Not For Ourselves Alone
This content-rich site traces the beginnings of the women’s rights movement and tells the story of the two individuals who were instrumental in motivating the nation to grant women the right to vote.
In November 2, 1920, over 8 million American women voted for the first time in history, yet the two women who fought longest and hardest for women’s suffrage, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, didn’t live long enough to cast a vote. Not For Ourselves Alone, hosted on PBS Online, captures the spirit of the documentary film by Ken Burns and Paul Barnes. Both educational and entertaining, the site combines the personal and political with excerpts from archival photos, film, letters, speeches, and historical commentary. The Not For Ourselves Alone site combines the best of film and Web media to create a complete interactive resource on the history of women’s suffrage. The heart of the site is The Movement, a rich-media storytelling environment that combines cinematic and interactive features. The site encourages users to explore and discover the story of these women’s lives through a media collage of historical photographs, dramatic voice-overs, and commentary by historians and biographers. A content-rich research and response environment provides concurrent historical and cultural events, archival documents, and commentaries about Stanton and Anthony’s legacy. In addition to being a research portal for the suffrage movement, the Web site provides access to forums for posting and reading about contemporary women’s issues.