Saturday night I attended a premier showing of clips from NOT FOR
OURSELVES ALONE: THE STORY OF ELIZABETH CADY STANTON & SUSAN B. ANTHONY.
The program consisted of clips from the film introduced by Ken Burns
and Paul Barnes. I'm certainly not an expert on this subject, but I
consider myself to be fairly knowledgeable...I learned a lot and think
the film is excellent! I urge you to mark your calendars with the show
dates on PBS: November 7 & 8.
The clips we saw included phots, old film clips, interviews with women
who remember the first time women voted (legally) in the U.S., comments
from biographers and historians, and more.
The Susan B. Anthony House has a web site and I have included some
parts of the "More about the film" section:
The following passages are from http://www.susanbanthonyhouse.org/
"When eight million women went to the polls and voted for the first
time ever in 1920, Elizabeth Cady Stanton had been dead for almost
18 years and Susan B. Anthony for 14," says Burns. "However, it was
the direct legacy of their tireless advocacy and a tenacious belief
that all Americans - regardless of race, creed or sex - must be
treated equally that led to this historic event," he notes. "And
beyond the vote, these two women created a movement that literally
transformed American society by winning for women advances in every-
thing from education to divorce law and the right to own property.
They are, in my opinion, the two most important women in American
history."
While the most notable contribution made by Stanton and Anthony is
the 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote, NOT FOR
OURSELVES ALONE goes beyond the suffrage effort to reveal the other
equally revolutionary changes these two women effected. Both were
born into a country where women were not allowed to attend college,
where wives were considered the property of their husbands, where
women could not testify in a court of law, where it was even considered
indecent for women to speak in public, and where black women (and men)
were enslaved in some states. By the time Stanton and Anthony died in
the early 20th century, they could rightly take credit for changing how
women were perceived and how they were treated. In doing so, they built
a movement of women, young and old, who fought in legislative halls and
town squares around the country to hold the American ideal of equality
to a new standard. "With such women consecrating their lives," Anthony
wrote shortly before her death, "failure is impossible!"
"Our world is different because of Stanton and Anthony," Burns explains.
"However, our world has also forgotten what these two women and an army
of others did to win equality. Hopefully this film will end the long
silence surrounding their story and embed it in the public's mind once
and for all - for it is an integral part of the ongoing evolution of our
American democracy."
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Bonnie Glickman, Rochester NY
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