Women's Studies

This documentary offers first-person accounts of the lives of two working-class Belfast women told against the violent history of the last twenty-five years in Northern Ireland.

This video examines the world of amateur Irish dancing, featuring interviews with Irish women in Great Britain who have passed on this cultural tradition within their own families and the wider Irish immigrant community.

In 1889, amidst the slums of Chicago's Near West Side, pioneer social worker Jane Addams (1860-1935) opened Hull House to aid the poor, largely immigrant residents of the neighborhood.

Examines nurse-midwifery as a significant and increasingly popular alternative to traditional hospital childbirth methods.

An insightful documentary portrait of young black and Hispanic teenagers, primarily girls, growing up in a poor urban neighborhood.

This short drama on domestic abuse, based on extensive research with battered Latinas, focuses on a Hispanic family, showing how the father's machismo has intimidated both wife and daughter into continual fear of physical abuse and alienated the son who resents his father's authoritarian attitudes.

Chronicles the experience of 46-year-old Suzanne, an unmarried American woman who, desiring to create a single-parent family of her own, adopts a baby abandoned on the streets of China in the wake of that country's notorious population laws. Her emotional ordeal illuminates both the joys and problems involved in adopting foreign children and in being a single parent.

Growing up Catholic has had a strong impact on many people. This kaleidoscope of baby boomers' memories features adults describing, with a sense of humor and a sense of survival, childhood experiences of physical and psychological punishment during their education by Catholic nuns, especially in the Fifties and Sixties.

A compelling investigation of the trauma of rape, portraying the aftermath of a rape and the work of the Rape Crisis Center in Austin, Texas.

Reveals the shocking conditions at the Female High Security Unit at the federal prison in Lexington, Kentucky, where three women political prisoners, currently serving sentences ranging from thirty-five to fifty-eight years in solitary confinement, have been subjected to psychological experimentation (including sensory deprivation and constant video surveillance) and other forms of cruel and unusual punishment.

This film shows how a firm with 60% women employees, most of whom felt stuck in clerical jobs with no chance for advancement, instituted an affirmative action program, dealt with attitude change, self-awareness and management training.

In 1993, Mieko Ouchi, a half-white, half-Japanese actress, began researching a documentary about her Japanese immigrant grandfather. Shortly thereafter, she was cast to star in The War Between Us, a feature film on the WWII internment of Japanese-North Americans, thus re-enacting a key episode in her own community's history.

Part of the Who Built America? series, this video tells the vivid tale of the African-American exodus from the rural South to northern industrial cities during World War I.

This video features a fugitive woman slave describing life, work, and day-to-day resistance to slavery on a North Carolina cotton plantation during the 1840s and 1850s.

This video is based on the life of Boston shoemaker George Robert Twelves and reveals how working people helped make the American Revolution.

Examines the reasons for the high number of hysterectomies performed on women every year, the alternatives available, the side effects and after-effects. Includes interviews with doctors, other professionals, and women who have undergone the operation.

Examines the birth control injection Depo Provera and the international controversy over its use, raising disturbing questions about racism and sexism in health care, population control vs. birth control, and how drugs are tested and marketed.

Journalist Linda Ellerbee examines the state of contraception in the U.S. today, including women's dissatisfaction with the methods currently available.

Examines the worldwide crisis in teenage pregnancies through four case studies of teenage mothers in Ghana, England, Cuba, and the U.S., thereby providing a cross-cultural survey of the underlying reasons for the increasing rate of adolescent pregnancies and also discussing the hazards to the health and well-being of such young mothers.

Surveys the work of plastic artists in Puerto Rico during the 20th century, as well as significant forerunners in the 18th and 19th centuries, focusing on the artists' expression of national identity. The video combines illustrations of hundreds of art works with interviews with a dozen major contemporary artists and commentary by art critics.