What ‘Not Done: Women Remaking America’ Says About Today’s Feminist Movement

“In periods that follow apparent successes what you get is a sense of complacency. A sense that we have fixed it. That pernicious sense that we are done,” writer and author Rebecca Traister says in Makers’ new documentary, “Not Done: Women Remaking America,” as footage of Hillary Clinton accepting the Democratic nomination for president in the 2016 election plays on screen.

“Not Done” goes on to argue that while many seemed to believe the feminist project was complete, especially in the midst of Obama-era idealism about social progress in America, it was, as the title states, not done. The 2016 election is positioned as the central event that exposed the fallacy in that thinking.

Many believed we achieved a post-racial, post-gender, post-oppression society with the election of the country’s first Black president. As professor and author Brittney Cooper noted in the documentary, her students fell victim to the idea that the project of feminism was complete, stating that “they didn’t know why they needed to be feminist and that all their rights had basically been secured.”

The film briefly points to pre-2016 social movements, like the creation of Black Lives Matter and protests against the shooting of Michael Brown, as evidence that systemic oppression was still rampant under President Obama. However, the film dedicates most of its energy to the social awakening after the 2016 election, unpacking the watershed reckonings about the place of women in American society and culture with particular attention questioning how far we have really come in the reckoning that resulted from President Trump’s election.

Under this lens, the film covers the Women’s March, the origins of the #MeToo movement, Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony against Brett Kavanaugh, the Time’s Up movement, the record-setting number of women elected to office in the 2018 midterms, and the George Floyd protests this past summer. As the film’s title suggests, its conclusion is that we still have a long way to go before achieving true equality.

Introducing so many mammoth topics and revealing their connections is a tall order for a 55-minute-long film and, in certain ways, the film suffers for it. Particularly for viewers who lived through and followed these movements, the film doesn’t offer much in terms of revelatory information. Due to time and scope, it rarely strays much deeper than the general details and social impact of each event it discusses. In this vastness, even its thesis can ring hollow. Just weeks after an election in which Donald Trump still managed to earn over 70 million votes, the idea that the work of feminism was not finished in 2016 and is still not complete in 2020 feels obvious.

However, the film is at its most captivating when it entertains a more messy picture of progress and asks deeper questions than simply: Is American feminism complete? Sometimes these moments come in a certain remark, like when journalist Jodi Kantor notes that after Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation, “what’s so confounding is that everything has changed and nothing has changed.” Kavanaugh’s confirmation in spite of Blasey Ford’s testimony exemplifies how those in power can remain wilfully antagonistic to social progress, despite seismic cultural shifts and deafening public pressure.

Other times, these revelatory moments come in revealing the lesser-known connections between different movements. Citing Black Lives Matter and Standing Rock as examples, Traister explains, “The one thing that’s too bad about the Women’s March is that it’s read as being a reaction to Trump, which by many means it was, but one of the reasons it’s so important that the co-chairs came from different movements is because they knew what was already bubbling.” This statement emphasizes the ignorance of so many white women to the plight of BIPOC during the supposedly halcyon days of the Obama administration and signals a disturbing fracture in our society that can’t be easily mended.

As a viewer, I found myself pulled toward these deeper questions: How does social progress succeed in spite of resistance both conscious and unconscious? And what does it actually take to create the new awareness necessary to effect positive social change? While the film may not unpack these ideas sufficiently, the next decade may bring answers we’ve been looking for.