U.S. feminism and we have received little more than incidental recognition for our efforts by too many feminist historians.
I wish you well with your work and hope that the short sightedness I so strongly perceive is somehow a misunderstanding.


Sincerely, Nikki Craft

cc: Mary Lee Sargent
Andrea Dworkin
Catharine MacKinnon
michelle andreson
Sagebrush Productions

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