(The Root) — If you’ve seen the award-winning 2008 documentary Pray the Devil Back to Hell, then this will be a familiar story: How a group of Liberian women — Muslims and Christians, young and not so young, long grown weary from the terrors of war — conspired to wage peace in their country. How they staged sit-ins outside the Presidential Palace, stalked stalled peace talks in Ghana, and withheld sex until their husbands saw the light and pledged to wage peace, too. Then there is the not-so-familiar story: how these women — in particular, the foot soldiers of the peace movement — struggle to keep the momentum going seven years after the end of the nation’s most recent war, now that treaties have been signed, the dead have been buried and an “Iron Lady” has been elected president. How do you keep going in the aftermath, when jobs are scarce, the country remains bombed out and there are so many rape victims to tend to? How do you keep hope alive? Is there room for feminism in a country that’s struggling mightily to rebuild itself? And how do you engage the young ones, convince them that feminism has a place in their lives?
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