Tag: Suffrage

‘Suffragette’: The More Things Change the More They Stay the Same

In fact, it made me even more upset at the fact that one hundred years later, we may have the vote but women are still facing inequality, sexual harassment, unequal pay, and poor conditions in the workplace. … I wasn’t expecting to be as taken aback by just how little has changed since the period ‘Suffragette’ is set. …It made me realize we need [feminism] more than ever.

Suffragette movie

This guest post is written by Scarlett Harris. | Spoilers ahead.

I went to see Suffragette at the culmination of a day spent feeling utterly depressed at the state of women in the workplace and the world at large. As you can imagine, Suffragette did nothing to assuage my feelings. In fact, it made me even more upset at the fact that one hundred years later, we may have the vote but women are still facing inequality, sexual harassment, unequal pay, and poor conditions in the workplace.

The day in question saw my Twitter timeline full of defenses of cricketer Chris Gayle, who hit on a female reporter as she was trying to interview him after a game; Jamie Briggs, the minister for cities and built environments, who sexually harassed a young female staffer on an international trip; Peter Dutton, the minister for immigration and border protection, who called reporter Samantha Maiden, who stood up for the staffer in question, a “mad fucking witch” in a text message clearly not meant for her but somehow sent to her anyway (and this is the guy in charge of Australia’s borders!); and the two men who murdered their families as “good guys” suffering from mental health problems (an important issue in its own right but not at the expense of the safety of women and children).

So, heading into Suffragette I shrunk into myself as a form of protection from all the microaggressions I’d faced that day but I raged internally at the depictions of workplace inequality, sexual harassment and assault and the general placement of women as second-class citizens and, behold, this piece was born.

Suffragette movie

Workplace Rights.
In the laundry that protagonist Maud (Carey Mulligan), her husband Sonny (Ben Whishaw) and friend and fellow suffragette Violet (Anne-Marie Duff) work, women toil away over steam and hot fumes. Maud herself was born at the laundry to a mother who was killed when a vat tipped on her only four years later. When Maud gets home, she washes her family’s own laundry and fixes her husband and son dinner. She endures sexual harassment and, it is implied, survived rape by the manager of the laundry, Mr. Taylor (Geoff Bell). All of this is viewed as inconvenient at best, a workplace hazard at worst.

After a day spent reading about the above-mentioned modern day examples of workplace harassment I couldn’t help but see the similarities. While the Gayle and Dutton incidents came to light because they happened in full view of the media, Briggs’ sexual harassment accusations are the exception to the rule: how many other countless examples of sexual harassment and assault have occurred but are swept under the carpet in an effort not to jeopardize positions or be looked on unfavorably by colleagues?

You Don’t Get a Cookie.
When Maud reveals these labor conditions (her standing up to her rapist happens later) in a votes for women hearing, the men on the board seem genuinely shocked. Prominent British politician and statesman David Lloyd George (Adrian Schiller) seems sympathetic to Maud’s plight however her testimony doesn’t convince him of her right to vote.

Maud’s husband, too, seems initially merely inconvenienced by her newfound interest in suffrage but, as the movie progresses, Maud’s feminism gets stronger and she spends more time in prison for demonstrating, he kicks her out of the house and adopts their son out to a rich family. He says he can’t be expected to work, run a household and look after their son — what Maud’s been doing this whole time — in a stark example of male privilege.

These are some of Suffragette’s more sympathetic male characters compared to anti-suffrage policeman Inspector Steed (Brendan Gleeson) and Mr. Taylor but, like men today who express astonishment when women reveal they’ve been harassed and assaulted and the belief that women do, in fact, deserve basic human rights, they don’t get a cookie for it.

Reproductive Rights.
As attacks on reproductive rights threaten to return to pre-Roe V. Wade levels, which is to say non-existent, in the U.S. and pap tests and STI blood tests will come at a price in Australia, they are mirrored in Suffragette. Abused spouse Violet steps down from the suffrage movement when she discovers she’s pregnant again, citing exhaustion at not being able to “take care of the [kids] I’ve got.” Maud is force fed in prison in a harrowingly triggering scene echoing rape, mandatory trans-vaginal ultrasounds for women seeking to terminate their pregnancies, forced sterilization and any manner of other violations against women’s bodies. She asks Steed, when he expresses disdain over her disobedience of the law, “Why should I obey a law I had no hand in making?”

Black Lives Matter.
Much has been made about Suffragette’s whitewashing and rightfully so. There were literally no women of color in the film, despite the real-life involvement of Indian suffragettes, for example. And, in perhaps the most offensive portion of the film that was parlayed into a tone-deaf marketing campaign, suffrage leader Emmeline Pankhurst (Meryl Streep in a two-minute cameo) says in her famous speech:

“We do not want to be law breakers; we want to be law makers. Be militant, each of you in your own way. Those of you who can break windows, break them. Those of you who can further attack the sacred idol of property, do so. We have been left with no alternative but to defy this government. If we must go to prison to obtain the vote let it be the windows of government not the bodies of women which shall be broken.”

