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LEFT ON PEARL

LEFT ON PEARL documents the 1971 takeover and occupation of a Harvard building by hundreds of women to dramatize the need for women's space.

LEFT ON PEARL

LEFT ON PEARL documents the 1971 takeover and occupation of a Harvard building by hundreds of women to dramatize the need for women's space.

1 Campaign |

Cambridge, United States

$52,628 USD 450 backers

105% of $50,000 Flexible Goal Flexible Goal

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Project Description

LEFT ON PEARL: Women Take over 888 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, a documentary film, is nearly complete. The 888 Women's History Project and filmmaker, Susie Rivo, must raise $50,000 to pay for the final, technical work that will make the film broadcast-ready, and to clear the rights for music, archival footage, and still photos.

LEFT ON PEARL tells the story of a highly significant but little known event in the history of the Women's Liberation Movement of the late 60's and early 70's. On March 6, 1971, International Women’s Day, hundreds of women took over a Harvard University owned building declaring it a Women’s Center. The building occupation highlighted the hopes and triumphs, as well as the conflicts and tensions, within what is now called Second Wave Feminism. The legacy of this action lives on in the founding of the longest continuously operating women's center in the U.S., the Cambridge Women's Center.

With the building takeover as the focal point, LEFT ON PEARL explores what led women of different class, racial, and ethnic backgrounds to join the Women’s Liberation Movement, how this movement fit into the broader social ferment of the 1960’s and early 1970’s, and how the Second Wave fit into the larger scope of women’s history in the 20th century.

LEFT ON PEARL also reveals the intersection of the women’s movement with the other political struggles of the time, the antiwar, civil rights, black power, and lesbian and gay rights movements. The film highlights several intertwined stories: the need for women’s space, the demands of the predominantly African-American Riverside community (where 888 Memorial Drive was located) for affordable housing, and Harvard University’s expansion into working class Cambridge communities. A key demand of the occupiers was for Harvard to build low and moderate income housing for neighborhood residents being displaced by Harvard's rapid expansion.

More than ten years in the making, LEFT ON PEARL represents a true labor of love. It documents a collective action undertaken by hundreds of women that resulted in the founding of a vital women's institution still in existence today. The film's form and structure also mirror the collective nature of the events it documents. LEFT ON PEARL's narrative emerges through a multitude of voices, representing various perspectives, some contradictory, some complementary, many humorous – a testament to the chaotic and unpredictable way that collective action actually occurs. Lynn, Libby, Susan, Rochelle, Susie, & Miranda

Who We Are:

Director/Producer: Susie Rivo is an award-winning filmmaker and Visiting Scholar at the Women's Studies Research Center at Brandeis University. Her work has been broadcast on PBS stations and screened at numerous film festivals, including Sundance, South by Southwest and Women in the Director's Chair. She holds an MFA in cinema production from San Francisco State University.

Executive Producers:

Rochelle G. Ruthchild participated in the takeover of 888 Memorial Drive and later in the founding of the Cambridge Women’s Center. She was head of Feminist Studies at the Goddard-Cambridge Graduate Program in Social Change. Currently, she is a Research Associate at Harvard’s Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, a Visiting Scholar at the Brandeis Women’s Studies Research Center, an editor of the journal, Aspasia and clerk of the Association for Women in Slavic Studies. She is the author of Equality and Revolution: Women’s Rights in the Russian Empire, 1905-1917

Libby Bouvier Libby Bouvier is Head of Archives at the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, and was the resident manager of the Cambridge Women's Center from 1972 to 1986. In 1980, she co-founded The History Project, which documents LGBTQ Boston.

Susan K. Jacoby was a member of the first core collective at the Women’s Center, and a founding member of its Emotional Counseling Group, which responded to women in crisis.. She was active in the Coalition to Stop Institutional Violence, which successfully organized to stop the construction of a super maximum women's prison unit. (The Coalition was one of many groups that met at the Center)

Editor: Iftach Shavit is an award winning film and video editor with more than 20 years of experience in documentary, commercial and corporate projects. His work has aired on PBS, A&E, NBC, BET, Channel Four in the U.K., WDR in Germany, and Czech Republic television, and has screened at festivals around the world. Films he's edited include: 'Gypsy Heart': Second Prize, Houston International Film Festival, 'Amy': Official Selection Sundance Film Festival, Bronze Apple, National Educational Media Network, Grand Prize, Cabbagetown Film Festival; 'Songs of Sorghum': People's Choice Award, Global Africa International Film and Video Festival, Award of Merit, Latin American Studies Association; 'Sidet': Juror's Citation, Black Maria Film Festival, Outstanding Independent Film Award, New England Film Festival.

Director of Photography: Lynn Weissman has been filming for documentaries, educational and non-profit media for over 15 years. Her award-winning productions and camerawork have been broadcast on the web, and on public television in the US and Canada.

