Students Win State with Documentary Film 'We are Women, Hear Us Roar'

Update: Fox6now.com interviewed Natalie and Hayley for a story on their winning documentary. The report aired at 10 p.m. Tuesday.

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Two students are headed to a national competition with their documentary film on the 1968 Dagenham Ford strike and Equal Pay Act.

In the summer of 1968, 187 female workers walked off the Ford Motor Co. plant in Dagenham, England, to protest unequal pay and other treatment.

Senior Natalie Mathes and junior Hayley Gray-Hoehn interviewed surviving women from the strike and a University of Essex professor in their film, which won in the documentary category at the National History Day competition in Madison on May 5.

Titled "We are Women, Hear Us Roar," the film beat out 15 other regional winners to be Wisconsin's entry in the national competition June 10 to 14 at the University of Maryland at College Park.

Mathes and Gray-Hoehn, who are advised by Central social studies teacher Christopher McBride, also went to nationals last year for documentary film-making. (see 2011 award winners)

This year’s National History Day theme was "Revolution, Reaction, Reform in History."

According to the contest's web site:

Students choose historical topics related to that theme and conduct extensive primary and secondary research through libraries, archives, museums, oral history interviews and historic sites.

After analyzing and interpreting their sources and drawing conclusions about their topics’ significance in history, students present their work in original papers, websites, exhibits, performances and documentaries.

These products are entered into competitions in the spring at local, state and national levels where they are evaluated by professional historians and educators.