When Dyllan McGee, founder and executive producer of Makers, first conceived of communicating the evolution of American women over the past half-century, she wanted to tell Gloria Steinem's story. Unsurprisingly, Steinem insisted that the movement could be better captured through a collective approach. The result, eight years later, is Makers: Women Who Make America, a three-hour documentary airing at 8 PM on Tuesday, February 26 on PBS (check local listings).

By featuring the stories of hundreds of women -- from household names including Madeleine Albright, Diane Von Furstenberg, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Katie Couric, Ellen DeGeneres, Billie Jean King, and Nancy Pelosi, to the lesser known Lorena Weeks, who filed suit against her employer Southern Bell in 1967 and eventually won in an important sex discrimination case -- the documentary reinforces the formative feminist claim that “The personal is political.”

Narrated by Meryl Streep, the film is connected to Makers.com, an ongoing video project of PBS and AOL chronicling more than 1,000 stories of women who have made an impact on political and social change as related to women’s rights.

Entry points include the publication and influence of Betty Friedan's 1963 book "The Feminine Mystique," which unveiled “the problem that has no name" plaguing 1950s and 60s housewives; Friedan’s cofounding of the National Organization for Women (NOW) in 1966, "to take action to bring women into full participation in the mainstream of American society now, exercising all privileges and responsibilities thereof in truly equal partnership with men"; the 1972 launch of Ms. magazine by Steinem and Letty Cottin Pogrebin; and, the decision of Roe v. Wade in 1973.

Along with trailblazing astronauts, Supreme Court justices, corporate leaders, politicians, coal miners, and athletes, Facebook CEO Sheryl Sandberg reaches beyond the glass ceiling with her vision that "a world where men ran half of the home and women ran half of our institutions would be a much better world."

With Makers as a catalyst for in-depth exploration, dive into the personal stories of these four extraordinary women it features.

“Insecure at Last: A Political Memoir” by Eve Ensler

Exploring our post-9/11 obsession with security, Eve Ensler asks in this 2006 memoir, "Why has all of this focus on security made me feel so much more insecure?" Best known for the provocative play The Vagina Monologues and creating worldwide V-Day celebrations to stop violence against women, Ensler weaves together personal history and reportage of current events to answer that question. She recounts a childhood full of physical abuse by her father and an adulthood characterized by near constant travel to convene with women in troubled regions.

In Bosnia, she learns about Serbs' use of rape to subdue Muslims; in Afghanistan, she hears stories of women publicly executed in a stadium. In a bold and lyrical style, she examines genital mutilation in Kenya and the traumas that followed the tsunami in Sri Lanka and Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, as well as daily conditions in refugee camps, prisons, and homeless shelters. After dissolving the “illusion of security,” she concludes, "Freedom is about becoming vulnerable to one another, rather than becoming secure, in control and alone."

“The World Has Changed: Conversations with Alice Walker” by Alice Walker

Through this collection of interviews and conversations chronicling the life and career of Alice Walker, edited by Emory University professor Rudolph P. Byrd, we gain insight into the childhood, creative process, and social activism of the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “The Color Purple.” Born into a cotton-picking family as the youngest of eight children in rural Georgia, Walker developed a lifelong “addiction to truth” in response to a powerful secret that pervaded her childhood and shaped her character.

Spanning the years 1973 to 2009, the book’s content covers a wide range, including Walker’s take on racism, the power of blues music, her literary influences, the environment, animal rights, civil rights, genital mutilation in Africa, and the election of a black president in a world that has changed greatly during her lifetime.

“Revolution from Within: A Book of Self-Esteem” by Gloria Steinem

In this moving collection of personal anecdotes and sociological cases studies, written as an antidote to her own casual observation as a young woman that "the examined life is not worth living" (really, it was too painful to explore, she discovers after much introspection), feminist trailblazer Gloria Steinem travels through her Ohio hometown, Spanish Harlem, India, and a Cherokee community to circle back to the most fundamental issue at hand for women, in particular: the question of self-worth. Citing influences from psychoanalyst Alice Miller to Mahatma Gandhi, Steinem concludes that an interior life upheld by a male-female balance within each individual results in the most healthy, progressive organism possible.

“Life So Far” by Betty Friedan

“The truth is that I've always been a bad-tempered bitch,” Betty Friedan admits in this memoir, looking back on a life as catalyst for the contemporary women's movement. Her 1963 book “The Feminine Mystique” began as research Friedan conducted in 1957, surveying her all-girls graduating class at its fifteen-year reunion. Friedan sought to explain the ''nameless, aching dissatisfaction'' that she and many other suburban housewives and mothers felt amid suffocating post-World War II domesticity. Since its publication in book form, "Mystique" has withstood the test of time, often credited as the cornerstone of second-wave feminism.

Co-founding the National Organization for Women (NOW) as an equivalent of an N.A.A.C.P. for women, as she often said, Friedan drew on a confrontational persona. In this memoir, published toward the end of her life, she presents a more mellow self-portrait comprised of revelations of physical abuse at the hands of her ex-husband and memories of feeling like an outcast child in Peoria, Illinois.