8 minute read
The March Towards Women’s Rights
She became interested in gender equality as a student at all-women Barnard College, where there was a heightened awareness around women’s rights, and she became more attuned to the inequalities they face in many industries, particularly the entertainment industry.
She majored in history with a minor in religious studies, setting her sights on pursuing a career in international development and aid work. After graduating, she landed a job managing the press center for the United Nations Conference on Population and Development NGO Forum, where she learned how the media could be used as an effective tool for social change.
In 1994, she took a position working as an archival researcher at Cronkite Ward Productions working on Walter Cronkite’s autobiographical series Cronkite Remembers.
She moved on to film, co-producing Blue Vinyl in 2002, a documentary about the health and environmental risks associated with the manufacturing process for the plastic, polyvinyl chloride, also known as PVC. She served as a production executive for the company, Non Fiction Films, before co-founding Chicken & Egg Pictures in 2005, and later Gamechanger Films in 2013, a for-profit production financing company that invested in a slate of ten feature films directed by women, most notably The Tale by Jennifer Fox and Land Ho! by Martha Stevens and Aaron Katz. Back then, there wasn’t much in the way of financial support or mentorship opportunities for women filmmakers, she recalls.
“The field has expanded quite a bit, and women filmmakers are breaking through more and more. There are new companies that have cropped up to support women, both in the fiction world and nonfiction world. There are festivals like the Athena Film Festival, focusing on women’s leadership, at Barnard. It is heartening to see more and more focus and attention on women filmmakers. It is still hard to get that first lucky break, and it is equally hard to get the big budget projects or win the awards, but there is movement and culture change, and a lot more awareness than there was five, ten, or fifteen years ago.”
Her focus more recently is on inequality in a much broader sense. “I think inequality in all its forms — gender and racial inequality in particular — are the most pressing issues in the U.S. today. American Factory spoke to the decline of the middle class and well-paying factory jobs with benefits in the Midwest. The big question is, how do we continue to have a robust middle class in the U.S., when so many jobs have been outsourced overseas and unemployment is so high?
“We need to make sure everyone is paid a living wage in all 50 states in the nation, and that goes for women, too. I want to continue to work on film projects that examine these issues, so we can better understand where we are and what we can do about it, to keep a hold of the American Dream for everyone.”
After American Factory won the Oscar, Benello was poised to go full-steam ahead with more challenging projects, having made new connections through the Oscar win. Then the pandemic struck, and things changed.
“COVID-19 has hit our industry hard, from big Hollywood productions to independent filmmakers who haven’t been able to shoot and have lost freelance gigs. We pivoted our programs at Chicken & Egg Pictures from in-person to virtual labs and launched an AlumNest relief fund for rapid relief grants to our filmmakers. On the flip side, it is true that audiences have grown as we are all stuck at home consuming more and more content on Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, HBO, etc., so there is a huge need for compelling storytelling in all its forms,” she says.
To that end, Benello signed on as executive producer with the Global Fund for Women, along with YouTube and Refinery 29, to produce the series, Fundamental: Gender Justice, No Exceptions about five women activists from around the world who are fighting for gender justice by disrupting the status quo.
A former board member of the Global Fund for Women, one of the world’s leading foundations for gender equality, Benello supported the work the organization does in funding grassroots women activists from developing countries. “I thought it would be great to profile some of these women activists and the movements they are a part of, so the series, directed by two-time Oscar-winner Sharmeen Obaid Chinoy, seemed like a natural fit and extension of my interests,” she says.
Recently, she came on board to produce Tony Award-winning playwright and performer Sarah Jones’s documentary directorial debut, SELL/BUY/DATE, which is based on her award-winning, one-woman play about sex workers. “Sarah is brilliant and very funny,” Benello says, “and we could all use more humor in this surreal and crazy moment in our world.”
Benello lives in San Francisco with her husband, Allen, and two daughters, Avery and Sophie. She serves on the Board of SFFilm and is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences Documentary Branch. In 1999, she was the Hotchkiss Community Service Award recipient.
100 YEARS AFTER THE 19TH AMENDMENT:
The March Toward Women’s Rights
BY WENDY CARLSON
PHOTO: COLLECTION OF THE LITCHFIELD HISTORICAL SOCIETY, LITCHFIELD, CONNECTICUT
As the struggle for women’s suffrage gained momentum at home, the boys at Hotchkiss focused on a world at war.
