Pen-Elayne on the Web

No Eye nor Touch of Man or Angel

This afternoon I watched most of a rerun of Not For Ourselves Alone, which I guess our local PBS station is showing in honor of Women's History Month. While I suppose it would have been nice to see a documentary on the amazing lives of Susan B. Anthony and particularly Elizabeth Cady Stanton written and directed by women, I also think it you can't get any better than Ken Burns. The photos alone are just mind-warping, all these strong groups of women posing nobly and seriously as though they knew they were being captured for the ages (didn't seem to be a lot of people smiling for the camera in the late 19th century). And I was so blown away by the excerpts read from Stanton's "Solitude of the Self" speech that I looked up the whole thing (thence the quote in the header). One of the historians interviewed noted that, since the movement to enlarge the franchise to include half the country's population was so key to the history of democracy in our nation, it was a shame that its history is so glossed over in textbooks, often relegated to no more than a picture of the Seneca Falls convention of 1848. (I'd love to do a day or weekend trip to the Women's Rights National Historical Park in Seneca Falls someday, but the website said it's not accessible by public transit, nor is the Elizabeth Cady Stanton House accessible to the handicapped, ironic considering Stanton's immobility in her later years. Maybe someone can petition the Friends of the Park, who provide the text of the Declaration of Sentiments on their site. But I digress.) She opined that it was a sign of the general devaluation of women's experience that lasts even through today, but I don't think that's the whole story. First of all, war always makes more headlines than nation-building (and 72 years' worth of rallying in favor of votes for women sure fits my definition of nation-building), so we obsess much more about the Civil War than about the time of Reconstruction to begin with. More importantly, documents and still pictures and some grainy post-19th Amendment film footage from 1920 can only accomplish so much, even in the skillful hands of Burns. The civil rights and modern feminist movements get much more airtime, and textbook room, because they're more recent and the filmed speeches more impactful. I highly recommend this documentary as a fascinating look into the personal and the political of two of the most important figures in our country's history.