Votes for Women!

Blog Review of Sarah Gavron’s Suffragette

There are so many ‘feminist’ films and they all look at a wide range of women’s experiences, from motherhood, marriage, careers, sisterhood and also coming of age. Very few, however,  have charted the history of women’s struggle to obtain the right to vote, especially the events preceding the outbreak of the First World War. Emily Wilding Davison’s arguably heroic or insane act of throwing herself at the King’s horse during the race on Derby Day in June 1913 has been the subject of many documentaries, most recently by Claire Baldwin for Channel 4. But in Sarah Gavron's Suffragette it is central to the story and is shown through the eyes of poor, manipulated, working-class Maud Watts from London. It is her realisation of the importance of the right to vote and what that meant to women of all classes that is the heartbeat of the film. Gavron said that she had wanted to show the unsung working class heroes who had campaigned for the right to vote as the attention has usually been on the aristocratic or middle- to upper-class women in previous films. These working class women’s rights pioneers had so much more to lose than their more affluent counterparts. They already struggled to earn enough money to scrape by, with hard times and the possibility of starvation or living on the streets a very real, very near possibility. So to take on an additional risk that pushed those possibilities even closer to fruition shows how much they cared for and understood the significance of what they were asking for. Women who were publicly known to support the cause and be involved in the public demonstrations were shunned by society and even lost their jobs. The jobs that just about kept a leaky roof over their head and a stale crust of bread in the kitchen.

Maud (Carey Mulligan) experiences these eventualities but does not admit defeat. Her husband (Ben Whishaw) seemingly caring at first, has no sympathy or understanding of why women need the vote and turns out to be very impressionable to other people’s opinions. As such, he is the one who really breaks Maud’s heart. The relationships between men and women are not as often featured in the film as the relationships between women for obvious reasons, but when they are shown they are presented as relationships of heavy disparity between their positions in society both legally and physically. This highlights the real reason behind women's desire for the right to vote. It didn't just give them the right to expression and a right to have a say in electing political leaders, it meant that it would have been legally recognised that women had a different opinion and a voice entirely different to the men surrounding them. As such, it would also have meant that they were entirely separate beings from the men that they lived with and who controlled their lives. It was only in 1870 that the Married Women's Property Act ended the previously existing condition that on marriage any property, money, or more widely anything owned by a woman, earned or inherited, before or after the marriage became the husband's to dispose of, sell, keep as he saw fit. This included children; the father could do with them as he saw fit including preventing any access to the children from the mother.

Women's rights were slowly increasing through the nineteenth-century due to campaigners like Caroline Norton  and Josephine Butler  and so by 1912 the fact that women still did not have the vote despite over a hundred years of attention being brought to the fact that women were equal in every way really rankled. The Suffragists had been the first party to form and start raising public awareness to the issue but they used just their voices and their pens, dissatisfaction at the pace that this seemingly 'got things done' led to the break off movement of the Suffragettes. They were a more militant group who felt that enough talking had been done and that it was time to take action. They argued that because men were the ones who had been stereotypically seen as the gender capable of violence, that men would only respond to violent acts. They set about smashing windows, blowing up letter boxes and even bombing MPs homes. These are all documented in the film but what the film does not say is that these acts actually slowed down the process of passing the bill giving women the right to vote. For the men in power it was another reason to be used to argue that women were not capable of voting, they were too emotional, too hasty, too reckless, they needed men to control them. It was only in 1928 that women finally had the same voting rights as men despite the fact that in 1911 and 1912 there were many men in parliament who were actively supporting the women's movement. Interestingly Winston Churchill, Britain's hero, was not one of that number. He famously said

The women's suffrage movement is only the small edge of the wedge, if we allow women to vote it will mean the loss of social structure and the rise of every liberal cause under the sun. Women are well represented by fathers, brothers, and husbands.


This attitude is the one carried through the film (the quotation is even delivered at one point early on) and it is this belief that the women are trying to desperately overturn with their increasingly extreme actions.

The film features a truly star studded cast including Meryl Streep, Brendan Gleeson, Carey Mulligan, Helena Bonham Carter, Ben Whishaw and Romola Garai. It is superbly performed and poignantly written. It is. It's definitely the film to watch this autumn. It is also a must watch for everyone being categorically universal and extremely relevant due to many of the themes being as relevant today as they were in the 1910s. Such as:



1. Due to the gap in pay, women essentially work for free for 57 days a year  http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/equal-pay-day-women-now-working-for-free-for-the-rest-of-the-year-9837965.html
2. UKIP have been connected with proclaiming  wide range of anti-feminist messages. Here's a link to just a snapshot of some of their statements:  http://leftfootforward.org/2014/05/15-reasons-women-shouldnt-vote-for-ukip/
3. Malala Yousafzai is drawing attention to women's rights to the same level of education as men in Pakistan
4. In the UK, the Home Office has estimated that there are 170,000 girls and women who are survivors of the practice and that there are another 65,000 girls under the age of 13 still at risk
5. 77% of Britain's MPs are men - nuff said!
6. 80% of university professors are men (http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2015/07/15/gender-inequality-uk-women-feminism-young-foundation_n_7800388.html)
7. 80% of women are still doing more housework than their partners, invariably on top of working and childcare  (http://www.newstatesman.com/v-spot/2013/05/five-main-issues-facing-modern-feminism)
8. 89% of the accounts of domestic violence have female victims (http://www.newstatesman.com/v-spot/2013/05/five-main-issues-facing-modern-feminism)
9. Tim Hunt's outrageous comment regarding women in the lab (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-trending-33099289)
10. Women are more likely to be victims of trolling   (http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/apr/15/dealing-with-trolls-make-young-women-sympathetic-hillary)