First of all, slavery is not a choice. Secondly, the above-mentioned use of this 1913 speech for a Time Out cover featuring the all-white cast illustrates just how far white feminism has to go in the inclusion of women of color.

Three queer Black women formed the #BlackLivesMatter movement after the death of Trayvon Martin at the hands of police as “a response to the anti-Black racism that permeates our society.” Meanwhile, white ranchers are allowed to demonstrate “peacefully” — albeit armed — on seized government land (which let’s not forget was originally stolen from Indigenous peoples hundreds of years ago). Much like the attempts to bar people of color from demonstrating peacefully without militarized police forces (see above tweet) threatening them or mowing them down, Suffragette excludes women of color from its depiction of the suffrage movement by denying them a voice. But on the other hand, consider Pankhurst’s words above and some of the film’s early scenes in which demonstrators are attacked by policemen in the streets: Suffragette could also be viewed as an allegory for racist police brutality.

I’m Not a Feminist, But…
Upon Maud’s first arrest, she insists she’s “not a suffragette.” Where have we heard that before? Modern women’s baffling insistence that they, too, are not feminists seems to be in the news every other day. The online campaigns about why women don’t need feminism and celebrities being asked whether they are feminists have dominated the discussion in recent years reminded me of Maud’s colleagues at the laundry turning their backs on her when she’s outed for demonstrating and when she finally takes her revenge on her abuser. Internalized misogyny is as hard at work today as it was 100 years ago.

White women who do call themselves feminists, such as Emma Watson and Lena Dunham, are seldom met with much push-back, whereas Black women’s (those who do identify with a movement that has often ignored the contributions of feminists who are women of color and not with another movement such as “womanist”) feminism comes with a whole host of caveats. Despite Beyoncé’s spectacular embrace of feminism at the MTV Video Music Awards flanked by an emblazoned erection of the word, she’s still asked to qualify it. Black feminists such as Janet Mock, Roxane Gay and Amandla Stenberg are increasingly having their voices heard by the mainstream media while Kate Winslet refuses to talk about “vulgar” pay inequities in Hollywood and Patricia Arquette urges other marginalized groups to support women — and, let’s be clear here, she was talking about white women in the über privileged world of Hollywood. That’s not to say that Jennifer Lawrence, a fellow champion of closing the pay gap, doesn’t deserve to get paid as much as Bradley Cooper, but it partially ignores the struggles of women like Viola Davis and men like John Boyega to get paid as much as their white counterparts. And to intersect the two, all we have to do is look at this week’s Oscar nominations which resulted in no actors of color being recognized in the four main acting categories. Oscar noms = $$.

I wasn’t expecting to be as taken aback by just how little has changed since the period Suffragette is set. Sure, sexism and misogyny may not be as violent and blatant and we’re more likely to get up in arms when it is, but just because a few high profile women enjoy privileges far removed from what Maud and Violet in Suffragette and countless other women around the world face, doesn’t mean that we don’t need feminism. In fact, it made me realize we need it more than ever.

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Scarlett Harris is an Australian writer and blogger at The Scarlett Woman, where she muses about femin- and other -isms. You can follow her on Twitter here.

Rewritten History: Affecting in ‘Brooklyn’, Not So Much in ‘Suffragette’

I was surprised at how enjoyable and skillfully made ‘Brooklyn’ is: I cried when everyone else did and gasped when the rest of the audience did too, but in spite of its excellent art direction and affecting performances the film is mostly hokum. New York in the 1950s is a place where no one the main character hangs out with smokes (when all of the men and the majority of women were smokers). Most of the characters barely drink (just one glass at Christmas) and, except for a child’s brief outburst at a family dinner table, (“I should say that we don’t like Irish people”) none of its white, working-class, ethnic characters have any problem with any other ethnic group.

BrooklynCover

I’m never enamored of the cleaned-up, ambiguity-free nostalgia that movies, especially mainstream ones, serve to their audiences in the guise of “history” so I avoided John Crowley’s Brooklyn (written by Nick Hornby from the novel by Colm Tóibín) about an Irish immigrant, Eilis (Saoirse Ronan) in the US. The Irish have been romanticized in films as early as The Quiet Man (a new release when the film takes place) and romanticized among Irish Americans for as long as the Irish have been coming to the US. But when Brooklyn began raking in awards (especially for Ronan) I decided to see it.

