“I may have breasts and a cunt, but that doesn’t mean I can’t do anything in the world.”

This saucy comment from Su Friedrich, one of my favorite road movie directors, opens Joan Braderman’s engaging portrait of a generation of feminists who launched what is generally regarded as the Second Wave of the Women’s Movement. The Heretics specifically refers to a generation that found sisterhood along with cheap rent in lower Manhattan during the feisty early Seventies when as one survivor notes virtually, anything seemed possible in the world of progressive women. The heretics of this film also comprise the Heresies collective which between 1977 and 1992 put out twenty-seven issues of Heresies a trailblazing feminist journal on art and politics.

Braderman notes the satisfaction of being able to track down the now far flung former Heresies’ members with a talented young female film crew. Most have prospered and stuck to their art, writing or work as political organizers. The camera reveals the extra pounds along with the increasingly daunting challenge posed by extra flights of stairs.

One youngish Heresies veteran recalls fondly the nights of all-female consciousness raising groups where women were allowed an uninterrupted fifteen minutes to tell their individual stories.”I think we need to go back to the CR groups,” she sighs, “They were the fuel of the movement.”