WOMEN'S  QUILT

By Kate Douvan

This proposal outlines a plan to create a documentary film and interactive digital experience on the Web called The Woman's Quilt. The title is inspired by the creative collaboration that occurs during a quilting bee -- a circle of women, talking, laughing, learning and making something beautiful out of bits and pieces of their lives.

Startling contemporary research by Harvard psychologist Carol Gilligan reveals that, with alarming consistency, young females girls lose their sense self during adolescence. The power they have known in their earlier life seems to vanish with training bras. They feel tremendous conflict between their ambition and self assertion on the one hand, and the desire to be popular with boys on the other hand. The loss of love, they often believe, is the consequence of a strong sense of self. A central motivation to create The Women's Quilt is a desire to change this. Gilligan and her colleges believe that one reason this occurs is that girls do not grow up with heroic female mythology that encourages them to lead exciting, adventurous, rewarding lives. Western tales of men questing in foreign lands abound. But girls seems to believe for them it is a choice: choose love or adventure. The male heroes are able to have both. They go off on their adventure and then come home to their wives, love and family. We want to show girl that it's possible for them to have both. The Women's Quilt be a place to find modern day female heroes. Women with strong identities who have initiated imaginative, self-expanding journies... women who have love in their lives... women who are thriving. Our female portraits will counterbalance the loud cultural message that our identity comes primarily from how we look; it will show that we are what we believe, what we do and what we say. Girls will come away from The Women's Quilt feeling that their talents, abilities & ideas are important and need to be heard. Girls will feel powerful, capable and inspired.

In phase one of the Woman's Quilt we will collect videotaped interviews. This research/gathering phase will generate a documentary film/video that explores the lives of American girls and women. We will examine the tumult that has occurred during the last two decades -- how our roles have changed, how our lives compare with our mother's. We will show the complicated weave of our lives -- the sometimes tangled intersection of intimacy/ relationships, work and child rearing, and create a film that speaks of being female in America.

Phase two will be the creation of the Interactive Women's Quilt. This experience will be packaged as a CD-ROM as well an experience that will exist on the internet. The Interactive Women's Quilt will be a cultural collage made of image1, text² and sound³. It will be an emotional sensorama where thoughts, feelings and ideas will be conveyed to a participant experientially. The physical act of navigating through a computer environment, making choices, interacting and communicating with others engages a participant in ways traditional media cannot. The journey will pull one forward; beyond every turn, something new will be revealed. Insight and power will be made in juxtapositions and connections between things. This will be a journey of discovery. Discovery of the self, discovery of others. The tone will be passionate, joyous, free, soaring. It will be an experience that makes one feel. It will inspire personal growth.

*1. still graphics and moving images (video and animations) *2. prose (fiction & non-fiction), poetry, song lyrics *3. music, spoken word, sound effects

With the internet Woman's Quilt we hope to create a community -- a place where females of all ages can communicate and share with others. We imagine that the internet Women's Quilt to grow to express the rich and varied splendor of women's lives around the globe, for online viewers can easily contribute their own pages to the Quilt in cyberspace.

Planting a garden is another metaphor for the creative process that's based on traditional women's work. During the first phase, collecting the interviews, we will be planting seeds. We will fertilize and encourage growth by asking interviewees to bring objects with them to their sessions. These objects that have meaning to them, may be photographs, figurines, rocks, jewelry, bits of embroidery, etc... Mary Catherine Bateson, in her book "Composing a Life" writes: "Women's lives have always been grounded in the physical by the rhythms of their bodies and the giving and receiving of concrete specific tokens of love, a ring or a teaspoon of cough syrup." The women interviewed will tell their stories, tell what the objects mean to them. The objects will then be graphically displayed and used for navigational purposes in the Interactive Women's Quilt. Click on the faded yellow rose and hear Maxine Hong Kingston tell a story from her childhood, click on Courtney Love's notebook and go to the pages filled with song lyrics. Follow a beckoning icon to a gallery of paintings. Like doors on an advent calender, each icon reveals a message: an image, a glimpse of wisdom, beauty, truth -- each is an opportunity, a challenge to learn and grow.

Here's a beginning list of women we hope to interview. While this list has known names on it, we will also interview girls and women (as young as 5 years) who are not well known. We know from the documentary film form that it does not matter if the interviewee is known or not, what they have to say still resonates. The film "Roger & Me" illustrates this -- the woman who slaughters rabbits (not an interview with Roger Smith) becomes the emotional heart of the piece; her life is the metaphor for the devastation caused by the factory closure.

The Women's Quilt will be an imaginative, mind and self expanding journey that supports girls in their development. It will allow them to envision a myriad of possible futures and possible selves and it will encourage them to become all they can be.