Gone With The Wind

 I knew the basics of this movie, cause I've seen it when I was a kid. But watching it again in college, with some background info on the time period, really changed my view.

It was way more interesting than I remembered. What stuck with me was how the women in the story are the only ones who make sense. Whether they're on one side or another, they're all saying the same thing: the war needs to end. Then the fighting starts, and everything starts to fall apart.

Scarlett isn't suddenly all tough and in charge, she has to be. There's no food, no money, and all the men are gone. She has to pick cotton by hand and even marry for money instead of love.

And run a business in a world that says women aren't supposed to. She doesn't do these things because she wants her freedom, she has to. Poverty and debt and a broken society leave her no other choice. She's doing things that a "good" Southern belle wouldn't do. That makes me wonder if this is really a story about women getting free, or if it's about being forced into a new life.

Lots of times in history, like during both WWs, women took over jobs and did work we thought was for men. But when the men came back, many of those women lost their jobs. I think this movie is more complicated than just "women should be free". It even seems a bit mad at Scarlett for where she ends up, which is alone because she drove away the people who cared about her.

Interestingly, the article about the Civil War I read also talked about how the war let enslaved families see each other for the first time in years.

That's a big part of what really happened. But the movie doesn't show that.

The two black house slaves, Mammy and Prissy, are just there to help Scarlett. They don't have their own lives. It made me think of a comment from my high school AP History class. We only spent like two days on the whole of Reconstruction. Our teacher said Hollywood likes the old South more than actual historians do. At the time, I didn't get what he meant. Now I do.