Comprehensive Women's Suffrage Film
C. J. Mclaughlin | Jacksonville, OR USA | 10/02/2005
(4 out of 5 stars)
"This three hour film covered everything you ever wanted to know about the suffrage movement. It was another excellent Ken Burns effort. I liked the way it was divided up into chapters. I'm teaching a women's history class and had a limited amount of time for a film (1 hour). So I was able to show their early life, twenty years later and the conclusion of the suffrage struggle by selecting certain chapters. I would highly recommend this film for any women's history buff."
"Wheat that was sown that others harvested!";"The women that
KerrLines | Baltimore,MD | 04/26/2007
(5 out of 5 stars)
"It would be totally inadequate for this reviewer to say that NOT FOR OURSELVES ALONE:The Story of Elizabeth Cady Stanton & Susan B. Anthony is simply a "must-see","well done","moving","dramatic","compelling"etc.etc. documentary of the two forgers of the early Woman's Suffrage Movement.This Ken and Paul Burns treatise has been so carefully,sensitively and lovingly handled,crafted and assembled that I was moved to anger,incredulity,sympathy,action and finally to just good ol'tears!
NOT FOR OURSELVES ALONE tells in vivid detail, based upon the enormous source material and writings and correspondence of the two amazing women of the 19th -century,Cady Stanton and Anthony, who almost in a battle alone, fought tirelessly for the equality and dignity and rights of all women to receive and exercise their rights as they saw guaranteed to them under the United States Constitution and The Decalration of Independence.These two pioneers maintained an endearing fifty year friendship,endured hardships,misunderstandings,trials,boos-and-jeers,and the sometime opposition of their own sex as well as the opposite sex AND race, and above all ,totally opposite lifesyles and temperaments in order to join faculties to push for what they themselves NEVER saw in their own lifetime...the 19th Amendment guaranteeing the woman's right to vote.Without these two women, much legislation that all of us now accept to be totally understood ,would never be in law today.The Burns Brothers have created an absolute masterpiece,running for 210 totally absorbing minutes minutely detailing how these two women met,how they were alike and unalike,and how their neverending faith and trust in each other and their common-held beliefs was the ultimate key for those women of the following generation to complete the task of gaining equal rights for all women.This is a very typical Burns format for his PBS documentaries complete with voiceovers,historian interviews,still tintypes.Where this particular documentary really succeeds above the other Burns' PBS features is the tender and deliciously sensitive narrative that has been scripted to tell Stanton and Anthony's story.This is a very absorbing piece of art that all peoples would greatly benefit from viewing.It is more than informational...it is life-giving.These were the women who "sowed winter wheat for others to harvest".They were "the women who worked miracles!""