Suffrage Sing Along: The Making of From Corsets to Combinations and Its Premiere
by Julie Mackaman
Last month I caught up by phone with Bennington’s Jackie Marro in her other part-time home in Rhode Island. I was eager to talk with her about our April 17 viewing of her new video, Suffrage Sing Along. Since I knew little about her, I asked Jackie how she describes herself. Filmmaker? Collector? Historian? I smiled when she told me how she had recently been described in an article in Victoria, a bimonthly women’s lifestyle magazine:
From constructing tiny mouse houses and dressing dainty bisque dolls to pressing petals and leaves from her garden, one artistic retiree is spending her days in creative happiness.[1]
She paraphrased it for me: “I’m a lifelong tinkerer.”
When I asked her where her story as a tinkerer starts, she said that as a child she recycled fabric scraps provided by a family friend to design and sew dresses for dolls — her own and those of friends in her Bennington neighborhood. Stitching by hand and using the sewing machine that her mother rarely used, she set in motion a life of creating art through “the stuff” on hand, equally comfortable in worlds of fantasy and, as she entered her academic life, history. Still today Jackie creates environments, often out of repurposed materials: a doll’s suffragist white dress out of a vintage linen napkin, a miniature theater out of packing materials, her own clothes out of a trove of garments from the recesses of her closet, redesigned and altered to give them a new life.
Fashion offers a key to understanding the past. Jackie’s collaboration with our branch and North Adams fashion historian Lynda Meyer to make From Corsets to Combinations put the key into the lock, opening a portal to one of the most important social movements in American and world history: women’s suffrage. As the documentary observes Lynda layering two dress forms with clothes in styles worn before and after suffrage, history comes to life. The “almost slavish” constraint and elegance of the former gives way to the liberation and confidence of the latter: clearly a shift of historical magnitude had taken place between the two dresses. Providing context for that historical shift are the film’s soundtrack of an a cappella voice singing a suffragist song and a concluding fashion show with models recreating actual suffragists from our own region.
[For more on the collaboration, see From Corsets to Combinations: AAUW Goes Hollywood.]
In Suffrage Sing Along, her new documentary about the making of From Corsets to Combinations, Jackie takes us behind the scenes, from the inception of an idea for a live fashion show by program committee member Mary Brady, and the pandemic-year decision to convert the show into a documentary. Incorporating new material (including an interview with Mary conducted in a secret location to escape the noise of outside construction), archival images and unused footage from the original project, Jackie has once again done what she loves to do most: tinker with material, this time in the editing room, to cast something in a fresh light. Like other “making of” documentaries, this project gave Jackie time to sift through her material from a different vantage than when she was in the throes of filming, and an opportunity to retrieve jewels from the cutting-room floor.
The new sequel allowed her to take the story all the way to the August 2020 premiere, where the suffragist history chronicled in From Corsets to Combinations gave way to a modern-day centennial celebration of the suffrage movement. Party-goers, sipping signature cocktails, roamed the garden dressed in clothes ranging from stately suffrage-era dresses and thoroughly modern flapper shifts to a 1970s Equal Rights Amendment T-shirt.
The suffrage sing along, led at twilight by Deb Burns just before the screening, brought home the shared sense of community, conviction and compassion that carried the 19th Amendment over the finish line.
History finds different ways to tell us its story. The clothes we wear, the things we collect, the songs we sing, and the tools we pick up to record and interpret history’s flow: these come together in Jackie’s new documentary. Let’s get together and take a look on April 17 — and relive that late summer premiere evening with its call-to-action sing along.
Watch the video at: http://bit.ly/AAUWBennSuffSing
[1] Victoria Magazine (March/April 2020), “Her Second Act” by Mac Jamieson and Stephanie Welborne Stele
Go to Meet Jackie Marro
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