INVENTING HERSELF
Telling Women’s Lives: A new series of remarkable, untold stories from America’s past
by Laurie Kahn-Leavitt

Woman looking through file cabinet drawer of the U.S. Office of War Information. 1945. Prints and Photographs Division.

I AM interested in telling compelling, visually interesting stories that don’t normally find their way to the television screen. In particular, I feel that stories of women’s lives - many which were discovered and pieced together in the last fifty years - should be brought to the attention of a large, national audience. A new ten hour series of films Inventing Herself will explore the history of women in America. This series will focus on the lives of extraordinary, ordinary women in the past. It will include women from different time periods, regions, and cultural backgrounds. Each film will be tightly focused, but the range of topics will be broad. The spirit of this new series will be similar to that of my last two films, A Midwife’s Tale and Tupperware! Both were narrowly focused films which opened out onto large issues in American history, exploring history we think we know from a new perspective.