Feminist movement gets powerful treatment

“Maybe the anger was what carried us through and made us fearless,” says a voice in Mary Dore’s stirring documentary “She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry.” A sort of oral history of the feminist movement born in the late 1960s, the film is narrated by a chorus of several dozen women, each of whom played a crucial role in a half-decade (roughly 1966-1971) of dramatic change. It’s fascinating to see photos and footage of each woman then and now, their fire undimmed by time.

Swiftly moving (and expertly edited), the film takes us through many branches of the splintered yet sturdy feminism tree: the early readers of Betty Friedan’s “The Feminine Mystique,” which put a name to their isolation; African-American women who wondered if there was a role for them in what initially seemed to be a white women’s movement; lesbians, pushed aside early on, who formed their own “Lavender Menace”; the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, which focused on issues of women’s health and published the landmark book “Our Bodies, Ourselves”; the Jane Collective, helping thousands of women to obtain then-illegal abortions; Cell 16, focused on self-defense; poets and musicians of the movement.

A few awkward re-enactments mar the effect, but they’re over quickly, while the narrators’ voices and plentiful historical footage create a rich mosaic. Its ending is both inspiring (seeing the younger faces of today’s feminism) and dispiriting, as voices remind us that many goals of the movement still aren’t met, or are slipping away. (Among the issues debated back in the ’60s: a lack of affordable child care; rape victims too often not believed; little access to abortion … sound familiar?)

“She’s Beautiful …” is an important film: a reminder of a battle fought by thousands of ordinary women and an engaging portrait of sisterhood.