The film is based loosely on the 1937 autobiographical book Out of Africa written by Isak Dinesen (the pseudonym of Danish author Karen Blixen), with additional material from Dinesen's 1960 book Shadows on the Grass and other sources.The movie is a sketch of a woman in the early part of the 1900s, a woman who would eventually become a serious career woman as a famed author but didn't yet have such aspirations.
Her first tactical decision is to establish a marriage of convenience to a friend that she describes as "my lover's brother" when her desire to marry for love falls through as an option. She does so as a means to play along with social expectations and thereby gain access to material resources with which to pursue life on her terms to some degree, in spite of being a woman in a man's world.
It was much rarer back then for women to have serious careers. They were generally provided for by family -- husband, children or other relatives. This was true in part because until shockingly recently, much of the human race survived in subsistence cultures.
I have had it said to me that, ironically, The Irish Potato Famine is seered into our memory in part because it's one of the last bad famines. Before that, famine was so common as to not be noteworthy.
The long, long history of human culture being strongly rooted in a subsistence culture where most people were merely trying to survive means that culture skewed heavily towards practices that provided stability for society and which guarded against outright extinction of a given population.
Contrary to modern ideas about optimal human development and the like, humanity spent a very long time merely trying to not die out. So cultural practices were mostly about what kept the group alive, not what helped individuals reach their potential.
Heteronormative culture wasn't intended to be some means to oppress women and gays. It was an emergent phenomenon of best practices that won out and, having won out, they then began crowding out other practices.
A best practice that won out is that of the nuclear family where mom does the women's work and dad works for a paycheck in order to provide for mom, dad, the children and often other relatives (a la grandma living in the mother-in-law suite). But even this practice isn't all that old as the consistent widespread use of money is only around 300 to 400 years old.
Prior to that, both men and women were typically working literally to put food on the table and provide other essentials. Dad hunted for meat or tended the fields. Mom gathered fruits and vegetables or had an herb and vegetable garden near her kitchen. Both tended to other chores mostly during winter, such as sewing clothes or making essential tools.
Men and women generally engaged in different tasks, but which tasks became women's work was mostly dictated by the need to have mom work all day while tending to her children first and foremost. Women's work ended up being the tasks women were capable of pursuing while tied down by a constant need to care for small children in a culture where birth control was not reliably available to the masses.
As money became more reliably available, some tasks that are currently viewed as women's work became such due to development of household tech that helped shift previously male household tasks to women for the purpose of freeing up male labor to pursue a paycheck. Examples include:
- Vacuum cleaners helped make cleaning rugs less labor intensive and shifted it from a male to a female task.
- As white flour became widely available in stores and people stopped growing their own crops, men no longer needed to take grain to be milled.
- Modern stoves eliminated a lot of male tasks related to cooking, such as chopping wood and cleaning the old wood burning stoves, and assigned new tasks to women.
So this was not an attempt to oppress women and prevent them from participating in public life. This was accommodation for the burdens imposed on both women and society by a lack of birth control, a lack of alternative means to feed infants, etc.
Thus, a hundred years or so ago when this film took place, men working for money was already somewhat firmly established but it was an era still strongly rooted in cultural practices where family took care of family, where everyone -- even the upper classes -- understood that they were to a large degree struggling to merely survive and so forth.
Not all that long before this time period, the children of European nobles served as officers and armed conflict was very common, so even noble or royal families had a strong need to have many children in hopes of some of them surviving. Their children were less likely to die of starvation, but some noble and royal families saw a high attrition rate among their sons -- the children through whom most generational wealth and power pass in a patriarchal structure -- due to dying in battle.
Karen Blixen ultimately became a famed author. This film depicts her life prior to that fact and shows the seeds of that career, a career she did not as yet aspire to.
One of her skills that she says she's quite good at is storytelling. In the following scene, she says that when she tells stories to her nieces, they are required to provide her with a first sentence. The clip suggests her story is quite lengthy and meaty. It shows that she really worked at being a good storyteller long before she ever thought of being a writer.
