Women’s Struggles Brought to Light

To celebrate National Women’s History, I wanted to explore a selection of documentaries about women’s struggles. Women’s struggles are some the most prevalent problems in the world today. National Women’s History month has brought to light several inspirational messages, especially about women’s struggles to live in this world.

A National Geographic special for “He Named Me Malala”, inspired this post. This documentary is about the Pakistani school girl shot for standing up for girls education in Pakistan. This was the first of many documentaries about women’s struggles that inspired me to dig deeper.

It led me on a search for these others, which gave me an enlightening couple of weeks, learning about the struggles of women everywhere. I hope one or all of them catch your attention, so you can share in these struggles with me and we can work to build a better world for our hurting sisters. Please let me know in the comment’s which of these documentaries about women’s struggles you connected with most.

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Documentaries About Women’s Struggles

This calls out mainstream media for its limited and often degrading portrayals of girls and women. The documentary intertwines interviews with teenage girls with ones featuring famed women such as Condoleezza Rice, Nancy Pelosi, Lisa Ling, Rachel Maddow and Gloria Steinem.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZYpAuUzDhU

I have to admit that by the time I watched this one, I was fuming about so many of these other women’s struggles that I was kind of annoyed with this one. Not that this isn’t a real issue, but its like a first world problem. The whole thing blamed the media for all our problems, objectifying women and not enough female leadership, but it really didn’t hammer home that we, as women, need to take responsibility for the part we play.

The world doesn’t owe us anything. We ask for permission, but we don’t make a place for ourselves, except to play the stereotypical part of the dimwitted blonde or the sexual object.

Stop playing those roles and make our own way, our own opportunities. Stop asking for permission and waiting for someone else to step up- we are the someone. We are the media- the audience they are trying to capture and we fall for it. We don’t look pretty enough? Aren’t happy with the way we look? Who cares?

Changing Perspective

If we spent half as much time working to solve real problems as we do complaining about the hair out of its place, we’d probably wouldn’t have the energy to complain. Want little girls to not be upset because they don’t look the girl in the magazine? Start showing them real problems, women suffering from obstetric fistula or the women working hard to bring education to young girls across the world, who don’t have time to care if their jeans make their butt look too big.

You can find it on Netflix or buy it on Amazon here.

8. Half the Sky

This documentary—filmed in 10 countries with narrations from celebrities such as Olivia Wilde, Eva Mendes and Meg Ryan—tells  uplifting stories of women around the world who are fighting back against systemic oppression. The film presents gender equality as the unfinished business of the our time and highlights women who are working to improve everything from healthcare to education.Though one of the faces of the Half the Sky movement, Somaly Mam, has recently been exposed for allegedly fabricating her harrowing story, it doesn’t diminish the power of this meaningful film.

I found Part 1 on YouTube, which you can rent for $2.99. Here is Part 2.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kIg7xlzm7_4

I LOVED this documentary. They really have the right idea. It’s more than facts, people need stories and to see the problems first hand, for the documentaries about women’s struggles to really hit home for people to care more. The two journalists mentioned originally wrote the book. This is what I had hoped to see with Girl Rising. I found the celebrities distracting, but I understand the reason they have them. Sometimes, a familiar face might be a more relatable talking head, but at the end of the day, I felt like they missed the point. They focused more on the actual girls and the women in the trenches, so there was at least that.

Discrimination caused more deaths for girls and women than all the deaths committed on battlefields in the 20th century.

More  age 15- 44 women die from violence than cancer or malaria or war combined.

Two Part Documentary

The first part covered violence, sex trafficking, education.

Most of the women working so hard to make changes in these areas for their community do not see an end to this problem in her lifetime. A lot of people see a problem they know they can’t possible stop, so they just do nothing. But doing nothing is something, contributing to the problem. This woman didn’t let that be her excuse. She put one foot in front of the other and making a real difference. She was on the cover of Newsweek, in this documentary, spreading the knowledge of these issues, but most importantly, loving those everyone disowned.

In the education segment, they were talking about a little girl who had to ride 17 miles to and from school. We have heroes who ride about 95 miles for 23 days in the Tour De France, much less in other competitions, but what about these girls, girls who ride 34 miles a day every day of their young adult life just so they can get an education?

You can get it from Amazon here.

9. The Invisible War

Using interviews with survivors, this documentary explores the culture of impunity that has allowed a military rape epidemic to flourish. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York credited the film as her inspiration for drafting a recent bill that aims to curb rape in the military and bring justice to perpetrators. The film was nominated for Best Documentary Feature at the 2014 Academy Awards.

These documentaries about women’s struggles were hard to watch. They dismissed the recent bill mentioned in the synopsis because sexual assault is considered an occupational hazard. In the military, you can’t sue for these situations. One woman had her jaw dislocated during the assault. Part of her journey was about getting compensation for these medical expenses. It makes me angry knowing this is happening to women everywhere. These women loyally fought for our freedom and their whole lives our ruined by this, but we are doing nothing to make the perpetrators pay for their actions. Horrible.

This is available on Amazon.

10. Hunting Ground

From the makers of The Invisible War (2012), comes a startling exposé of rape crimes on U.S. college campuses. It talks about their institutional cover-ups and the devastating toll they take on students and their families. Weaving together verité footage and first-person testimonies. The film follows the lives of several undergraduate assault survivors as they attempt to pursue both their education and justice.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9aYfrhDkT1M

There is such about this that just makes me angry. I can’t believe the responses these women and men are getting for something that happened to them. One of these universities had 183  expulsions for cheating and other honor board violations, but ZERO expulsions for sexual assault out of 205 reported cases. They’re lives are forever changed and ruined the violators get to go completely free. The two women who did the research to make easier for all their all their fellow women to file complaints and created a structure that could help them know what to do.

But the thing is most of these sexual assaults are from repeat offenders. Eight percent of the perpetrators, usually male students, are responsible for 90 percent of the sexual assaults. If universities are so afraid of having their crime rates go up, then get rid of that 8 percent, it would solve their number problems.

Unfortunately, there is cases that false accusations and that just gives doubters more of an opportunity to say that it isn’t a problem. But there isn’t any more false accusations than there is for any other crime, which is about 2 to 10 percent.

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You can find this documentary on Netflix or buy it from Amazon here.

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