Yours in Sisterhood

Yours in Sisterhood gives life to the voices of women living in the 1970s while showing the ways that being a woman has and has not changed over time. The film shows a selection of interviews in which a person is asked to read a letter that was penned in the 1970s to Ms. Magazine but was never published and then answer questions about the letter. Almost every interview is shown as a continuous shot, or as at most three shots cut together. Every reader is from the same town as the author of the letter and has personal experience with the issues being discussed in the letter. The topics of the letters include environmental justice, race, sexuality and gun control and are all about the experience of women in America. They discuss the opinions of prisoners, sex workers, children, and senior citizens. Their are readers who sympathize deeply with the writers of their letter and there are readers who critique or scoff at the author of the letter they read. Many of the letters contain perspectives or opinions that would have been considered to devient in their time and that were not published by Ms. Magazine to avoid alienating the mainstream readership or distracting from what Ms. perceived to be the main issues. The film draws attention to whose voices we are not hearing in feminist and womens spaces, both then and now.

A book by the same name as the film which also explores unpublished Ms. letters can be found by members of the TriCo at: https://tripod.swarthmore.edu/permalink/01TRI_INST/j0hcq8/alma991010485049704921

A citation of the book follows:

Farrell, Amy Erdman. Yours in Sisterhood?: Ms. Magazine and the Promise of Popular Feminism. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998. Print.

Citation of the movie poster:

Lusztig, Irene. “Yours in Sisterhood Poster.” Women Make Movies, Women Make Movies, https://www.wmm.com/catalog/film/yours-in-sisterhood/.