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Women's History Project
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Women's History Project
INVENTING HERSELF is a project that must be realized. The time is right, at the beginning of the 21st century, to look back at how we got to where we are. It matters what stories we tell. And we ought to tell these stories. We owe it to our daughters – and our sons – to tell them the stories of remarkable women in America’s past.

DEVELOPMENT
EACH STORY CHOSEN for the series Inventing Herself has to be strong enough to carry the dramatic arc of a film, and there have to be enough archival visual materials to bring the story to the screen. Once I have narrowed down the list of possible film subjects to several dozen topics that meet these two criteria, I will then make final selections in such a way that the series of films will add up to more than a sum of its parts. To do this, I will have to think through the implications of my choices carefully.

ULTIMATELY, I will choose stories that allow me to develop key thematic through-lines between the films – common themes between women’s lives that emerge in diverse situations: for example, women’s networks and alliances, women and the law, women’s work, women and material culture, ethnicity and race issues, etc. I will attempt to select a group of ten stories that convey the broad range of women’s experiences, in different time periods and regions in American history.
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