Time to get energized for winter. Come chart a powerful course by curling up on the couch and watching strong, mature female characters crush their evil opponents. And because nothing about being a woman is simple, our opponents come in all shapes, sizes and curses, some purely cultural and some purely mental. Female empowerment is based on grit. So naturally, stories of women’s triumphs involve a degree of blood, sweat, tears and even death. Remember, though, that while men have bankrolled and directed most of the movies we see — which means they’ve had their thumbs on the happy-endings scale — in real life, we control the endings to our own stories. All are available via Netflix or Amazon Prime!
Respect (2021, 2 hours 25 minutes)
Aretha Franklin, the Queen of Soul, overcame enough sexism, personal trauma and racism to make most of our lives look like cakewalks. Franklin’s mother, a talented singer in her own right, died when Aretha was 10, and her domineering minister father managed her early career. She had two children by the time she was 14, though she never revealed their father’s identity. Franklin had released nine albums by the time she was 22. In 1967, she recorded “Respect,” which Rolling Stone called the greatest song of all time. Franklin was close to Martin Luther King Jr. and a civil rights activist herself. The winner of 18 Grammys and countless other awards, she was the youngest person to receive Kennedy Center Honors and the first woman inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. She performed into her 70s, before dying in 2018, at age 76.
Hidden Figures (2017, 2 hours 7 minutes)
Three brilliant, determined African American women at NASA — Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson — fight racism and sexism to be the brains behind one of the greatest operations in history: the launch of astronaut John Glenn into orbit. This stunning achievement restored the nation’s confidence, turned around the Space Race and galvanized the world.
The Post (2017, 1 hour 57 minutes)
With Meryl Streep as legendary Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham and Carrie Coon as reporter Meg Greenfield, this is the true story of the first female publisher of a major American newspaper. Graham was raised to be a Washington socialite and mother. But despite having no training in journalism or business, and with four young children, she became one of the world’s most influential publishers in her 40s after her father died and her husband committed suicide. She led a team of journalists and lawyers in a race with The New York Times to expose Richard Nixon’s massive cover-up of government secrets.