What does being a woman really mean? How do women live the status society reserves for them? To such questions posed by a television station, a group of women filmmakers, beautiful or not, young or not, gifted with motherly instinct or not, answer before Agnès Varda’s camera.

Posed the question “What is a woman?,” Agnès Varda responds with this provocative, polemical short film — encapsulating an argument propounded in second-wave feminism, after Simone de Beauvoir’s Manifeste des 343, and after the campaign for legalized abortion in France.