Women of Summer: The Bryn Mawr Summer School for Women Workers, 1921-1938 (review)

weight to the comments of contemporaries such as former Sierra Club President David Brower. Again, there is a need to go beyond the surface of the developer's demand for a consistent water supply and the environmentalist's concern over exploitation of natural resources. The production values of the film were good and the messages certainly worth stating. By focusing on three key issues, the filmmakers provide some range for discussing the water problem. However, the historical record could have been used with greater effect as a framework for this film. The linking of past and present water dilemmas and the evolving political, social and economic issues give sufficient power to the concepts behind this venture. Dramatic devices, such as the "debate" among Wolman, Commoner, and Brower are superficial attempts to explore complex problems. Martin V. Meiosi University of Houston Film Review Women of Summer: The Bryn Mawr Summer School for Women Workers, 1921-1938, 60 minutes. Produced by Suzanne Bauman. Distributed by Filmmakers Library, 133 East 58th Street, New York, NY 10022. Women of Summer is a small marvel. At the simplest level, the documentary attempts to capture the essence of Bryn Mawr College's Summer School for Women Workers, 1921-1938, through a series of intertwining video interviews with students who had attended and professors who had taught in it. But the consumate skill and sensitivity—both filmic and historical—of director and editor have resulted in an uncommonly sophisticated production that invites interpretation and appreciation at multiple levels. The film derives part of its rewarding complexity, and its historical validity, from the open juxtaposition of the past of its subject and the present of its frame. Visually, it highlights the juxtaposition through alternating sequences of color and black and white. No attempt is made to reenact the past, which is captured through photographs, clips of film (black and white), and through the interviews with speakers (color). If that contrast underscores the break between the past and the present, the use ofimages (signs), music, and segments of text underscore the bonds that link them. Visually and thematically, continuity frames the core of the historical narrative that derives from the convergence ofthe first-person accounts of those who had participated in the adventure. The film opens with a color close-up of a wheel that initially looks almost like a water-or even a spinning-wheel. That foregrounded wheel suggests recurrence: turn, turn, turn. Gradually, the camera pulls back to identify the wheel, more specifically than the generic image, as a huge wheel in a textile factory. Thus 22 women's factory labor anchors what ensues. Only a few minutes later, when the scene shifts to the gothic Pembroke gate of Bryn Mawr College, does the full significance of that choice emerge: The film is not framed by Bryn Mawr, the middle and upper-class women's college, but by workingclass women's work. The color signals that the work continues—like a wheel's turning. Thus the film never sanitizes women's work as a past horror, but reveals it as a persisting aspect of women's lives. In the same spirit, students speak of their experiences before many of the teachers. And a contemporary student's singing of labor songs (e.g. Bread and Roses) at the reunion, which brought the remaining participants together, frames many of the flashbacks and thus links them to the continuing story. The central narrative of Women of Summer chronicles the backgrounds from which the students came—with brief but telling evocations of the tedium of their work, its smell that clung to them even after countless baths, and the unexpectedly positive attitudes of their parents, notably their fathers, toward the unexpected opportunity for an education. This quiet emphasis on workingclass identification unobtrusively punctuates the film, as in the passing reference to Bryn Mawr's decision in 1936 to provide basic food for the members of the workingclass students' immediate families in the face of the discovery that the students were harboring siblings in their college dorms in order to feed them. But that personal class consciousness, which significant numbers of Americans embraced during the 'twenties' and 'thirties', is also shown to...