The London police behaved in a most ungentlemanly manner to the ladies protesting for their right to vote. They were generous with their billy clubs and angry enough to push the protestors to the cobblestones and kick them when down. And yet, the suffragettes, as the women were called, persevered, continuing picketing and, frustrated by the unwillingness of politicians to yield, resorted to terrorism. Suffragette dramatizes their history through its fictional protagonist, Maud Watts (Carey Mulligan), a laundry woman drawn into a movement that struck the establishment of its day as dangerously radical.
A century ago it wasn’t self-evident to everyone that women deserved the same legal status as men. Voting rights was the flashpoint as nation after nation wrestled with whether to extend suffrage to their female citizens. Great Britain was neither the first nor the last nation to lower the gender barrier by granting women the vote.
Directed by Sarah Gavron (Brick Lane) and written by Abi Morgan (The Iron Lady), Suffragette displays the vulnerability and dependence of women in a society where they enjoyed fewer rights than men. The condition of the working class was bad regardless of gender, but women had the additional burden of silently enduring the advances of lecherous foremen and keeping house after their shift ended. Maud’s husband is kind and caring—until her arrest at a protest brings social opprobrium upon the family. The neighbors in their East End slum, women included, regard Maud’s conduct as shameful.
The suffragette movement was led by a charismatic figure, the real-life Emmeline Pankhurst, played in a fluty-voiced patrician key by Meryl Streep. Dodging a warrant for her arrest, she pops up occasionally like a guerilla performance artist. In and out of jail, activist Edith Ellyn (Helena Bonham Carter) displays the flinty glare of the fanatic as she mixes gunpowder in her husband’s pharmacy and blows up mailboxes and homes. The totalitarian willingness to follow the orders of Mrs. Pankhurst is disturbing, lending some credence to the enforcer of the existing order, a police inspector (Brendan Gleeson) who insists that Maud is nothing to her leaders but cannon fodder. The inspector steps toward the modern surveillance state by introducing portable cameras to his men. The suffragettes are being watched—but by all the wrong people. But with an awareness of the rising power of media and image, they are determined to bring their cause before the eyes of the world.
Mulligan deserves Oscar consideration for her sad-eyed portrayal of persistence against forces that truly believe legal equality for women is unnatural and antisocial.
Suffragette
3 and a half stars out of four
Carey Mulligan
Helena Bonham Carter
Directed by Sarah Gavron
Rated PG-13
