To mark her 60th birthday, Melinda French Gates spoke with women of different ages about their life transitions. In this episode of Moments That Make Us, Reese Witherspoon talks about working motherhood, the origins of Legally Blonde and her mission to put women at the centre of their own stories.
A mother on set at 23
Witherspoon grew up with a mother who worked as a paediatric nurse and taught nursing, and a grandmother who helped raise the children. She never thought she had to choose between career and family. At 23, she had a baby while making films like Legally Blonde. Back then, she hid her children at work so as not to look distracted. Things have changed since, but not enough: French Gates recalls that women at Microsoft were once laughed out of the room for asking for a breastfeeding room.
“What are you developing for women?”
At 34, frustrated by scripts in which women were only “the wife or the girlfriend”, Witherspoon asked the head of every studio she had worked with what they were developing for women. The answer was nothing, and one studio said it already had one film with a female lead that year. Seeing the rise of social media and streaming, she founded a company focused on women’s stories and women filmmakers. Investors often doubted her: “I don’t get depressed or sad. I get angry.”
The scene that changed “Legally Blonde”
She hesitated to take the role of Elle Woods, until she saw Gloria Steinem tell Goldie Hawn that Private Benjamin was a feminist film. With the screenwriters, she reworked three scenes, including the one where Elle realises she will never be “good enough” for the man who left her, and decides to do it for herself.
Her book club follows simple rules: a book worth sharing, written by a woman, with a heroine of her own story. “I’m just allergic to victimhood,” she says. “There isn’t a woman who hasn’t saved herself at some point in her life.”