Have you ever seen the movie Mona Lisa Smile? You know, the one with Julia Roberts, Kirsten Dunst, Julia Stiles and Maggie Gyllenhaal (the sister of the oh-so-gorgeous Jake). Well if you haven’t, I’ll sum it up, Kathryn Watson, a liberal from California, becomes a professor at a conservative school in New England. Kathryn teaches Art History and asks her students to question traditional society roles.
Watson asks her students to think of a world beyond their own. The movie is basically about a society that hasn’t seen the feministic revolution yet. In this world, a woman’s greatest goal is to find a husband and have children. I love this movie, but it didn’t receive much claim when it came out. It’s one of those movies that you have to watch more than once before you can truly understand and appreciate it.
Anyway, a few days ago I was sitting in my dorm talking with a friend. She was telling me about how she and her long term boyfriend were looking at engagement rings. She was excited and so was I; she showed me the ones they were looking at, truly lovely. And I thought, have things really changed all that much since the 50s? Have things really changed at all since that world which Mona Lisa Smile shows us?
I came into college looking to find my MRS just like many girls around me. We all still look for that cute guy in class to go out with. Many of my friends have long term boyfriends who they may end up marrying. Is that all really so bad? Of course not. We all talk about how in an ideal world staying home with children would be wonderful. Some of my friends want to work; they don’t want to stay home with children. And I thank God for the feminist movement in the 60s and 70s that allow me that choice. I can chose to marry or not to, and I can chose to stay home with my children someday. There will not be the same pressures from society that women of that movie were faced with.
Yet sitting in my dorm talking about rings, I could not help but remember a scene from the movie about rings. Or talking in a friend’s room about birth control I thought of the contraceptive sponge one of the girls pulls out of the purse of a friend. However, in the world today birth control is legal, not illegal under state law like it was in 1953. College today is much different than it was almost 70 years ago. And yet I cannot help feeling akin to those women. Feeling a kind of friendship because we all still deal with the same issues relationships, breakups, birth control, the future, classes…the same issues so many years later.