"The Ballad of Little Jo"
                        A film review by
                      Linda Lopez McAlister
                      on "The Women's Show"
                    WMNF-FM (88.5), Tampa, FL
                        November 13, 1993

   FEMINIST FILM ALERT!  Do not miss this one!  "The Ballad of
Little Jo" written and directed by Maggie Greenwald chronicles
the life of one of the many women in 19th C. America who passed
as men.

   The other day a friend of mine remarked after having seen "The
Crying Game" and "M. Butterfly" that it seems as if the message
they send is that males make better women than females do.  While
such a reading of these as backlash films has some plausibility,
at least in "Little Jo" we have the reversal, a film in which a
female makes a better man than the males do.   On the other hand,
I think I'm more inclined actually to applaud all these recent
gender-bending films as illustrations of feminist philosopher
Judith Butler's contention that gender is largely a performance,
something we do rather than something we are, something that can
(and should) be modified, transformed, played with in the
interest of subverting the tyranny of rigid opposition of
femininity and masculinity that oppresses us all.

   For some time now feminist historians have been uncovering the
lives of transvestite women and discovering that the phenomenon
seems to have been more common than most people have supposed.
The reasons for women taking on a male persona seem to have been
largely economic and for self protection.  Historian Lillian
Faderman (in Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers) quotes one such
woman, Lucy Ann Lobdell as saying, "As a man I can travel freely
though unprotected and find work."

   As "The Ballad of Little Jo" opens it is just these two things
that Josephine Monaghan (Suzy Amis) most needs.  Walking in her
ladylike clothes and carrying a heavy suitcase along a road
headed West she is subject to harassment, kidnapping, rape.  No
"respectable" woman would be in such a situation so no respect is
given her.  She teams up briefly with a peddlar who gives her a
ride and pays her to help sell his goods, but he considers her
among his goods and sells her to some ex-soldiers for a few
bucks.  Josephine escapes by swimming down a river, but the next
morning when she cannot buy any ready-made women's clothes we see
both her decision forming to (illegally) cross dress and, in a
flashback montage, and the reason she's in this predicament.  She
was seduced and bore an illegitimate son, for which her father
threw her out of the house and left her to fend for herself.
Loose women, in the sense of not being connected with a male
protector, were fair game for any man to do whatever he wanted to
them and their options were very narrow.  One was to become a
loose woman in the other sense, a prostitute.  Another was to
become a man.  And that was relatively easy at a time when no
women ever wore pants.  If you wore men's clothes and moved and
acted like a man, no one suspected.

   Jo's debut as a man is in the little Montana mining camp of
Ruby City, where he's suspected at first of being a "dude" but
despite his clean soft hands his clothes smell like everybody
elses and he isn't wearing fancy socks so he's judged to be o.k.-
-just a young man from the East out for adventure.  For a while
he pans for gold, then works in town in a livery stable, and
finally talks Frank Bodger (Bo Hopkins) into hiring him as a
sheep herder at his line camp, requiring him to spend the four
winter months in solitude in the mountains.  After some years of
this he has earned enough to buy 800 acres and become a sheep
rancher himself.  Only twice is the secret of Jo's sex revealed,
once when erstwhile roommate Percy (Ian Kellerman) opens and
reads a letter from Jo's sister and then promptly tries to force
his brutally misogynistic idea of sex upon her since he now knows
she has a son so she's a "whore."  Luckily by then Jo knows how
to use a gun.  The second time, having saved a Chinese man called
Tin Man (David Chung) from being hanged by a bunch of white men
"just having a little fun" Jo reluctantly takes him home as a
cook and servant.  It only takes Tin Man three days to figure out
that Jo is Josephine and, in the realization that they will both
be killed if anyone finds out, they become lovers.

   Screenwriter and director Maggie Greenwald clearly cares about
what women's lives were like on the prairie so she gives us many
fleeting glimpses along the way, including a sequence in which
Mrs. Bodger (Carrie Snodgrass--remember her from "Diary of a Mad
Housewife"?) uses her knowledge of folk medicine to successfully
treat Tin Man for a life-threatening disease, while shooing the
"fellows" out because medicine is women's work.

   "The Ballad of Little Jo" is a film that seems to take pains
to be historically accurate, it is feminist through and through,
splendidly acted and utterly compelling.  Catch it this week or
look for the video but don't miss it.

     For the WMNF Women's Show this has been Linda Lopez
McAlister on Women and Film.

   Copyright 1993 by Linda Lopez McAlister.  All rights reserved.
Please do not reprint this review without the permission of the
author.