Lord makes a fairly persuasive case that Taylor, even if she didn't identify herself as a feminist, was such a commanding and original presence in both her personal and professional life that she instinctively communicated empowering messages to women. Thus the title of the book, "The Accidental Feminist: How Elizabeth Taylor Raised Our Consciousness and We Were Too Distracted by Her Beauty to Notice." ... you may not be entirely persuaded that "the subversive drumbeats of feminism ... swelled in the star's important movies over decades from a delicate pitty-pat to a resounding roar." But this provocative feminist appreciation will surely tempt you to rent or download her best movies, to acquaint or reacquaint yourself with this marvelous force of nature.

...a reader might want to consider: Are make-believe roles a reliable representation of the actress who plays them? And, if not, was the raised consciousness that Lord experienced after watching all of Liz’s movies just a matter of Hollywood luck, or a matter of the author’s retrofitted response to bygone popular culture? ... This reader concludes that ”accidental feminism” is, by definition, unreliable; much as I love Taylor (both as a personage and as an actress), I don’t see messages of rebellion in her body of work. M.G. Lord does, and makes a swinging case for why she’s right. On this, meanwhile, we can agree: Elizabeth Taylor was a gorgeous Hollywood icon big and ballsy enough to inspire passionate debate, even among admirers, and even after her death. La Liz would have loved the hubbub.

Lord takes her readers on a chronological journey through the actress’s signal perform­ances, analyzing each film with a theory scholar’s eye for telling detail, brightened with bloggerly brio, emotion and use of the first person. Early on, she lists the social advances that she spots Taylor enacting: in “Giant” (1956), Lord writes, she feminizes the American West; in “Suddenly, Last Summer” (1959), she “portrays the callousness of the male medical establishment toward women patients”; in ­“BUtterfield 8” (1960), she “endorses a woman’s right to control her sexuality”; and in her most famous film, “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” (1966), she shows the corrosive effect that being forced to live “through her husband’s career” can have on an intelligent woman — not to mention on everyone who comes within her wrathful shouting range.... watching her significant films in succession, you see that, as Lord maintains, each serves as a cinematic Rorschach of social changes percolating through postwar society, in which Taylor stars as the protean blot.... With “The Accidental Feminist,” M. G. Lord makes the intriguing case that for Elizabeth Taylor, too much was never enough — not for the woman, not for the actress and not for the society that produced the theater of her life.

Elizabeth Taylor is synonymous with “icon” both on and off the screen, but culture historian Lord’s (Forever Barbie) analysis of her film persona viewed through the lens of feminism is shaky at best.... while Lord makes a convincing case that many of Taylor’s best-known roles do go against the grain of prescribed attitudes toward women in studio era Hollywood and beyond—for example, Taylor’s Leslie Benedict in Giant is a mouthpiece for social justice and Gloria, the call-girl she plays in Butterfield 8, is in control of her own sexuality—ascribing that feminist bent to Taylor’s onscreen persona as a whole is much murkier. Perhaps it’s Elizabeth Taylor’s status as a Hollywood legend, but Lord has bitten off more than she can chew, rather than narrowing her focus to a few films that could substantiate her point.