IN A YEAR MARKED BY A PANDEMIC,
wildfires in the West, hurricanes in the South, national protests for racial justice, and election chaos, all upending life as we know it, it is easy to overlook the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, granting women the right to vote. Ratified on August 18, 1920, the amendment followed almost a century of protest. At the time, Hotchkiss was far removed from the struggle, though not entirely.
In their hard-won battle, women carried out relentless lobbying, acts of civil disobedience, and nonviolent confrontations, all far from the rolling hills of Lakeville. As the boys at Hotchkiss learned to be gentlemen and prepared themselves for Yale, women picketed the White House for months, leading to the arrest and imprisonment of many suffragists, which shocked the nation and brought attention and support to women’s rights. Although often alienated by mainstream suffragists, Black women also played a major role fighting for the right to vote, only to be disenfranchised by state laws requiring literacy tests and poll taxes after the amendment passed.
Across Connecticut, women hit the road, campaigning for the right to vote.
PHOTO: RG 101 CONNECTICUT WOMAN SUFFRAGE ASSOCIATION RECORDS.CONNECTICUT STATE LIBRARY
At the time of the first suffrage convention held in Seneca Falls, NY, in 1848, women had few legal rights and were often excluded from higher education and most professions. When a woman married, she lost all control of her finances, her wages went directly to her husband, and she could not own property under her own name. If the marriage dissolved, custody of children was automatically granted to her husband.
While the suffrage movement gained strength in the early 20th century, The Hotchkiss Record during that period offers scant clues about the School community’s views on the issue. The paper shows a school largely living in a parallel universe: boys were focused on sports and the impending world war. They conducted marching drills and worked in an emergency farm program to address the war food shortage. There were no female instructors; the first women to teach at Hotchkiss would not arrive until the 1960s. Students interacted with girls and women on rare occasions, including at the mid-winter dance, at the infirmary where female nurses attended to them, and at the home of Headmaster Huber G. Bueler, (1904–24) whose wife, Roberta, would invite the boys to the house for high tea or what she called the “Queen’s tea.” Nor did the boys travel much outside the campus; rarely, if ever, could they leave Lakeville during term time.
Their views on women’s rights remain a conundrum, which doesn’t surprise Emma Wynn, head of the humanities and social sciences department and instructor in history, philosophy, and religion.
“In my course, LGBTQ U.S. History, we often look at periods for which there is little surviving evidence for how a community felt about a contemporary issue. It’s something you learn to live with as a historian — getting to know as much as you can about the broader historical context and then doing your best to reconstruct how individuals may have reacted to major events.”
In the small towns surrounding the campus, the women’s rights movement was gaining steam in the early 1900s, particularly after a group from Hartford organized an auto tour through the Northwest Corner in 1911, pausing in Sharon and Salisbury to rally support. They tooted their horns as they drove over the bumpy dirt roads past Hotchkiss into Salisbury, stopping to post paper notices on the tree trunks. In Connecticut, the suffrage movement’s biggest impediment remained the state’s longstanding Republican party machine, led by GOP party boss J. Henry Roraback, who just happened to live in Canaan, a stone’s throw from Hotchkiss. Roraback was chairman of the state Republican Party for 25 years from 1912 to 1937. (Eleven descendants of the extensive Litchfield County Roraback clan “Should Women in the United States Have a Suffrage Equal to that Held by Men?,” The Record reported: “This question is exceedingly well chosen. The suffrage program has been agitating the world for several years without apparent advantage to either side.”
would go on to graduate from Hotchkiss, including State Superior Court Judge Andrew Roraback ’78.)
The Record acknowledged the suffrage movement in three articles, in 1911, 1917, and 1918, each when the Agora and the Forum held debates over whether women should have equal rights. Reports of those debates were overshadowed by the boldface headlines of sports victories, news like the wonders of the wireless telegraph, and society events such as Yale’s senior proms.
In 1914, when the societies debated the question, “Should Women in the United States Have a Suffrage Equal to that Held by Men?,” The Record reported: “This question is exceedingly well chosen. The suffrage program has been agitating the world for several years without apparent advantage to either side.” By the 1917 debate, Agora took the
