Boston Women

IT'S BEEN over a year since graphic designer Emily Hiestand was asked by Boston 200, a group involved in planning many of city's observances, to design what it has called one of its "theme exhibits": Boston Women The show's opening last week is, significantly, one of the first overt productions of the bicentennial. It is also her first major exhibit for the young and talented Ms. Hiestand.

The exhibit runs its first two weeks at Jordan Marsh, its sponsor, as part of a larger collection of happenings called "The American Woman: A Celebration of Her Past, Present, and Future." Ms. Hiestand's show is detachable from its multi-media surroundings at Jordan's and it's scheduled to appear for month-long periods at Boston area locations from The Women's City Club on Beacon Hill to the Boston YWCA and City Hall over the course of the coming year.

Hiestand's exhibit loses some of its individual character in the midst of the related activities at the Jordan Marsh "Celebration." There is so much going on there that one wonders what the Jordan's planners intended the celebration's focus to be. Aside from the fact that women are the featured subject, a sense of integration in the whole of the proceedings is lacking. For the moment, the intriguing graphic display shares the stage with other acts, including the WBZ-TV (Channel 4) program. "Woman '75," hosted by Pat Mitchell, which will be broadcast live every weekday at 12:30 for the two-week period.

On entering the Fashion Auditorium, the viewer is accosted by "Woman '75's" imposing stage which evokes the loud patriotic decor of Brigham's. The blue and white Boston 200 logo wallpapered around portraits of famous women and a starkly geometric waging flag in red and white form the backdrop of the stage. The WBZ program will lecture such dicers acts as the Caravan Theater, mush by Jade and Sasparilla, and an interview with Ms. Dukakis The women's history exhibit suffers under the onslaught of cameramen, glaring TV lights and coached applause. On the first day of the exhibit, "high school women" discussed sex roles and modeled original clothes. For opening day had been designated "High School Day" and included continuos presentations by high school women ranging from demonstrations of Judo and the Can-Can to poetry readings and musical performances.

Given these distracting surroundings, it is important to remember that the Boston Women's exhibit is both the blurred focus of this present total production and a discrete entity that will move on, and be seen alone. One has the feeling here that the surrounding women's groups are coming out of the woodwork and that, while legitimately interesting on their own, their country fair-like atmosphere is in jarring contrast to the verbal and visual qualities of the exhibit, which must be read and absorbed-theoretically, in tranquility-to be fully appreciated.

The exhibit is literally many-sided, and it has to he described in terms of the overlapping considerations of its concept, content and design. It attempts to give a comprehensive yet necessarily selective presentation of salient aspects of women's historical growth and role transformation in Boston over the last two centuries. Hiestand has chosen to marshall portions of the vast body of information available to her into six separate groupings: "Dress," "Law," "Work," "Health," "Feminism" and "Education." Her writer-assistant, Marjorie Waters, with a team of three historians, sifted through the voluminous subject choosing those quotes, facts and observations which form the verbal body and content, of the exhibit.

A great deal of ground is covered, original and often unfamiliar source material alternating with a chronicle of better-known trends and events. One is struck by the modern spirit of protest expressed by individual early American women. Women's progress from having "no legal individuality" through the gradual reversals in the courts (the acquisition of voting rights, educational opportunities, divorce and child-custody rights, wage and hour standards in working situations, to the 1973 U.S. Supreme Court abortion decision) are traced.

At the Jordan's celebration, Boston Women is at the center of the crowded room, contained within a red carpet. Its two major structural components are the six groupings of a total of seventy-two door-sized white panels, and a slide and tape presentation with separate viewing area set behind the rest of the exhibit. In each group, six panels are joined in a kind of flattened-sawhorse formation so that the panels participate in a connected, four-side, walk-around display. The viewer moves from group to group, circling each separate area. Over each section hangs a long blue banner with the Boston 200 logo and the single-word title of the group in white letters.

The panels strongly suggest sets of doors. Through which the women described on them and others have stepped. The pictures and prose set in black on these panels resemble Alice-In-Wonderland sized pages; it's almost as if they were torn from a book, animated and made larger than life.

The text is set in a typeface named Tiffany, blown up to enormous bold sizes by Wrightson's typographers of Boston, and mounted on the panels by Stone's Reprographics of Cambridge. The face combines a pleasingly weighty, rounded horizontal density with elegantly elongated spaces inside o's and n's, for example, which enhance the vertical dimensions of the panels themselves. Fine, script like serifs further create a sense of grace suitable to discussions from sources as diverse and far apart in time as Abigail Adams's 1776 letters to her husband, and statistics from a Scientific American article on housework.

Accompanying the text are a variety of photographs (reproductions and slides by Tod Stuart from The Carpenter Center for The Visual Arts), some enlarged to fill one or more whole panels, as a picture of Anna Howard Shaw, lace-collared feminist; some in old-fashioned oval cameo frames. Other graphics include illustrations of old sewing machines culled from early catalogues, some alarming anatomical diagrams captioned "effects of corsets on the rib cage and organs," a high-stepping Flapper, scenes of factory work--a whole range of women in their changing images.

The facts pinpointed in this very concise exhibit are each striking and resonant, building up a sense, from grouping to grouping, both of the incredible entrenchment of women's oppression. In the early days of this country's history, and of the many positive accomplishments that have accumulated to bring women today, face to face with the eventual fruits of the accelerating trend toward a basic theoretical equality with men. The gaining of independence by women has been an integral part of this country's social history, and is as much a revolution in its own right as was the political upheaval which resulted in America's independence from Great Britain in the 18th century.

The chronicle of progress in voting rights, working and career recognition, educational opportunities, changes in habits of home and public life and appearance, as well as women's roles in the politics of such social issues as abolition, are also covered in the thirty-minute slide-tape presentation. Unfortunately, the broadcasting of the Pat Mitchell program conflicts with the sound of the slide show, which has to be turned down so low that you can hardly hear it.

BOSTON WOMEN will change, as it moves from one place to another, interacting with and deriving meaning from the different scenes which will surround it on its tour this year. It is in itself a tacit event in the movements it describes, a realization showcasing many women's achievements and exemplifying them personally in the work of its designer. For Hiestand has decisively lent her voice to answer the 18th century writer Judith Sargent Murray's question, "Is it reasonable that a candidate for immortality, for the joys of heaven, an intelligent being...should...be so degraded as to be allowed no other ideas than those which are suggested by the mechanics of a pudding, or the sewing of the seams of a garment?" Her answer is an emphatic "No!"

Boston Women will appear at the following locations: The Women's City Club-May: The Women's Educational and Industrial Union-June: The State House-July: The Boston YWCA-September.