"Rachel's Daughters: Searching for the Causes of Breast Cancer"
    A Film Review by
    Linda Lopez McAlister
    on "The Women's Show"
    WMNF-FM 88.5, Tampa, FL
    June 7, 1998


    It's obvious that it's summer by looking at the movie listings.
So instead of going to a movie last night I watched a preview video of a
film that came to me in the mail this week from Women Make Movies.  They
had called and asked me to take a look at it because they, and now I,
believe that the film in question is hugely important and must be seen by
as many women as possible.  The film is called "Rachel's Daughters:
Searching for the Causes of Breast Cancer," by Oscar-winning filmmakers
Allie Light and Irving Saraf.  It's possible that some of you have already
seen this feature-length documentary because it was broadcast over HBO
last October during National Breast Cancer Awareness Month.  But cable tv,
especially premium priced cable TV, is not the best possible medium to use
to reach a broad audience of women of all socio-economic classes, and
that's what needs to happen to this film.  The filmmakers are taking it
"on the road" and having screenings in a number of cities across the
country this summer and fall.  Unfortunately for us, Tampa is not one of
them.  However, I think we could get together a coalition of women's
health, public health, and cancer treatment folks and sponsor a screening
of the film here, as well.

    First let me explain the title.  The Rachel in "Rachel's
Daughters" is Rachel Carson, the pioneer environmentalist whose 19962 book
"The Silent Spring" was among the first to sound the warning about the
ways contemporary industrial societies were poisoning our environment and
leaving a legacy of death for future generations.  Incredibly, some people
commented at the time that they didn't know why she, a cancer victim
herself, was so interested in future generations since she didn't have any
children of her own. One of the points that the film makes is that the
generation of women born after World War II has increasing numbers of
young women diagnosed with cancer, dispelling the myth that it's only an
older women's disease.  And the women in the film see themselves as
"Rachel's Daughters."

    Who are these women?  They are a group of women who have breast
cancer, ordinary women not journalists or scientists.  They came together
after meeting at a march on behalf of breast cancer that was held in San
Francisco a few years ago.  Their project was to tell their own stories
and talk about what they thought might have caused the breast cancer in
their particular cases and then each one assumes the role of investigator
and tracks down the people who are at the forefront of the research on the
various suspected environmental contributors to breast cancer, such things
as pesticide use, radiation, electromagnetic fields, estrogen, plastics,
and the like.  They interview more than twenty biologists, biochemists,
epidemiologists, estrogen researchers, breast surgeons, environmentalists,
industrial health and safety experts, nutritionists, as well as every
conceivable variety of breast cancer researcher.  I think I learned more
things from this documentary than I have from any other thing I've seen on
the subject.  Because the interviewers are ordinary women, not necessarily
educated, the questions they put to the people they seek out are basic
ones and phrased in layman's terms and they are able to elicit answers
that are equally comprehensible.  Only women with breast cancer and their
supporters were directly involved in the production of the film.

     So this is a film all women should see in order to understand as much
as we can at this point in time about what happens to one in nine women in
the industrialized world.  There are still no definite answers to what
causes breast cancer, but pieces of the puzzle are beginning to fall into
place.  The film, while serious and quite sad at times (one of the
investigators dies during the course of the project and two others have
reoccurrences of their cancer), it also has its moments of hope, of love,
of empowerment.  It is photographed beautifully and there are some images,
particularly the opening sequences in which the camera lingers on a
beautiful scene of the Northern California landscape through which,
suddenly, a hearse and a funeral procession drive, while a voice over
speaks of the fact that in Northern California the incidence of cancer in
younger women has tripled in the last twenty years.  We later realize that
that funeral procession was the funeral of Jennifer Mendoza, the member of
the group of investigators who died.  There is also a beautiful image near
the end reproducing a dream image that one of the scientists
actually had after she had become cancer free. These will be etched
indelibly on your memory.

    "Rachel's Daughters" is too important not to see.  Not only does
it inform, it rouses you to action.  I defy any woman watching it not to
give herself a breast examination even while she's watching the film, and
I'll bet a lot of the audience members get on the phone and call to make
an appointment for that mammogram they've been postponing, too.

<Linda Lopez McAlister is Professor of Women's Studies and Philosophy and
Chair of the Department of Women's Studies at the University of South
Florida.>

Copyright 1998 by Linda Lopez McAlister.  All rights reserved.  Please do
not reprint or reproduce this review without the permission of the author:
mcalister@chuma1.cas.usf.edu.