As a feminist writer I often refer to “the lens of gender,” a term that refers to looking at the world through metaphorical spectacles that allow one to view people and events via a special filter. That filter exposes women’s experiences, needs, and perceptions while revealing the realities, needs and perceptions of men in new ways too. Our vision becomes refined, more acute, and more humane when we don these spectacles, allowing us to see things more clearly and compassionately. By becoming aware of context, we find new meaning in our own and others’ experiences.
Looking at the world through the lens of gender allowed Jean Kilbourne, for example, to shine light on the world of advertising in a way that no one had done before her. She demonstrated through her writing and classic video series that women were being objectified and sexualized by advertising that seemed clever, until the gender lens revealed advertising’s alarming or violent subtext.
Another kind of gender lens was more literal as photographers Dorothea Lange, Margaret Bourke-White, Diane Arbus and others revealed. Lange and Bourke-White were social realists whose visionary work revealed what Henry James referred to in literature as an “air of reality.” Like James their work valued accurate representations of the psychological and material realities of life.
Lange achieved this reality by capturing historically important events, including the Dust Bowl and Depression-era days. Committed to revealing the hardships visited upon poor migrants, she afforded her subjects dignity and respect, and by offering a literal gender lens, she also revealed what it looked like to be frightened, unbearably fatigued and marginalized. Lange's images, like the iconic “Migrant Mother,” were often confrontational calls to conscience exposing the need to defend against a lack of interest or skepticism, especially among policymakers.
Margaret Bourke-White offered something new with her imagery of industrial America, 1930s Russia, and the horrors of World War II as no one else had. She also proved adept at capturing human moments in the lives of both the powerful and the poor in a body of work that ranged from the uncompromising to the personal. Women were often among the people she photographed to tie picture essays to real lives and individual experiences in a human way.
Diane Arbus once noted, “There are things nobody would see if [we] didn’t photograph them.” Thankfully, she and other women photographers did view their work through a gender lens, for without that lens we would never have known so much of the world or the historical events that challenged everyone, including women and children.
Martha Gellhorn was an intrepid journalist who covered several wars through a literary lens of gender. Leaving the news of bombs, battleships and martyred soldiers to the male press corps, she used her reporting to show the world what civilian women and children were suffering in war torn places By telling their stories she put a human face on the dreadful effects of conflict.
These innovative photographers and reporters, along with others, paved the way for women writers and photojournalists who were compelled to address social justice issues. Marion Palfi, for example, combined her art form with social research which resulted in her iconic images, including the 1940s photo “Wife of a Lynch Victim.” Social documentarian Mary Ellen Mark’s work explored homelessness, addiction, mental illness and teenage pregnancy, as seen from the inside. (In 1976 she spent 36 days in the women’s maximum- security section of an Oregon mental institution.)
I can’t help thinking now about women like these as we contemplate the suffering occurring in the world in our own time. What might we learn in larger social justice terms if unflinching photographs of the vacant stares and skeletal bones of children starving in Yemen, Afghanistan and parts of Africa were in our minds, or we heard the stories of grieving mothers, themselves hungry and frail? Would we see the face of famine differently?
Would we more fully empathize with the pain of incarceration, wrongful or otherwise, or the unending grief of parents who bury their children because of gun violence? Would we view addiction or mental illness differently? Would we be less judgmental about those who live in family structures unlike our own? Would we understand more deeply what it is like to lose everything in a natural disaster, or to grow old alone?
If we saw the faces of hopelessness, terror, marginalization, solitude, and profound sadness might we be inspired to show up at the polls to vote for change, to advocate vociferously, to press for more humane legislation?
As feminists know, context is everything. When the world is viewed through the lens of gender, social change becomes a political imperative. Stories of real people who live punishing lives for various reasons become compelling through a visual medium that offers powerful testimony to the reality of lives lived outside our own spheres.
In short, seeing is knowing. And knowing, we can no longer look away.