Secondary Source
Vanity Fair Short Film: The 1910s—Women’s Suffrage and Equal Rights
Director: Gilly Barnes. "1910s-Women's Suffrage and Equal Rights." Vanity Fair, 2013.
Era: Post-Suffrage Era | Media: Curated Photos/Ephemera, Documentary Film, Newspapers, Video, Web-based
This Vanity Fair video by director Gilly Barnes is short—at just under four minutes, it’s closer in length to a film trailer than a typical documentary—but packs in a lot of information.
Part of the “1910s” portion of Vanity Fair‘s centennial “Decades Series,” the video combines suffrage-era primary sources like photos, quotes, and newspaper clippings with dramatic reenactments of a suffragist narrator explaining how she discovered the cause.
Though perhaps too condensed to be much use to viewers already steeped in the history of the American suffrage movement’s final decade, the video is a good introduction to the topic, and places it neatly within its historical context.
This description of the “Decades Series” comes from the project’s YouTube page:
Ten decades, 10 directors. In celebration of V.F.’s 100th anniversary, 10 eclectic filmmakers—from Judd Apatow to Don Cheadle to Brett Ratner—created a film on each era of V.F.’s century-old history and the Zeitgeist that defined it.