The Bechdel test will hopefully be familiar to the reader base of Unconquered Peaks, but just to make sure that everyone is with me: The Bechdel test is a measure of the inclusion of women in media, which asks whether there are two women who speak to each other about something that isn’t a man. The test was the subject of an 1985 comic strip by the cartoonist Alison Bechdel, which features two women deciding to choose a film at the cinema based on the rules of the test. They are unable to find a film that passes, so they go home. Bechdel credits the rules to her friend Liz Wallace (and prefers the name Bechdel-Wallace Test), and suspects that Wallace was inspired by Virginia Woolf. In A Room of One’s Own, Woolf notes that ‘All these relationships between women, I thought, rapidly recalling the splendid gallery of fictitious women, are too simple. … And I tried to remember any case in the course of my reading where two women are represented as friends. … They are now and then mothers and daughters. But almost without exception they are shown in their relation to men.’ Over fifty years later, Bechdel and Wallace sought to highlight this disparity between the depth of portrayal of women and men, and still today, this gap has not been closed.
Feminists and film critics are too quick to dismiss the Bechdel-Wallace test
5th November 2020
