Movie-loving feminists are likely to have heard of the Bechdel Test for representation of women in film. Is there more than one woman? Do the women talk to each other? About anything other than men?
It makes one take a second look at the films one likes or watches, and it’s startling how few films pass the test.
For all that, I must admit I had never bothered to learn more about the Alison Bechdel who came up with this modern version of Virginia Woolf’s 1929 musings:
All these relationships between women, I thought, rapidly recalling the splendid gallery of fictitious women, are too simple. … And I tried to remember any case in the course of my reading where two women are represented as friends. … They are now and then mothers and daughters. But almost without exception they are shown in their relation to men. It was strange to think that all the great women of fiction were, until Jane Austen’s day, not only seen by the other sex, but seen only in relation to the other sex. And how small a part of a woman’s life is that …
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own
Alison Bechdel, it turns out, is a graphic artist, and The Test was first featured in her strip Dykes to Watch out For, in 1985. The first time I actually saw her work, I’m sorry to say, was in her most recent book The Secret to Superhuman Strength (2021). I’m no connoisseur of graphic art — the only other graphic novel I’ve read is Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis (also a great read) — but I was immediately charmed by the misleadingly simple drawing, the autobiographical content, and the topic.
Bechdel jumps right into the purported main subject, exercise.
As you see, she also drifts into Western history, and then goes on into her 1950s childhood when exercising for the sake of exercise was largely unknown.
There was no T-ball, no soccer, no aquatics, no one was driving us around to any Tae Kwon Do tournaments. Apart from having to get up and switch channels manually, there was no working out, no going for the burn, no digging deep, nor any shredding of the gnar.
It was all rather restful. And it was all about to end.
As an intermittent exerciser who has viewed all these trends with bemused admiration for the doughty and determined, I immediately chuckled in recognition.
I have never had Bechdel’s ambition and abilities, but as someone of approximately the same age, I also identified with her reality check:
Backing off to the 1960s, Bechdel charts the changes in American life decade by decade, along with her own physical and emotional development.
1960s: Fallout shelters, Silent Spring, psilocybin, the assasination of JFK. Sneakers were rigidly delineated into ‘girls’ and ‘boys’. Bechdel, a ‘tomboy’ with short hair who wanted to wear jeans, finally got a pair of boyish sneakers. The early days of TV exercise: a rather condescending Jack LaLanne explains to women how to ‘work your body from the feet up to the top of your cute little head’. Bechdel learns to ski, and never looks back.
1970s: the dreaded shower at the end of school gym class, requiring public nudity, that discouraged so many from exercising. In those days, ‘only the tough girls played sports’, but then Title IX is passed, and athletic opportunities for girls slowly begin to increase. Bechdel jogs to her grandmother’s house, and one day she decides to keep running..and running… ‘Athletic stores’ begin to open. Bechdel starts driving.
While it’s true that I suffer from unseemly spasms of self-doubt and self-criticism, I simultaneously possess a self-confidence as solid as a seventies station wagon.
1980s: Bechdel’s father dies, and she attends the Michigan Womyn’s Festival (‘a mind-bending utopian experiment, an insurgency of women engaged in nothing less than dismantling the patriarchy. My gob was absolutely smacked.’). Yoga and martial arts enter her life. Even Bechdel’s mother starts following Jane Fonda on TV (‘a compelling mix of privacy and communcal experience that would reach its apotheosis decades later with Peloton, the stationary bike that live-streams classes’). Bechdel starts drinking and has a bout of depression.
That first bout of depression foreshadows a theme: Bechdel, like most of us, has had several deep lows in her life. Each time, she scrambles out of the emotional trough by way of the exercise endorphins. She doesn’t evangelize, but she doesn’t need to: the implication is clear.
Bechdel is lesbian, and her various relationships are described as a matter of course. The book does not describe any agonies of sexual confusion in her youth, and she undergoes heartbreak, falls in love, and struggles between life and work: her gayness is pleasantly unremarkable.
Then come the 1990s, and Bechdel gets her first longterm injury: a bad knee which precludes her from running. She is faced with her own mortality.
The thing about changing your life is that change means moving on, and moving on leads essentially to one place — the grave.
I won’t summarize the remaining decades, but suffice it to say that they follow Bechdel’s life, with American events in the background (9/11, for example) but her own evolution in the foreground.
Along the way, she wanders into stories about writers of the past: Margaret Fuller, Richard Scarry, William Wordsworth, Shunryu Suzuki, Jack Kerouac, Samuel Coleridge, Thoreau . (Virginia Woolf, who originated the idea that is most associated with Bechdel, is not mentioned, but that is likely because Woolf appears in one of Bechdel’s earlier books)
Of course, the book passes the Bechdel test in terms of women. There are loads of women characters and complicated relationships between them.
If I have a minor discomfort, it is because the book is so … white. Bechdel’s college in the Berkshires, the Michigan Womyn’s Festival, and even New York City in the 1980s are apparently all-white, except for the NY subway mugger. Very very occasionally there is a glimpse of a non-white person in a background picture. I suppose this is reflective of Bechdel’s life, and I’m not demanding that every ethnicity be reflected in every book, but for such an inherently feminist book I found it a little disheartening, somehow.
Still, there is plenty to like, and trust me, the quotes in this review are much more entertaining with the accompanying graphics.
fascinating genre! A lovely review. It sounded a great read!
You make a good point about how some feminism can be quite white; unfortunately, it seems that problems faced by women of colour, global south women, as women, but also thus positioned, had often been and seemingly still are eclipsed by white, middle class, heterosexual, women’s issues.
But is it fair to criticize a book because it doesn’t have nonwhite characters? I’m on the fence about this. For all I know, Bechdel’s college and the Womyn’s Festival and her circle in Vermont were indeed all white, and her drawings reflect that reality. I do think there could have been a bit more diversity in the depiction of NYC.
Perhaps there should be something like a Bechdel test for diversity: are there multiple nonwhite characters? Are they named? Are they stereotypical (drug dealer, mugger, teenage mother)? 🙂