The Women’s & Gender Resource center kicked off its Fall Film Series with a screening of  “Feminist Stories From Women’s Liberation,” on Thursday, Sept. 7.

The documentary, directed by Jennifer Lee, includes live footage of protests and interviews with trailblazers of the women’s movement such as Betty Friedan and Vivian Rothstein.

“I was just struck by the way the women’s movement was treated as a kind of aggregation of all of these other movements from labor rights and Vietnam protests and sort of grew into this thing sort of fed by those other efforts,” says Associate Professor of Art and Art History Elizabeth Lee.

Among others, the main theme of the movie was the exploration of fundamental concepts of feminism. According to the film, the publishing of Betty Friedan’s book “The Feminine Mystique” was among the first to acknowledge and voice concern for a common feeling of hopelessness and frustration felt among women who were confined to society’s expectations for them. This issue, commonly known as “the problem that has no name,” came about as a result of women feeling enshrined by society’s expectations for them, which often included not being able work late enough into one’s pregnancy, not being encouraged to pursue areas of mathematics or science in college or not being encouraged to pursue an education at all.

“Feminism wants to upset the patriarchy,” says Donna Bickford, director of the Women’s & Gender Resource Center. “And white privilege and homophobia, and the people who benefit from those, the maintenance of those systems don’t want them upset. So they might use the rhetoric of equality but they don’t really want the change.”

Although society’s perceptions and understanding of feminism has improved since the publishing of Friedan’s book in 1963, the film discussed a stigma still present surrounding the concept of one being a feminist or one who identifies with society’s efforts to view the sexes as politically, economically, and socially equal.

“I think that a lot of people are afraid of using the word feminist because for a lot of people, the connotation of the word has blown up to be synonymous with man-hating or extreme over-the-top practices meant to aggressively reassert society’s traditional concept of femininity,” says Caroline Kassas ’20..

The film series continues in October with a screening of the film “Free Cece,” a documentary discussing the perception of trans women of color directed by Jacqueline Gares and in November with a screening of “He Named Me Malala,” which highlights the acts that occurred prior to and after the Taliban’s assault on Pakistani student Malala Yousafzai, directed by Davis Guggenheim.