“The fact that a woman will put her body on the line to be a citizen is considered shocking,” says one of the characters featured in “American Experience’s” “The Vote.” Emmy winner Michelle Ferrari’s four-hour, two-part documentary series revisits the radical movement that led to the passage of the 19th amendment. Far from being “given” the right to vote, women went to battle for it, putting their bodies on the line time after time. The footage in our exclusive trailer for the project recalls how women were arrested and physically assaulted along the way.

Promising to delve into gender, race, and political power, “The Vote” focuses primarily on the movement’s “militant and momentous final decade.” The doc series, which is narrated by Kate Burton and counts Mae Whitman, Audra McDonald, Laura Linney, and Patricia Clarkson among its voice cast, follows American women’s “determined march to the ballot box, and illuminates the myriad social, political, and cultural obstacles that stood in their path.”

“The Vote” is timed to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the passage of the 19th Amendment, and promises to delve into gender, race, and political political power, offering “an absorbing lesson in the delicate, often fractious dynamics of social change.”

“The lengths to which women had to go in their pursuit of the ballot will likely come as a surprise to most viewers,” said Ferrari. “How many people are aware that suffragists were the first Americans to picket the White House? That those women were jailed, went on hunger strikes and were force-fed by authorities? And that the techniques of non-violent civil disobedience, which we usually associate with the Civil Rights Movement, were employed first by women fighting for the right to vote?”

Executive producer Susan Bellows added, “The hard-fought campaign waged by American women for the right to vote was a truly transformative cultural and political movement, resulting in the largest expansion of voting rights in American history. It’s also a story that has usually been reduced to a single page in the history books. ‘The Vote’ restores this complex story to its rightful place in our history, providing a rich and clear-eyed look at a movement that resonates as much now as ever.”

Ferrari won an Emmy for writing “Seabiscuit,” a 2003 episode of “American Experience.” Her directing credits include “The Eugenics Crusade” and “Rachel Carson.”

“The Vote” premieres Monday and Tuesday, July 6-7, 9:00-11:00 p.m. ET on “American Experience” on PBS. Check out a trailer and more information about Part One and Part Two below.

Part One

Part One traces the rise of suffrage militancy, a direct-action approach to politics inspired by Britain’s notoriously militant suffragettes. First introduced in New York by Harriot Stanton Blatch, the daughter of women’s rights pioneer Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and later championed by Alice Paul, a well-educated, singularly-driven Quaker of the movement’s third generation, the new, “unladylike” tactics heightened the movement’s visibility, as thousands of American women took to the streets to boldly demand their right to full and equal citizenship. Already by 1911, “votes for women” had become, as one journalist noted, “the three small words which constitute the biggest question in the world today.” While galvanizing to many, such radical action was also divisive, stiffening the opposition and threatening to undermine the movement’s credibility.

Part Two

Part Two examines the mounting dispute over strategy and tactics. The suffragists, stung by a string of bitter state-level defeats in the fall of 1915, concentrated their energies on the passage of a federal amendment. One faction, under the leadership of the National American Woman Suffrage Association’s President, Carrie Chapman Catt, was determined to pursue a moderate course and work within the political system, while another, Alice Paul’s National Woman’s Party, deployed ever-more confrontational and controversial methods of protest. The two efforts nevertheless pushed the movement to its crescendo in tandem, and forever transformed the politics of social change in America.