A new book titled The Accidental Feminist: How Elizabeth Taylor Raised Our Consciousness and We were Too Distracted by her Beauty to Notice argues that the movie star's explorations of gender in (National Velvet) desire (in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof) and rage (in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?) changed our understanding of women and men.
It's occasioned a lot of wonderful commentary, such as this open from Larry McMurtry:
If one is attempting to judge the depth and force of a woman’s feminism—the woman, in this case, being the American actress Elizabeth Taylor (1932–2011)—surely the first thing to do is to determine exactly what feminism is. The most succinct opinion I’ve seen is the famous doormat quote from Rebecca West:
I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is. I only know that people call me a feminist when I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat.
And in BookForum, Rhonda Lieberman brings examples:
In National Velvet(1944), Liz is a "twelve-year-old warrior against gender discrimination." A Place in the Sun(1951), in which Liz is the ultimate dream girl, Lord says, "is hard to view as anything other than an abortion-rights movie . . . [dealing] with the tragic consequences of stigmatizing unwed pregnancy."… In Suddenly, Last Summer (1959), Liz's character crusaded against lobotomies for inconvenient women. (If that sounds far-fetched, Lord offers as context the appalling story of Rosemary Kennedy, who in 1941, at the age of twenty-three, was lobotomized at the request of her parents, Rose and Joseph P. Kennedy Sr., for being "disruptive.")
I'm convinced.
[Taylor in l954, photographed by the best studio still photog, Cecil Beaton]
Kit Stolz 