Elizabeth Taylor and Women's Rights

This article was sent to me the other day by my friend, Donna. It's about a new book published about Elizabeth that came out last week called "Elizabeth Taylor: An Accidental Feminist". I can't wait to pick it up! The article was great and I had a lot of thoughts on the subject, which I sent to Donna in an email. Instead of going into it again, I just decided to post the email I sent her underneath the article. If anyone has any thoughts, please comment! :)

The Article:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/05/books/review/what-elizabeth-taylor-did-for-womens-rights.html?pagewanted=all

My thoughts (from my email to Donna):

I completely agree with what this article said. The thing about Elizabeth is that she was truly the first Hollywood star (of her caliber) that simply didn't give a damn and lived her life on her own terms. I don't think she ever meant to be a feminist, she simply wanted to live her life and did to the fullest. What's also interesting is that all those roles she played that are supposed to have done so much for feminism were written by men. She had a way of playing them while maintaining complete control over herself, and more importantly, her own sexuality. A lot of people forget that she wasn't just a pretty starlet. She was one of the smartest, shrewdest, business-minded women in showbusiness and eventually in other endeavors like her perfume business and the creation of AMFAR. She was the first star ever to be paid a million dollars for a single role when she signed to do "Cleopatra" and that was only because she didn't want to do it and sarcastically said, "I'll do it for a million dollars and ten percent of the gross" and they said "okay". Then the whole scandal around "Cleopatra" when she met Richard Burton while they were both married really helped to kick start the sexual revolution in the early 60's. People today forget how huge that was. Brad & Jen and Angelina have nothing on what went on then! lol Another great story is that after Mike Todd (her fourth husband) died, she was forced under contract to do "Butterfield 8". She didn't want to do it and when she finally saw the film, she openly hated it. In the movie, her character writes "No Sale" in lipstick on a mirror, so after she saw the film, she went and wrote on the mirror there "Piece of Shit". And then she won an oscar for it! So, as I said, she just didn't care. She was going to live the way she wanted to regardless of what everyone thought. This was a woman who was thrown out of the catholic church, Britain threatened to take away her dual citizenship, then later named her a Dame, and the Vatican even tried to take her children away at one point all because of her personal life, regardless of the kind of person she was. She's a perfect example of what people (women especially) can go through and SURVIVE. So, she truly was an "Accidental Feminist". She was a human being and she embraced it.