Women & Girls Lead

AMERICAN MASTERS “Dorothea Lange”
Dorothea Lange (May 26, 1895 – October 11, 1965) was an influential American documentary photographer and photojournalist, best known for her Depression-era work for the Farm Security Administration (FSA). Lange’s photographs humanized the consequences of the Great Depression and influenced the development of documentary photography.

Unsung Heroes: The Story of America’s Female Patriots
Today, more women serve in the armed forces than at any other time in our nation’s history, in ways never before possible. Women pilot B-2 Stealth Bombers on combat missions, drive tanks in Iraq, direct Marines in Afghanistan, command carrier battle groups, fly jet fighters and helicopters, and continue the noble tradition of providing critical battlefield care as doctors and nurses. There are almost 2,000,000 living female veterans whose contributions span three generations. The service of these women has been heroic, their sacrifices profound and their enormous accomplishments largely ignored. That is about to change. Unsung Heroes: The Story of America’s Female Patriots introduces you to the women who have helped to guarantee the nation’s freedom since its founding. At the heart of the two-part series are the powerful firsthand accounts of perseverance and triumph, which reveal the unheralded achievements of this valiant legion of patriots.

Texas Trailblazer

The newest installment of KERA’s Texas Trailblazer series profiles the lives and careers of three outstanding women who are making a difference in North Texas. Kael Alford is an award-winning journalist and SMU adjunct professor; Liz Cedillo-Pereira is a Dallas-based attorney with a special focus on immigration; and Erma Johnson Hadley is the chancellor for the Tarrant County College District. They chose different paths, but they have one thing in common. Each of these women followed her passion, and through her achievements has changed lives. This half-hour television special is part of KERA’s Women and Girls Lead programming initiative.

Erma Johnson Hadley

Erma Johnson Hadley is the Chancellor for the Tarrant County College District, the first woman and first African American chancellor of TCC. She has been with the district for more than 40 years as a faculty member and administrator. During her tenure on the Tarrant County College faculty, she was voted “Outstanding Teacher.” Chancellor Hadley grew up in the small southeast Texas logging town of Leggett in the era of legal segregation, and has dedicated her life and career to changing lives through education. She was inducted into the Texas Women’s Hall of Fame in 2010.

Kael Alford

Kael Alford is a nationally acclaimed photojournalist who has travelled the world capturing untold stories. Her work has focused on political conflict, underrepresented communities, cultural identity and the human relationship with the natural environment. Alford’s work has appeared in European and American publications including Time, Newsweek, The New York Times and The Guardian, among others. Her work in Iraq is included in the book Unembedded: Four Independent Photojournalists on the War in Iraq. Her latest project focuses on a remote community in the disappearing wetlands of Louisiana’s coast. Alford is now at Southern Methodist University as a visiting artist and adjunct faculty member.

Mary Elizabeth (Liz) Cedillo-Pereira

Mary Elizabeth (Liz) Cedillo-Pereira is an attorney seeking U.S. immigration solutions for her clients from around the world, and is passionate about children and education. In law school she established a tutoring and mentoring project for Dallas kids. Currently, Liz serves on the Advisory Board for the Irma Rangel Young Women’s Leadership School for Girls and the Advisory Council for the Capitol One University Crossroads Initiative to increase college matriculation for Dallas school children. In 2010, Liz received the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Young Leader Award for demonstrated commitment to developing the next generation of leaders.

MAKERS: Women Who Make America
Parts 1, 2 and 3
This series tells the remarkable story of the most sweeping social revolution in American history, as women have asserted their rights to a full and fair share of political power, economic opportunity, and personal autonomy. It’s a revolution that has unfolded in public and private, in courts and Congress, in the boardroom and the bedroom, changing not only what the world expects from women, but what women expect from themselves. Makers brings this story to life with priceless archival treasures and poignant, often funny interviews with those who led the fight, those who opposed it, and those first generations to benefit from its success. Trailblazing women like Hillary Rodham Clinton, Ellen DeGeneres and Oprah Winfrey share their memories, as do countless women who challenged the status quo in industries from coal-mining to medicine. Makers captures with music, humor, and the voices of the women who lived through these turbulent times the dizzying joy, aching frustration and ultimate triumph of a movement that turned America upside-down.

We Served Too: The Story of the Women’s Air Force Service Pilots
This story of a group of young, determined and courageous women during World War II who broke through barriers and shattered stereotypes. We Served Too
Provides a first-hand account from WASP history. WASP experts and family members share their personal stories and expert knowledge.

Sweet Tornado: Margo Jones and the American Theater
During the 1940s and ’50s, Dallas theater producer-director Margo Jones – nicknamed the “Texas Tornado” for her larger-than-life personality – pioneered the regional theater movement, championed the work of new playwrights, including Tennessee Williams, and crusaded against the commercial domination of New York theater. But despite her idealism, energy, warmth and salesmanship, Jones struggled with loneliness, frustration and doubt. Her untimely death at age 43 came just six months following her triumphant world premiere of the play, Inherit the Wind. Sweet Tornado captures the remarkable life and times of this American visionary by weaving together theatrical representations and excerpts from three plays with interviews, archival photographs and rarely seen film footage. The powerful performance documentary narrated by Academy Award-winner Marcia Gay Harden, stars Judith Ivey as Margo Jones and Richard Thomas as Tennessee Williams.

