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Votes For Women
August 26, 2010 was the 90th anniversary
of the date that women got the right to vote. This is an appropriate
time for us, as a society, to reflect on how the roles of American women
have changed. Votes for Women will show how women got the
right to vote and tell those stories vividly to listeners so they can
understand how these changes impact their lives today.
This hour-long radio documentary explores, not only the legislative
changes themselves, but also the societal attitudes that influenced
those changes; the progressive movement of the early 1900s, the role
that women were expected to play in Victorian times, how women organized
to get the right to vote, and the techniques they used to get it.
By weaving together oral histories of women who had firsthand experience
in these events, excerpts from letters and speeches, comments from
sociologists and historians, and music from the suffrage movement,
Votes For Women will remind 21st century listeners that the
rights that so many of us take for granted were not always there.
"I’m delighted to have the opportunity to tell this story”, says
producer Sandra Sleight-Brennan. “Radio has the ability to reach many thousands of
people and it’s important for listeners to hear and remember historic
events like this one. Most of the story will come from interviews I
collected in the early 1990s with women who remembered and participated
in the suffrage movement. These women are now gone, but their stories
will live on in this documentary."
The documentary is funded, in part, by the Ohio Humanities Council, a
state affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
This documentary,
Votes For Women, is created from several older documentaries
that Sleight-Brennan produced in the 1990s. Those
documentaries; America's Women: A Legacy of Change; A
Woman's Place; and Remembering the Suffragettes won a
total of 8 awards for excellence. This new documentary allowed
Sleight-Brennan to re-visit her archives and re-tell the stories.
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