My Top Ten Women in History Series:

31 March, 2026 Siobhan Marie Day 0 Comments 1 category

Women, Power, and the Stories We Choose to Tell

Every March, Women’s History Month invites us to do more than remember — it challenges us to reassess how history has been written, who has been centered, and whose voices have too often been pushed to the margins. At MoviesToHistory.com, that mission takes on a dual lens: not only examining the past, but interrogating how film and television reinterpret it for modern audiences.

Women's History Month. Women of different ages, nationalities and religions come together. Vector.

This year, our Featured Television Blog of the Month, The First Lady (2022), serves as both a focal point and a launching point for a broader editorial series: My Top Ten Women in History Series. Through this list, we explore how television has attempted to capture the lives, legacies, and contradictions of women who shaped political, cultural, and social landscapes — often behind the scenes, and sometimes in defiance of them.

The First Lady offers a compelling, if imperfect, case study. By weaving together the lives of Eleanor Roosevelt, Betty Ford, and Michelle Obama, the series attempts to reframe the role of the First Lady not as ceremonial, but as politically and culturally consequential. It highlights an enduring tension central to historical storytelling: how do you dramatize influence that often operates outside formal power structures? And what gets lost — or gained — in that translation?

(L to R) Michelle Pfeiffer, Viola Davis, and Gillian Anderson as Betty Ford, Michelle Obama, and Eleanor Roosevelt in Showtime's "The First Lady" (2022) Photo Credit: SHOWTIME ENTERTAINMENT

But The First Lady is only one piece of a much larger narrative puzzle. Across television, series like The Crown, The Gilded Age, Women in Movement, and Mrs. America each attempt, in their own stylistic and ideological ways, to reconstruct women’s roles in history. Some center political authority, others social activism, and still others the quiet, often invisible labor of influence. Together, they form a mosaic — one that is as revealing in its omissions as it is in its storytelling.

This series is not simply a celebration. It is a critical examination. It asks:

Where do these portrayals succeed in reclaiming historical agency?
Where do they fall into familiar tropes or narrative simplifications?
And perhaps most importantly, how do these dramatizations shape public memory of the women who lived these histories?

The First Lady meets the aesthetic criteria of prestige TV but falls short in its narrative execution. The gap between ambition and structure becomes increasingly visible as the series progresses. In this sense, the show exemplifies a broader challenge within prestige television: the assumption that concept and casting can compensate for structural weaknesses. They cannot.

In revisiting these stories, we are not just looking backward — we are analyzing the ongoing negotiation between history and media, between fact and interpretation, and between visibility and erasure. Because in the end, how we tell these stories determines how they are remembered.