Description:

9 to 5
(Colin Higgins, 1980, USA, DCP, 109 min.)

9 to 5 remains a classic film for many reasons: its top-tier cast, catchy theme, and the powerful way it blends comedy with a rallying cry for working women. Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin, and Dolly Parton’s characters fight against the patriarchy to enact progressive ideas--their platform is for equal pay for equal work, ending discriminatory hiring and office sexual harassment, and instituting social programs including workplace child-care. Nearly forty years later, these issues are still being grappled with as a new battle for equal rights taken on by the most diverse Congress ever elected.

Visual Pleasures: The Work and Play of Women’s Liberation

This year’s One Book One Northwestern selection, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, imagines how the hard-fought economic and sexual freedoms won by the women’s movement might be stripped away. The films in this series, co-presented with One Book, the Northwestern Women’s Center, and the Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies, manifest those freedoms in both form and content. Visual Pleasures encompasses both mainstream comedies of empowerment and experimental representations of desire through a distinctly female gaze, celebrating liberation through a spectrum of cinematic forms.