“MAKERS.com is a dynamic digital platform showcasing thousands of compelling stories – both known and unknown – from trailblazing women of today and tomorrow.”
“MAKERS: Women Who Make America is an ongoing initiative that aims to be the largest and most dynamic collection of women’s stories ever assembled.”
View a preview of the MAKERS journey below.
And now, take a look at some of the women who make America who will be central to Hewitt’s ongoing discussion of past and current MAKERS.
Betty Friedan was an American writer, activist and feminist. She is perhaps best known for her book The Feminine Mystique, published in 1963, that covered new ground on what the role of women in a society could and should be. She explored the idea of women finding personal fulfillment beyond their traditional roles and helped advance the women’s right movement as a founder of the National Organization for Women.
Dyllan McGee is the executive producer at Kunhardt McGee Productions, the celebrated documentary company that specializes in documentaries highlighting bringing cutting-edge scholarship to popular audiences and that produced MAKERS: Women Who Make America along with PBS. McGee oversees all documentary and web programming. In addition to her film work, McGee also sits on the Board of Directors of The Gordon Parks Foundation and the Meserve-Kunhardt Foundation, both not-for-profit organizations with focuses on photography. From 1997 to 2007, she served on the Board of Directors for The Taft School.
Letty Cottin Pogrebin is an American author, journalist, well-known lecturer, and activist. Pogrebin is the co-founder with Gloria Steinem of Ms. Magazine and Letty Cottin Pogrebin is well known for her advocacy through journalism and her activism on behalf of women’s equality, authors’ rights, and inter-group understanding. She was the president of The Authors Guild and is currently a board member of many organizations including the Ms. Foundation for Education and Communication, the Director’s Council of the Women in Religion Program at the Harvard Divinity School, and the Women and Gender Studies Program at Brandeis University.
What is Ms. Magazine? Published originally as a “one shot” sample insert in New York Magazine in 1971, Ms. was never expected to have much impact. But it soon became a full magazine that boosted the women’s movement of the time, featuring prominent American women standing up for their rights. It was the first magazine to explain and advocate for many women’s issues and rate presidential candidates on their respective views, to put domestic violence and sexual harassment on the cover of a women’s magazine, to point out the seemingly corrupt influences of advertising, and much more. As MsMagazine.com indicates “Ms. was the first national magazine to make feminist voices audible, feminist journalism tenable, and a feminist worldview available to the public.”
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