Free The Accidental Feminist: How Elizabeth Taylor Raised Our Consciousness and We Were Too Distracted by Her Beauty to Notice by M. G. Lord Page A

documented how male mental health professionals have throughout history pathologized disruptive women. A woman who asserted herself sexually—or rebelled against her second-class societal role—was likely to be labeled crazy and locked up. (Or, in yet more primitive times, incinerated as a witch.)
    Freeman was discredited in 1967, when he accidentally killed a woman on whom he was performing a third lobotomy. But psychotherapists continued to muzzle troublesome women, using antipsychotic drugs such as Thorazine (developed in the 1950s) instead of surgery.
    Nor were psychiatrists unique in their insensitivity. Specialists in all fields, particularly gynecology, tended to ignore women’s feelings. During the 1950s, male obstetricians used “twilight sleep” as an anesthetic for childbirth. The drug didn’t ease a woman’s agony; it just made her forget the pain afterward. Even today, some male doctors remain shockingly indifferent to women’s welfare. This was evident in May 2010, when the American Academy of Pediatrics announced its willingness to serve the Muslim immigrant community by performing clitorectomies on girls. Happily, when blistering, immediate, and widespread criticism met the announcement, the AAP backpedaled.
    In Suddenly, Last Summer , Elizabeth Taylor battles all the doctors who have ever used science against an inconvenient woman. She portrays Catherine Holly, a trauma victim, whose lost memories, if recovered, might destroy the reputation of her newly deceased cousin, Sebastian Venable. But because Williams created art, not agitprop, Catherine does not have a pat antagonist. Nothing in this movie is black-and-white, except its film stock. Doctors, Williams suggests, don’t always practice medicine in a sterilized operating room; they work in the real world, with all its corruption. Sometimes, doctors can be tainted by this corruption. They can be manipulated by unscrupulous people—of whom there is no shortage in Suddenly, Last Summer.
    Thanks to set designer Oliver Messel, Lion’s View is an unmistakable snake pit. But compared with the New Orleans home of Catherine’s aunt, Violet Venable, the state asylum is as cheery as a Disney theme park. Violet’s overstuffed Victorian house surrounds a dank primeval garden, a tangle of clawlike shrubs and twisted tree-ferns, dripping with Spanish moss. A human skeleton adorns a wall niche. Carnivorous plants devour live flies. There, Violet obsesses on the flesh-eating birds that she and Sebastian, her son, witnessed while he was “looking for God” in the Galapagos.
    As portrayed by Katharine Hepburn, Violet is over-the-top, even for a pompous Garden District dowager with deep pockets. She enters her drawing room via a birdcage elevator: “The Emperor of Byzantium, when he received people in audience, would rise mysteriously in the air to the consternation of the visitors,” she explains. “But as we are living in a democracy, I reverse the procedure. I don’t rise; I come down.”
    Although Violet is a powerful woman, she is in no way a feminist. She recoils from the company of other women, with whom she feels she has nothing in common. She prefers to be around young men, such as her late son. “We were a famous couple,” she tells Dr. Cukrowicz, the new surgeon at Lion’s View, when he visits her. “People didn’t speak of Sebastian and his mother or Mrs. Venable and her son, they said, ‘Sebastian and Violet.’ ”
    Cukrowicz doesn’t raise an eyebrow. As portrayed by Montgomery Clift, he speaks with empathy. Yet his expressions are inscrutable. This may have been inadvertent—Clift’s accident froze half his face. But it heightens his mystery; viewers can’t quickly tell whether he’s benign or not.
    Cukrowicz’s boss, who runs Lion’s View, is not benign. He is an emblem of the coldhearted male medical establishment. Desperate to shore up his hospital, he places its needs above those of its individual patients. When Violet