Watch the Makers Documentary Online!

A while ago I complained about a TV series that seemed to be glorifying a bunch of rich white men as the people who made America.

And a short while ago Fem Phil posted about the PBS documentary, Makers: Women Who Make America.

In case anyone missed it on TV, you can watch the whole thing (yup all 3 hours) here or here.  (The first link doesn’t contain commercials, as far as I can tell.  Apologies if the video doesn’t work everywhere. I tried searching Youtube as well but couldn’t find another version.)

And if anyone ever followed Twisty at I Blame the Patriarchy, she is still occasionally throwing out a blame or two, in between blogging about the various ailments her horses suffer from. She points out some irony regarding the commercials for the documentary:

“Despite the title, during the station break a voiceover described the doc’s subject as “women who ‘helped’ shape America.” Women are helpers, yo, just in case this film causes you to forget that for a moment.”

And in classic Twisy fashion, she helpfully suggests,

Here, Voiceover, let me “help” you kiss my entire ass.

(If it’s not obvious, I miss IBTP.)

I haven’t watched the documentary yet, but I’m hoping it’s good.  Twisty links to a few articles on it in her post.  And Chris Hayes talked about it some on his Feb 9th show–you know, the one where he devoted the WHOLE TWO HOURS to the women’s movement (both local and global, past and present.) The show, while containing a few awkward kumbaya moments, had some of the best dialogue I’ve seen about how to address the women’s movement without slipping into American-centric white middle class feminism. (If you can watch MSNBC shows, you can watch it here by hovering over “recent shows” on the left and finding Feb. 9th.)

 

Melissa Harris-Perry (left) and Sarita Gupta (right) on Up with Chris Hayes

Police pressure to drop rape charges

in order to improve conviction stats.

Rape victims were pressured to withdraw their allegations by a specialist Metropolitan police unit as officers tried to gerrymander their performance statistics, the report found.

The Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) said the Sapphire unit at Southwark had failed victims. Women reporting rapes and sexual assaults were encouraged to withdraw their allegations, it said.

The watchdog said its investigation followed cases in 2008, when the Southwark Sapphire unit was performing poorly and under pressure to improve.

The report found women were questioned repeatedly by a detective about whether they had consented to sex. They were encouraged to withdraw their complaints, which boosted the unit’s sanctioned detection rate.

The rape allegations were not recorded by police.

 

Thanks, Mr Jender!