In the movie Legally Blonde, we meet a girl by the name of Elle Woods, she is blonde and beautiful, she is also a fashion major and a sorority girl. At the time of her enrolling in college she was dating a guy by the name of Warner, he was pursuing to be a politician and go to Harvard Law School. As Elle and her boyfriend went out to dinner one night, he broke up with her because he believed “she wasn’t serious enough” about the life he wanted in college. Elle later believed she could win her boyfriend back if she pursued a career in law, she earned a 179 on the LSAT and got accepted into Harvard. At the end of the movie, Elle worked on a case, sent the defendant to jail and Warner asked to get back together. After Elle realized her worth and what she could accomplish, she rejected him.
Throughout the whole movie, Elle Woods was overcoming stereotypes made for women trying to pursue careers where it was male dominant. Not only was she criticized due to her looks and blonde hair, but people also just truly didn’t believe she could accomplish high levels of education. Her own father in the movie tried to talk her out of it by saying law school is a place for people who are “boring, ugly and serious.”
I chose this movie not only because it relates to me personally, as I am pursuing a career in law but because this related great with one of our class materials. One of the materials we read in class was “Can the Subaltern Speak?”, we see throughout that reading the author touches on how women will never be on the same level or seen the same next to a man. Whether that is in society or in a work setting, the movie Legally Blonde relates to that reading so well. One of the famous lines of the movie was when Elle ran into her ex-boyfriend in the Harvard school halls and Warner asks if she’s here to see him, she responds, “No I go here,” Warner responds to her with remarks like “You go where?, You got into Harvard Law?”. Elle responds with the famous line, “What? Like it’s hard?”. That scene is a clear representation of how Elle’s ex-boyfriend believed she would never even make it into a school that he got into because she was never on the same level that he was, when in reality she was and broke many stereotypes. This movie is a great example to young women that no matter what someone tells you or how many times you get told you can’t do something, you most certainly can.
