Stealing Feminism

“The Queen’s Gambit,” directed by Scott Frank, 2020

One conventional view of this Netflix series is that it is the ‘Bobby Fischer story’ in drag.  Fischer was a chess child prodigy from Chicago, won the U.S. championship at 14, became a Grandmaster at 15 and was probably on the autism spectrum.  He was initially brought up in poverty by a single mother.  His long lost father was a Hungarian mathematician, which is relevant to something else.

Is the film “The Queen’s Gambit,” and Beth Harmon, its ‘on-the-spectrum’ female orphan, really about the male Bobby Fischer?  Or is the real attraction of this film about a woman succeeding in a male-dominated game?  I think it is quite obvious that it is the latter.  This is a transparent feminist series.

There have been a number of films about Fischer but none have attracted the attention of this Netflix series, which had 62 million who glanced or watched it.  Why?  It is no accident that it comes as part of a recent number of popular STEM films about western women doing well in science and math – “Hidden Figures,” “Contagion,” “Radioactive” and "Ammonite" come to mind.

Beth Harmon is brought up in the 1950s in an orphanage, outside the paradigm of a typical 1950s U.S. female. She doesn’t give a damn for convention, religion, nationalism, men or pop culture.  She has no father or mother, and instead gets close to a fellow black orphan and the orphanage’s male janitor, who teaches her chess.  Instead of getting married and having a baby like the girls in her high school, she goes straight to tranquilizers, drink and chess.  She rejects the religion of the orphanage, which shows up later.  She eventually gets adopted by a cold father and a repressed housewife who yearns for the life of a pianist.  This is the U.S. 1950s and these are all familiar feminist themes.

Then she starts her rise in the overwhelmingly male-dominated world of chess, which in the U.S. of the time is the passion of a small sub-culture of geeky, broke men.  In Russia and central and eastern Europe on the other hand, it is a national passion.  She plays in Kentucky, Vegas, Mexico City, Paris and eventually Moscow.

 STEALING FEMINISM

I contend that this film and book steal real chess feminism from the USSR and Hungary, substituting a fictional ‘American’ heroine.  These countries were on the other side of a ‘curtain’ separating the bureaucratic workers’ states from the U.S. and so verboten.  Yet at the time in the ‘50s-‘60s these places where actually advanced over the U.S. in feminism and chess.  For instance, an ERA was passed in the Soviet Union in 1917 mandating formal equality between the sexes.  Daycare creches were developed in workplaces and women given pregnancy leave.  They gained the right to vote, the right to own land, the right to abortion, and the separation of church and state.  Women were allowed in combat. Child illegitimacy was abolished, homosexuality legalized and divorce made easy.  Alexandra Kollontai became the first female government official in any western government as Peoples Commissar of Social Welfare.  This was light years ahead of the conditions for women in the U.S.

In the U.S. on the other hand the ERA has not been passed to this day, while the women’s vote was attained after the USSR.  Abortion was made legal only in 1973 and it is now under threat again.  U.S. women on their own couldn’t get credit cards, sports training, certain jobs and other property rights until the 1970s.  In chess, the U.S. right now has only had 6 out of 119 female international masters and 1 out of 37 female grandmasters.  This is why I call this series an exercise in stealing feminism.

Vera Menchik

RUSSIANS & SOVIETS

The Washington Post on 11/28/20 figured out this film is not about Bobby Fischer but about women and now other publications have chimed in.  Since the Harmon story is fiction, who might be the real Harmon? The Post wrote about Vera Menchik, a wealthy girl in Russia who after the Revolution and the break-up of her family, took up chess.  In 1927 Menchik won the female World Championship and became the first women to play in men’s tournaments.  In 1929 she tied a male Polish grandmaster and was the first strong female chess player in the world.  She was followed by 3 more females, one Russian, Lyudmila Rudenko and two Soviet Georgians, Nona Gaprindashvili and Maia Chiburdanidze in the 1950s, 1970s and 1980s, the latter two Grandmasters. 

HUNGARIANS

Of most interest to me are two sisters from Hungary, who learned chess as child prodigies similar to Harmon.  This happened in the 1970s and 1980s before the collapse of the deformed workers' state in Hungary - Susan Polgar and Judit Polgár.  Susan, like her sister, was a child prodigy trained by their father, an educational psychologist.  In 1984 Susan at the age of 15 became the top-ranked female player.  At 17 she was the first woman to qualify for the Men’s Zonal Championship in 1986. In 1991 she became the 3^rd women to become a Grandmaster.

Judit was also a child prodigy playing at 10 (and Grandmaster at 15) and tied as winner in the U.S. Open Chess Championship in 1998, similar to Harmon.  She was the first female player to defeat a reigning world number one in a game, beating the Russian Garry Kasparov.  This is reminiscent of the final scene in the “Queen’s Gambit.”  In her career she also defeated Karpov, Spassky and others.  The outline of their two stories are similar to Harmon’s.  The Polgárs were quite cute to boot.

Judit Polgar

Some of these events happened after the 1983 book was written, so they are not models for the book.  That is not the argument being made here, though a comparison of the book and series by Slate call the latter ‘an escapist fantasy,’ as the book has a much tougher tone.

WOULD the REAL BETH HARMON PLEASE STAND UP?

These Russians, Soviet Georgians and Hungarians are the real Beth Harmons.  But would a large U.S. audience watch their stories on Netflix?  No.  This mainstream, stylish film is in essence a U.S. nationalist and Jenny-Come-Lately feminist ideological project. As part of this patriots are supposed to take pride in the victory that Beth has against the implacable Russian Vasily Borgov in Moscow.  At least the film shows that Harmon is more irritated with her CIA handler than the Russians.  The Russians mob her with praise, shake her hand, compliment her and she eventually mingles with them in a park to play chess.  The more intellectual USSR and eastern Europe took chess seriously as a common skill for all - and you can see it here.  Hungarians play chess in their geothermal baths.  Cuba participated in female chess and to this day, Cubans play chess in the parks. 

The slant behind this film is a bit like the State Department feminists who supported Carter’s war against the Communist government in Afghanistan, in alliance with Islamic fundamentalists.  The Americans claim to be the preeminent fighters for women in the world.  Yet the U.S. feminists’ anti-Communism outweighed their commitment to the rights of female Afghans. The Communist government was teaching girls in schools and giving rights to adult women, unlike the Islamists who wanted girls out of the schools and women back under the thumb.

Ignoring the USSR, bureaucratic Hungary and eastern Europe is evidently the duty of all U.S. feminists, male and female - even on the issue of chess!  So please note that the real Beth Harmon did not live in Lexington, Kentucky or was a man in drag.

P.S. - The actress playing Beth Harmon also appeared in the series "The Peaky Blinders," reviewed below.  Here she is talking to Polgar on Twitter about chess:  https://twitter.com/netflix/status/1341081066619035648?lang=en

P.P.S. - Harmon spent time with Judit Polgar in a Netflix-organized chat after the show came out, making the connection explicit.

The Kulture Kommissar

12/1/2020

 Other prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left:  “Feminists and Feminists,” “Socialist Feminism and the New Women’s Movement,” “Fortunes of Feminism,” “Marxism and the Oppression of Women,” “Revolt.  Revolt She Said.  Revolt Again,” “The Old is Dying and the New Cannot Be Born.”