History of the Project

In th the lead up to the 30th anniversary of the takeover of 888 Memorial Drive, a group of women with strong personal ties to the Cambridge Women's Center, set out to document this pivotal event in the history of the Boston Women's Movement. They collected materials and began to videotape oral history interviews, and soon brought in filmmaker Susie Rivo to technically move the project forward.

The group soon realized that the interviews, along with archival footage and newsreels documenting the takeover and the early Women’s Liberation Movement, formed the basis of a powerful film.. Over the next ten years, we interviewed more than 50 individuals and received grants from foundations such as MassHumanities, the Blaufarb Fund of the Tamiment Library at NYU, the Puffin Foundation, Massachusetts Cultural Council, as well as financial support from many individual contributors. Little by little the production of the film moved forward.

Now that we are at the home stretch, we are turning to crowd-sourced funding, a wonderful democratizing tool, to raise the money we need to finish LEFT ON PEARL. We want this film to be used to teach history, sociology, women and gender studies, LGBT studies, and social studies at high schools, community colleges and universities throughout the U.S. and beyond.

Why Is This Film Important Now?

A well-funded backlash has turned the word "feminist" into a slur. Young people do not identify as feminists because of the way the term has been misrepresented and caricatured by the media. Many young women are not aware of what life was like before the Second Wave of feminism. With little choice and few opportunities, women were relegated to low-paying jobs as teachers, nurses, secretaries or maids, often fired upon getting married or becoming pregnant, not permitted to open bank accounts on their own, subjected to violence in the home, sexual harassment on the job, illegal back alley abortions - all without recourse or protection by law. At the same time, homosexuality was considered a mental illness and lesbians and gay men could be fired from jobs, jailed or confined to mental institutions. Women now expect equal pay and opportunities in employment, the classroom, the military, and in professional sports. These rights and opportunities were hard fought and won by the feminist movement.

Yet, the struggle continues. From the debate over whether birth control should be covered by the Affordable Care Act, to extreme anti-abortion laws adopted in Texas, North Dakota, Arkansas, and North Carolina, to serious discussions by politicians over what constitutes “legitimate rape”, we are seeing some of the most radical attacks on women's basic rights of the past 40 years. Clearly, the campaign for women's liberation remains as relevant and as critical as ever.

What We Need & What You Get

LEFT ON PEARL is almost done, but this last leg of the journey is the costliest. We need to raise $50,000 for the technical work required to bring the film to broadcast quality (this includes final editing, sound mix, color grading, and graphics/title design) and to clear the rights for music, archival footage, and still photos.

Besides the satisfaction and karmic boost you will get from contributing to such a worthy cause, we are offering a variety of rewarding and cool perks to choose from, ranging from T-shirts and DVDs to on-screen credits. See our perks to the right.

All donations are fully tax deductible and you will receive a receipt for tax purposes with your perks.

Please Note: Perks that require the film to be finished such as DVDs, tickets to premieres, on-screen credits, etc, will be shipped in late 2014, our expected completion date. Perks that do not require the film to be finished, such as t-shirts, magnets postcards, etc, will be shipped by mid-December 2013. All of the more expensive perks include these smaller items too, so this part of your reward will be delivered in December 2013, while the rest will be delivered in late 2014 (unless you email us asking to receive all your perks at once in late 2014 - leftonpearl at gmail dot com).

What if we exceed our goal?

We should be so lucky! Whatever we raise beyond $50,000 will go toward festival fees, a major outreach and distribution campaign, translation and subtitling for non-English versions of the film, a curriculum guide, and an online archive of amazing clips from our video interviews on Second Wave feminism, searchable by topic and by speaker.

The Impact

Film is the most powerful way to reach the largest number of people on an emotional as well as intellectual level. LEFT ON PEARL will bring the compelling stories of the many women who participated in the takeover and occupation of 888 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, to television, film festivals and educational settings.

LEFT ON PEARL not only bears witness to and documents the Women's Liberation Movement, a subject underrepresented in films about the political upheavals of the late 60's and early 70's, but inspires a new generation of women to take action in the ongoing struggle for women's rights. LEFT ON PEARL preserves and passes on our activist history, so that each new generation can see the progress made and the work still to be done.

Cinematographer Lynn Weissman & Director/Producer, Susie Rivo

Other Ways You Can Help

After making a direct financial contribution to our Indiegogo Campaign today, you can send our campaign link - with a few words about why LEFT ON PEARL is an important film - to friends, colleagues, and relatives. Post it to your network, on Social Media, to listservs you are on, and in other online communities. If you can't contribute financially, help spread the word about the campaign so it goes viral! THANK YOU!

If you have technical problems donating on the website, email us at leftonpearl at gmail dot com.

If you just prefer to keep your donations old school, you can send a check made out to the 888 Women's History Project to our snail mail address:

The 888 Women's History Project, 69 Spring Street, Cambridge, MA 02141.

We will send you your tax-deductible receipt and any perks you qualify for!

Thanks again for helping us preserve and pass on the history of the Women's Liberation Movement in Boston!