Mare Winningham is Prudence Crandall, an ex-Quaker and teacher who opens the Canterbury Boarding School for Young Ladies in Connecticut in 1832. After she allows a colored maid Marcia Davis (Lisa Marie Russell) to sit in the back of the class, Prudence than accepts other colored girls as students, which causes a town uproar.
As Prudence who is described as `the most stubborn stiff-necked female in the entire country', Winningham wears her brown hair in a bun, except when she is in bed when it is down in a long plait, and her clothes are period - bonnets, capes, and petticoated dresses. As in her 1990 Crossing to Freedom, she uses a `hmm?' at the end of her sentence to emphasise her statement, she speaks French, and sings hymns. When townspeople crowd outside her school, Winningham enters yelling `I will not be patronised', and looks into the camera when she is imprisoned and says `When I am weak, then I am strong'.
The teleplay by Bruce Franklin Singer, based on a true story, is painfully didactic, which isn't a surprise for a Disney production. Prudence's romantic life is shown to be sacrificed for her career, she has terrible luck with her first partner lawyer Andrew Gibson (Robert Desiderio) and William, the editor of The Boston Liberator, her situation indicated by her referring to her students as her `children'. Prudence is also shown to have a strong fantasy life, where she invokes visions of William, and Singer has her appear to make a letter she reads in prison a dialogue. A trial incorporates whimsy such as a speech defending Prudence that no prosecutor would allow, and Prudence's students singing a song they appeared to have composed for the day. However one exchange is funny in a politically incorrect way. When asked if he is familiar with the school, Daniel replies `I oughta be. I'm down wind of it'.
Director Jack Gold doesn't lighten the didacticism, but he frames Prudence at the top of a triangle formation of the students as she speaks.
