Ken Burns, the acclaimed producer and director of documentaries on American history, presented his newest documentary, "Not for Ourselves Along: The Story of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony," yesterday before a packed crowd in Science Center A.

Burns showed six clips totaling under a fourth of the film, adding historical background and commentary about the women's suffrage movement and its two pivotal leaders, Stanton and Anthony. The three-hour documentary, fourth in series of five biographical films, will be shown Nov. 7 and 8 on PBS.

"When Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony were born, women had less rights than a lunatic--that is, a male lunatic--in an asylum," Burns said. "By the time that they died, most of these--what we consider self-evident--rights had been at least partly achieved."

The clips spanned period between the Seneca Falls convention of 1848 to the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, which gave women the right to vote.

Other film segments investigated the relationship between Anthony and Stanton and documented Stanton's emotional final speech, "The Solitude of Self," which Burns said is on a literary par with Emerson's "Self-Reliance."

"[The film] is focused initially on where [Stanton and Anthony] came from, their psychology and their friendship, but also on the political movement they founded," Burns said in an interview.

Burns said his interest in producing the documentary began 11 years ago, during the production of his Civil War documentary.

"My co-producer Paul Barnes was reading a biography of Stanton and would regale us daily with her stories," he said. "I felt humiliated that I didn't know about the two most important women in American history."