Dr. Amanda Foreman looks at the role of women in revolutions that transformed the modern world. She discovers, through women like campaigner and writer Olympe De Gouges, that the French Revolution's promise of equality, liberty and brotherhood would be limited to men. Bolshevik radical Alexandra Kollontai would find that while her fellow Russian revolutionaries may have put women's rights at the forefront of ideological change, the post-revolutionary world would be as rife with gender bias as the societies they'd helped transform. In the end, revolutionary change for women would come from within the private sphere - in America, with activists like Margaret Sanger, who coined the term birth control and developed the pill which would finally give women control over when to have children.
Join Ann Curry as two women search for friends and colleagues who fought for equal rights. One of the first female commercial pilots wants to thank her mentor, and an advocate hopes to find the woman who inspired her to join a movement.
From the end of the 19th century, the women of the European countries energetically demand the right to vote, better working conditions, and education, just like the Suffragette movement in England. Despite some progress, results are slow to come when the year 1914 dawns. But with the lack of a male workforce, gone off to the war, factories are forced to employ women in positions traditionally occupied by men. The image of the world of work has changed definitively and forever. Once the First World War ends, women finally and gradually obtain the rights they were demanding. The Roaring Twenties and the post-war libertarian movements usher in this wind of freedom. Female emancipation brings a liberation and a consideration for the body and well-being of the woman as an individual. Many women politicians and artists emerge and are able to express their creativity and opinions in total freedom and especially with total legality, continuing the struggle for equality of the sexes.
A focused look at the workplace, where individual women crashed through the glass ceiling, and to the courts, where they waged a battle against the “hidden injuries” of battery, harassment and rape. Two women — in very different ways — asserted women’s control over their own bodies. When Anita Hill reluctantly stepped forward to accuse Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment, she brought the issue out of the shadows. At the same time, pop superstar Madonna asserted a naked and aggressive sexuality, outside the control of men. However, even as the Movement achieved long-sought goals, a new generation of women were re-evaluating some of its most basic assumptions, especially the balance between work and family. By the 2000s, the movement was again under attack from conservatives seeking to rollback abortion and contraception laws, and by younger women fleeing the very word “feminism.” But the Movement is far from over, as new fronts in the struggle have opened up, especially overseas.
The title of this unique documentary is drawn from Betty Friedan’s challenge of the 1970s that feminism is not about men and women but about changing the world. The program was filmed at the meeting of women leaders from around the world who gathered in Dublin in 1992 to discuss new visions of leadership. Ireland’s President Mary Robinson, Friedan, and Utte Ranke-Heinemann are among the many charismatic speakers who debate the nature of power and empowerment—of religion, marriage, dreams, and achievements.
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