A Brilliant Film About the Women Who Saved Liberia

How exactly did Leymah and her peers affect the peace talks?

One of the brilliant things these women did was they realized that they needed to be a piece of a larger set of influencers, that there were people inside the organization they needed to get to. They saw they had to fit in the larger picture. Americans have the tendency to think of political solutions as more simple than they ever are. No war is simple. It would be disingenuous to say that on their own these women got Charles Taylor to go to peace talks, but the popular opinion was with them, and their pressuring him was the final straw. With the rebels, they sent Muslim women to Sierra Leone to convince LURD to join the talks as well—they coaxed the men as only women can.

So it was a particularly female form of activism?

When you make an argument about women and their peaceful capacity to bring conflicts to an end, you always get the pushback about women are no less violence than men, women soldiers, etc. But you look at that footage and 95 percent of the time you see who is pulling the trigger—men. It tends to fall to the women to have to do things horizontally instead of vertically, cooperatively instead of confrontationally, pushing for restorative models of justice rather than retributive models.

What is your next project?

Ginny and I were offered the opportunity to develop a project for Wide Angle called Women, War, and Peace. It will be four hours on the role women have always played in conflict, which is greater than we acknowledge. In Congo and Zimbabwe, for example, we look at both those places and think, How horrible. But—and the reporters aren’t covering it—the women are mobilizing there now. They are gathering testimonies, even as Mugabe is still in power there, and they need our support from the International Community. They are starting to fight back from remarkable brutality.

Over and over these women say they start from zero. But where would they be if they started from 5 or 10? How far could they get? They could be really effective peacemakers—Leymah’s work has just begun.

Rachel Syme is Culture Editor of The Daily Beast