Last night, PBS aired MAKERS: How Women Made America, a three-hour look at the history and evolution of the women’s movement in the United States. If you missed it, the whole thing can be viewed online.

It’s difficult to distill 50 years of diverse, rapidly evolving, and (necessarily and often productively) contradictory feminist history, work and ideas into a documentary format at all, even if given an almost unprecedented amount of airtime to do it in. It’s important to note, right off the bat, that MAKERS relied heavily on stories told by and about the women whose identities and concerns — white, cisgender, documented, and able-bodied — have and continue to be privileged by mainstream feminism. While the film featured noted women of color and queer identified activists, their role was mostly presented as “challengers” to racism and homophobia within the mainstream feminist movement, rather than as an integral part of building that movement, now and then, to serve more people better. And it is outright shameful that MAKERS eliminated trans* folks from the history of feminism, especially since the movement and some its leaders both borrowed from trans* women’s organizing in their tactics while at the same time tearing down those women and their organizing.

But here is why I am grateful that MAKERS exists, not as the definitive version of feminist history but as a first step toward reappearing women into mainstream history: the film was, without a doubt, a more comprehensive and thoughtful look at the history of the women’s liberation movement than most US students ever learn in school — and now it exists as a resource to be used by educators who’ve either been unable to use existing resources (“too radical” or “not approved”) or simply did not know about them. There is a tremendous opportunity for the film to be paired with additional resources in classroom settings at all levels that expands upon the content in the film and introduces some of the work and leaders who were not featured on the screen.