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| Alice Paul |
American suffragist Alice Paul (1885-1977) was born into a prominent Quaker family in New Jersey. While attending a training school in England, she became active with the country’s radical suffragists. After two years with the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), she cofounded the Congressional Union and then formed the National Woman’s party in 1916. Drawing on her experience, Paul led demonstrations and was subjected to imprisonment as she sought a voting amendment, but her actions helped bring about the passage of the 19th Amendment in 1920. Paul continued to push for equal rights and worked from National Woman’s party headquarters in Washington, D.C., until her later years.
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| Eleanor Roosevelt |
Eleanor Roosevelt’s legacy stands on two pillars. She was an unabashed feminist, refusing to be silenced in the traditionally male world of politics. And she became a symbol of what caring for the downtrodden in society — including the poor, minorities, women, youth, and refugees — should look like. Through these two pillars, Eleanor transformed the role of the First Lady from ornamental to activist....
Eleanor
faced a lot of public backlash during her time as First Lady. When she
wrote magazine
articles
and expressed her opinions, she was likely to cause uproar. The Los
Angeles Times newspaper called for her to be forced to retire from public life,
because of her public criticism of the discrimination that Japanese Americans
were facing. She was outspoken on the issue of racial discrimination and
declared her support for civil rights. She invited hundreds of African
American guests to the White House during her time as First Lady — another
controversial move at the time. Her stance on racial discrimination
created angry ripples across the country, especially in the South. But the
critics never deterred her. Eleanor Roosevelt spoke out for
those whom society cared less about at a time when women were not supposed to
be speaking out at all.
LATER LIFE AND LEGACY
Franklin
D. Roosevelt died in 1945, and his successor, President Harry S. Truman,
appointed Eleanor Roosevelt as a delegate to the United Nations General
Assembly. She became the first chairperson for the
United Nations Commission on Human Rights and played a key role in helping to
form the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Against a backdrop of sex, politics and race, Academy Award winning filmmaker Freida
Mock's
Anita reveals
the intimate story of Anita Hill, a woman who dared to speak the truth.
This powerful documentary traces Ms. Hill's life from her early years
through her legacy today, offering fascinating insight into her
experiences testifying before the Senate just over 22 years ago in the
weekend of shocking television that made her a household name and
smashed the door open on the issues of sexual
harassment and gender equality.
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| Anita Hill |
The New Yorker asked Anita Hill what has changed since she contended in 1991 that Clarence Thomas was not fit be a Supreme Court judge because he sexually harassed her.
Read a shocking article in
The New Yorker about how Harvey Weinstein used private security agencies to discredit the women who accused him of sexual improprieties and to ensure their stories never became public. Individuals posing as journalists or human rights activists for women sought to gather information on these women
I recommend two pieces a strong
op ed in
The New York Times on the culture of complicity and a historical profile of
sexual harassment from
The Times
“In 1991, I
testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee that Clarence Thomas, who had repeatedly
harassed me when he was my boss, was unsuitable to sit on the U.S. Supreme
Court,” said Hill. “The outcome of my testimony was not what I’d hoped, but in
no way was it the final word. In the five years after I testified, sexual harassment
complaints filed with the EEOC more than doubled. Legislation against
harassment slowly but surely began to pass. And I saw that we had a chance to
shift this narrative.”
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| Maya Angelou at President Clinton's Inaugural |
The film Maya Angelou and Still I Rise from co-directors Bob Hercules and Rita Coburn Whack does have the credit of being the first documentary made about Angelou's life. That sounds hard to believe at first, given Angelou's popularity and importance to American art, but also makes more sense when one considers that she also wrote seven autobiographies, along with numerous amounts of personal pieces. The film seeks to become the ultimate biography, while offering Angelou on camera, sharing her side of life stories that have become American lore in books like I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.
Told in mostly chronological order, the documentary touches upon many chapters of Angelou’s life, starting with her upbringing in Stamps, Arkansas. While painting a picture of her upbringing in a poor, racist part of the country, it focuses on the growth of her voice, particularly when she was mute for a long time after a traumatic event. As a clue to her later brilliance without intense schooling, Angelou shares how she memorized full Shakespeare plays and read everything she could get her hands on during her formative years of silence. But as she says herself, “When I decided to speak, I had a lot to say.”
As the documentary charts the course of how her creative voice blossomed across mediums, Angelou is a fascinating open book, with her perspective coming in between smiles during a talking head interview. In an incredible journey, she started as a dancer then singer (known as Miss Calypso), and then went onto write songs and short stories, before getting to personally know the like of
Langston Hughes or James Baldwin. She established an importance that spread to other areas, like political activism, which led her to friendships with Malcolm X and Dr. Martin Luther King, among many others. “Maya Angelou and Still I Rise” provides an in-depth picture of how prolific she was, the connections that led from one artistic opportunity to the next, and strong examples of how those she interacted with influenced her work. Hercules & Coburn’s film celebrates the importance of others on our creativity, and with a brilliant example; a woman who gave back a voice to numerous communities, while helping the life of a black woman become more visible on a cultural scale.
What the documentary adds to the Maya Angelou legacy can be found in various little gems, as it covers nearly every major form of artistry that she tackled, including songwriting (with
Quincy Jones) and directing (the 1998 film “
Down in the Delta”). Its talking head interviews are in particular a great find, including some beautiful words by
Alfre Woodard and
Cicely Tyson, or figures like President Bill Clinton, who speaks about why he chose her to write a poem (
On the Pulse of Morning) for his presidential inauguration, which hadn’t happened since
Robert Frost: “I knew she would make an impression. She was big and had the voice of God.”
"Ask
social scientists how to end global poverty, and they will tell you:
Educate girls. Capture them in that fleeting window between the ages of
10 and 14, give them an education, and watch a community change: Per
capita income goes up, infant mortality goes down, the rate of economic
growth increases, the rate of HIV/AIDS infection falls. Child marriage
becomes less common, as does child labor. Educated mothers tend to
educate their children. They tend to be more frugal with family money.
Last year, the World Bank reckoned that Kenya’s illiterate girls, if
educated, could boost that country’s economy by $27 billion in the
course of a lifetime.
Whether
an emerging nation likes it or not, its girls are its greatest
resource. Educating them, as economist Lawrence Summers once said, “may
be the single highest-return investment available in the developing
world.”
Nowhere
is that lesson more evident than in the story of Malala Yousafzai, a
Pashtun girl from Pakistan’s Swat Valley who was born of an illiterate
mother, grew up in her father’s school, read Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time by
age 11 and has a gift for stirring oratory. And nowhere did that lesson
go more rebuffed than in the verdant Swat Valley, where hard-line
jihadists swept out of the mountains, terrorized villages and
radicalized boys, and where—one muggy day last October—a Taliban fighter
leapt onto a school bus, shouted, “Who is Malala?” and shot her
point-blank in the head for speaking out about her God-given right to
attend school.
Malala tells of that life-shattering moment in a
riveting memoir, I Am Malala...a book that should be read not only for its
vivid drama but for its urgent message about the untapped power of girls.
The story begins with Malala’s father, Ziauddin
Yousafzai, the son of an imam (a preacher of Islam), who was instilled from
boyhood with a deep love of learning, an unwavering sense of justice and a
commitment to speak out in defense of both. Like Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the
founder of Pakistan, Ziauddin was convinced that aside from the sword and the
pen, there is an even greater power—that of women — and so, when his
firstborn turned out to be a bright, inquisitive daughter, he raised her with
all the attention he lavished on his sons...."
—Marie Arana in The Washington Post
