The Vote, Now Streaming on PBS's American Experience

The Vote, a two-part documentary streaming now as part of PBS’s American Experience, tells the story of the 72-year struggle of American women for the right to vote. Written and directed by Michelle Ferrari, the film traces the suffragist movement’s journey from Seneca Falls in 1848 through the eventual passage of the 19th Amendment in 1920. It is a story of incredible, multi-generational perseverance.

“The struggle for women’s suffrage takes over seven decades,” journalist Elain Weiss says in the film.  “The women who began the movement didn’t live to see it come to fruition. And the women who took it over the finish line weren’t born when it began. And, so, you have these three generations of American women who all come together in this extraordinary movement for equality.”

The film is full of compelling personalities, all brilliantly brought to life. In the final decade of the battle, the split between the movement’s two leading figures, Alice Paul and Carrie Chapman Catt, makes for riveting viewing, with Paul’s unyielding drive for a federal amendment and inflammatory tactics on one side, pitted against and Catt’s more politically incremental strategy on the other.

It’s a history that many people often know only in part, including Ferrari, the films writer and director. As she said in an interview with Ms. Magazine, “I was very excited about the prospect of doing it in part because I knew very little about the suffrage movement. It should be said in that regard that I majored in American history in college. I have a graduate degree in American history, and yet I knew very little about the women’s suffrage movement. I figured, given my background in history, I couldn’t possibly be alone in that.”

The film benefits from a trove of great archival material, much of which was originally orchestrated by Alice Paul, who had an early understanding of the power of media, and made sure all the major events and demonstrations were documented and publicized at the time.

“She understood how media could help further the cause, and had everything photographed and filmed,” Ferrari said in an interview with Current, the public media news service. “Two key events captured on film in Washington, D.C., were the 1913 suffrage parade, which erupted in violence as an estimated 8,000 women marched down Pennsylvania Avenue; and the first-ever picketing of the White House, which began in 1917.”

The filmmakers don’t evade hard truths, including the racial tensions that emerged at key moments of fight. While the early suffragists were staunch abolitionists, the movement was uneven throughout its history in its commitment to Black women’s rights.

“This struggle is going on at the same time that the nation is resolving still the Civil War. How? By jettisoning black Americans, from the story and from the actual political culture,” historian Martha Jones says in the Film. “And so maybe we shouldn’t be so surprised that some American women come to that same notion of a compromise. Which is that African-Americans might be dispensable for other kinds of goals.”

But in the end, the suffrage movement, by winning the vote for all women, both Black and white, moved the country closer to its founding ideals.

“What the 19th Amendment meant for American democracy is hard to overstate,” author JD Zahniser says in the film. “Half the population winning the vote is a tremendous step toward this young country America finally achieving the equality the Thomas Jefferson wrote about in the Declaration of Independence. A huge step towards America achieving its potential.”