If Nita Harvey was alive today, I reckon we’d have got on well.
The warmth Ellen Nolan (her great niece) talks of her with is infectious, portraying her as a strong, confident woman. However, Ellen’s compiling of her great aunt’s archive shows how Hollywood changed a young Miss Harvey’s perception of herself, documenting the change from her happy-go-lucky photos in her back garden to the professional and somewhat scared ones of Hollywood. (To see these for yourself, check out Ellen's instagram.
The first photos Ellen shows are of a smiling, child Nita, playing in the back garden with friends. She is performing for her ‘constant companion’, with smiles and laughs in all the photos her mother took. This sense of fun is lost when the pictures from Hollywood appear and the main theme of the photographs switches to submission.
However, we learn that Nita refused to go on the ‘casting couch’ and left her job at Paramount Pictures when she wasn’t getting paid enough. This surprises and inspires me, knowing that even then, young women were standing up for themselves and beginning to shatter the glass ceiling.
I arrived expecting to enjoy looking at photos from the past, and left feeling touched by one women’s story of how others made her view herself. It was a timely reminder of why the #MeToo movement of today is so important.
Niamh Spiers
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