The clip ends with Denys telling her she is not indebted to him but he is to her and We pay our storytellers here and he gives her an expensive pen as payment. She tries to turn it down, saying "This is lovely, but my stories are free and your presence much too dear." He refuses to take the pen back and replies "Write them down sometime."
She is in a marriage of convenience in a colonial settlement, largely isolated from much of her own culture. The result is that her husband sleeps around pretty casually and she begins an affair with Denys.
Thanks to her husband's affairs, she ends up with syphillis. The treatments then leave her sterile.
Some research suggests that -- at least historically -- serious career women were very often not women with strong ambition. Instead, they were often women who were infertile and ended up with a serious career as a side effect of their infertility.
The movie suggests this may well be the case for Karen Blixen. She was empowered to divorce her husband in part due to his many affairs and then as an infertile divorcee was not very eligible to remarry.
She had hoped to marry Denys, but he dies before that can happen. With his death, she was unlikely to find another to marry for love and was likely no longer in a position to arrange a marriage of convenience again. Odds are high she had no choice but to try to find some means to support herself, like it or not.
Throughout the movie, Denys is portrayed as someone who treats her more like a person than other men treated her or than men generally treated women. In many small ways, he backed her right to do as she saw fit and routinely provided some kind of practical support to help her achieve her own goals.
At one point, someone protests what she is up to, saying "We don't send women to war." and "She could be hurt. Or worse." Denys says "I imagine she knows that" then gives her a compass to help her find her way and tells her how to use it effectively, though she is traveling alone and has no prior experience.
If the movie is at all accurate, Denys Finch Hatton likely played a very large role in her personal development and did a lot to lay the groundwork for her to be able to pursue a paid career. Or even to be able to envision a career for herself as an author.
Had she not met him, we might not have ever heard of her.
My experience in life suggests that men who treat women like Denys treats Karen in the movie are quite rare. Men are much more likely to either squelch women outright for some reason or other or to try to play hero.
They seem to try to play hero mostly for one of two reasons:
- They see themselves as "good men" and they have this idea that this is how "good men" behave towards women.
- They are attracted to the woman in question and hope to score points with her in hopes she will sleep with him at some point.
There is a scene in the Buck Rogers TV show of my childhood where he tells the princess to go start the spaceship while he lays down cover fire so they can escape and she doesn't know how to start her own spaceship because "Princesses don't start spaceships." Far too many women end up in situations where they don't know how to do X simply because "Women don't do X" without the good fortune of being princesses.
If no or very few women know how to do X and no man will let you do X or show you how because you are a girl, this ends up being an extremely serious barrier to female development and thus to gender parity across society as a whole.
Denys not only let Karen do things she wanted to do, he would provide some small but critical piece she was missing: a pen and the suggestion that she write them down and the idea that "We pay our storytellers here"; affirmation that she can go where she chooses and do as she wishes and a compass to help her get there and instructions on how to use it in spite of her lack of experience.
Many men who are or claim to be pro women's rights err too far in one direction or the other.
On the one hand, they may affirm her right to do it herself but provide no practical support to help her succeed. It is often a quietly hostile position subtly designed to set women up for failure and sometimes boils down to an attitude of "If you want equality, do it your damn self," implicitly denying that men can do what they do in part due to a lifetime of training in how to do certain things.
On the other hand, they may be too helpful. They may recognize that she lacks the same experience, training etc. that he has and they may place their emphasis on making sure this task happens nominally in her name THIS TIME while overlooking the big picture issue that it fails to give her the ability to replicate this success.
For women, this would contribute to the existence of the glass ceiling. Women denied development opportunities will find their Peter Principle role of being promoted to the level of their incompetence at much lower levels than men who have a lifetime of being expected to develop their ability and prompted to do so instead of "helped" to succed this time.
Men who affirm a woman's right to decide for herself and set goals for herself while recognizing that she hasn't been given the means to pull it off and who are willing and able to provide just enough support for her to have a reasonable hope of succeeding by her own efforts are extraordinarily rare. Not because men are all monsters or because they are all misogynists but because that's just a really hard thing to do successfully and most men likely have no idea it's what women need.