History Alive Project

The topic of my project is Women’s Rights. My theme is how literature and journalism can be used to spread awareness and incite revolution. 

As I was researching different topics and important people in history, I came across many feminists and women’s right’s activists. Feminism is a topic that has been brought up many times during various class discussions so I thought it would be interesting to learn more about women’s right’s activists and feminism in history. Since we have been studying civil rights for the past few months in social studies, I thought about the rights of other people as well. This led me to becoming more engaged in learning about how feminism has evolved and the journey that many women faced in history.

I researched my topic by first searching “Gloria Steinem” in google. I took notes about Gloria’s early life, as well as how she became invested in the women’s rights movement. I then looked for different sources and images that I could find. I looked for different books that I have access to and attempted to find them. Then I went to the SAS Middle School Library to check out the book that I found, as well as borrowing a book that Mr. Elms suggested from Mrs. Clark's room.

I chose to create a documentary because I enjoy editing videos on iMovie and creating different films, as a result of taking video class. I think a documentary is a good way to clearly and easily inform the audience in a concise manner, while teaching them more about the topic. Since documentaries normally include many images and videos, I thought it would be a good idea to make one since I was able to find a large variety of images and videos related to my topic. Since I have worked a lot with making videos and short films, I thought that making a documentary would be the best option for me. 

My topic fits into our unit theme, Civil War to Civil Rights: Protest & Perseverance, 

because it relates to people’s rights. The definition of Civil Rights is “the rights of citizens to political and social freedom and equality.” For many years, women have been treated less equally than men. Women were not allowed to vote, apply to certain jobs, etc. During our unit, we have learned about slavery and African American rights. The African Americans were discriminated against, and although it is not as obvious, women were discriminated as well. Even today, in certain countries, women still struggle to fight for their rights.