Alice Walker: Beauty in Truth
Most famous for her seminal novel The Color Purple, writer/activist Alice Walker celebrates her 70th birthday. Born February 9, 1944, into a family of sharecroppers in rural Georgia, she came of age during the violent racism and seismic social changes of mid-20th-century America. Her mother, poverty and participation in the civil rights movement were the formative influences on her consciousness, becoming the inherent themes in her writing. The first African-American woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for Literature, Walker continues to shine a light on global human rights issues. Her dramatic life is told with poetry and lyricism, and includes interviews with Steven Spielberg, Danny Glover, Quincy Jones, Howard Zinn, Gloria Steinem, Sapphire and Walker herself.

Independent Lens: Las Marthas
The annual debutante ball in Laredo, Texas, lasts an entire month and coincides with George Washington’s birthday. For more than a century, the city’s coming-out celebrations have involved intricate paeans to America’s colonial past. In 1939, the Society of Martha Washington was founded to usher each year’s debutantes (called “Marthas”) into proper society. The centerpiece of the festivities is the Martha Washington Pageant and Ball, when the girls are presented. The festival resonates anew in a time of economic uncertainty and political tension over immigration. Still, the Washington celebration has managed to persevere and even flourish, thanks in large part to the Mexican-American girls who carry this gilded tradition on their young shoulders.

Half the Sky: Oppression into Opportunity
Filmed in 10 countries, the series follows Nicholas Kristof and celebrity activists America Ferrera, Diane Lane, Eva Mendes, Meg Ryan, Gabrielle Union and Olivia Wilde on a journey to tell the stories of inspiring, courageous individuals. Across the globe oppression is being confronted, and real meaningful solutions are being fashioned through health care, education, and economic empowerment for women and girls. The linked problems of sex trafficking and forced prostitution, gender-based violence, and maternal mortality – which needlessly claim one woman every 90 seconds – present to us the single most vital opportunity of our time: the opportunity to make a change. Half the Sky was filmed in Cambodia, Kenya, India, Sierra Leone, Somililand, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Liberia and the U.S.

Independent Lens: Young Lakota is set in a small town in the heart of South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Reservation, where sisters Sunny and Serena Clifford, and their neighbor, Brandon Ferguson, share a common dream of helping to create a better future for their tribe. When South Dakota passes a law criminalizing abortion with no exceptions for incest or rape, their tribal President, Cecelia Fire Thunder, challenges it with a threat to build a women’s health clinic on the reservation. The women are drawn into a political fire storm.

Women, War & Peace is a five-part series that reveals how the post-Cold War proliferation of small arms has changed the landscape of war, with women becoming primary targets and suffering unprecedented casualties. Yet, women are simultaneously emerging as necessary partners in brokering lasting peace and as leaders in forging new international laws governing conflict. Featuring narrators Matt Damon, Geena Davis and Alfre Woodard.

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Independent Lens: The Graduates/Los Graduados explores pressing issues in education today through the eyes of six young Latino and Latina students from across the United States. One hour of the program focuses solely on the unique situations of Latina students. This program offers first-hand perspectives on key challenges facing Latino high school students and their families, educators and community leaders. The Graduates/Los Graduados is not only a story about how Latino students are faring in our nation’s public education system, it is also a story about the graduates who will make up America’s future.

American Masters: Billie Jean King is the first American Masters program that profiles the accomplishments of a sports figure. This program commemorates the 40th anniversary of the famous Bill Jean King/Bobby Riggs “battle of the sexes” tennis match held in Houston on September 20, 1973. King presents her own story, with perspective from other women tennis greats, women’s movement leaders, and her family.

POV: The World Before Her is a tale of two Indias. In one, Ruhi Singh is a small-town girl competing in Bombay to win the Miss India pageant – a ticket to stardom in a country wild about beauty contests. In the other India, Prachi Trivedi is the young, militant leader of a fundamentalist Hindu camp for girls, where she preaches violent resistance to Western culture, Christianity and Islam. Moving between these divergent realities, the film creates a lively, provocative portrait of the world’s largest democracy at a critical transitional moment – and of two women who hope to shape its future. Winner, World Documentary Competition Award, 2012 Tribeca Film Festival.

FRONTLINE: Kind Hearted Woman is the story of Robin
Charboneau, a 31-year-old Oglala Sioux woman in North Dakota, who struggles between saving her family and risking it all to help her Indian community and abused women. To download a discussion guide about the documentary, Click Here.

Part 1

Watch Kind Hearted Woman Part One on PBS. See more from FRONTLINE.

Part 2

Watch Kind Hearted Woman Part Two on PBS. See more from FRONTLINE.