I was surprised at how enjoyable and skillfully made Brooklyn is: I cried when everyone else did and gasped when the rest of the audience did too, but in spite of its excellent art direction and affecting performances the film is mostly hokum. New York in the 1950s is a place where no one the main character hangs out with smokes (when all of the men and the majority of women were smokers). Most of the characters barely drink (just one glass at Christmas) and, except for a child’s brief outburst at a family dinner table, (“I should say that we don’t like Irish people”) none of its white, working-class, ethnic characters have any problem with any other ethnic group. In the actual 1950s, my mother, just a few years younger than Eilis is in the film, lived in an Irish American neighborhood in Boston, much like the one the film shows in New York and wasn’t allowed to date Italian boys because, her father explained, “They beat their women.” We never find out what the main characters in Brooklyn think of Jewish people (since the church still taught then that the Jews killed Christ, that opinion probably wasn’t favorable) because none of them encounter any, even though plenty of Jewish people lived in Brooklyn in the 1950s. And Black people in this film are at the farthest periphery: two women in a crowd crossing a street and a Black couple is shown on the beach at Coney Island.

Eilis’s family in small-town Ireland is prosperous enough that her sister works as a bookkeeper and they live with their mother in a decent house, but Eilis immigrates anyway to a sales clerk job, arranged by a kindly priest (Jim Broadbent), at a department store in New York. In other words, she’s the kind of immigrant even the Republican party of today would like: white and “respectable.” She’s not the kind who comes to the country without papers, or has to learn English, scrub floors or work as a nanny and she doesn’t have an impoverished family in her home country to worry about. When being well-cared-for in her new home becomes too much for Eilis, her suddenly sympathetic boss (Jessica Paré) has the priest swoop into the store break room and tell Eilis he’s signed her up for bookkeeping classes at Brooklyn College. He tells her, “Homesickness is like most sicknesses. It will pass.”

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Priests in the US at the time took collection money from their parishioners and gave them very little in return so to have one dole out college tuition after arranging a sales clerk job seems far-fetched, and for the recipient of both favors to be a young “marriageable” woman the priest barely knows seems like something from a parallel universe. For women in the 1950s, especially those in the working class (even ambitious ones like Eilis) the endgame was marriage, not a career. “Real” men (especially working-class ones) didn’t let their wives work outside the home (unless the family was poor), but Eilis’s middle-class, Italian-American, plumber boyfriend (Emory Cohen, a standout in a very good cast) walks her home from her night classes and loves hearing about her studies. His parents and his brothers seem equally charmed instead of exchanging nervous glances and asking, “You’re not a career girl, are you?” The only way a daughter-in-law in that type of family in the 1950s could work would be in her husband’s business — and even then she probably wouldn’t be given a salary for the first decade or so.

What priests did then (and for decades afterward) was browbeat women for working when they had children at home: if they encouraged women to go to college, the goal was for the women to find husbands there and never work outside the home again. If their husbands then beat or neglected them, the priests told the women they must be at fault (this mindset was a secular one at the time too) and they must never, ever get divorced. At the boarding house where Eilis lives she talks about marriage with a woman whose husband has left her for “someone else.” We never have a clue, in all of Eilis’s longing for her old hometown that a woman in that same situation wouldn’t be able to get divorced in Ireland until the very last part of the 20th century, a detail that a woman screenwriter or director probably wouldn’t leave out.

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Sarah Gavron’s Suffragette (with a screenplay by Abi Morgan) is another film I put off watching, because even with its creaky plot device of seeing historical events through the eyes of a fictional “composite” character the film apparently still managed to leave women of color out of the fight for British women’s suffrage as well as omitting another integral element, the queerness of some of the most famous suffragettes.

Suffragette

The film isn’t as bad as I feared it might be (or perhaps it just looked good compared to the film I saw just before it: The Danish Girl) but its problems are not just because it’s about white, straight women. Carey Mulligan does what she can with the lead role, Maud, who works at the laundry and is radicalized by a coworker–and by witnessing police beating up “Votes for Women” protesters. The film could do a much better job of integrating present-day concerns with what happened to “radicals” then, with its scenes of not just police brutality and political groups using bombs and violence as a means to bring about change, but the treatment of political prisoners and the force-feeding of hunger-strikers.

We see Helena Bonham Carter in another old-fashioned role: the audience/main character’s guide to the movement but we don’t see what we do in Brooklyn’s portrait of the women in the boarding house: the sense of the group of women as a clique, a cornerstone of the women’s suffrage movement which needs to exist in any radical political movement. If a woman’s family and old friends think her ideals are anathema, she needs to find peers who share those ideals and who will be her new friends — and new family. Except for a few, not very compelling scenes, we don’t get the sense of Maud as part of a group that supports her, just that she’s an outcast from her old life. The film contains very little we haven’t seen before and what’s new in it is allowed onscreen only very briefly: like the idea that Maud, who has worked most of her life including her childhood, would find motherhood her first opportunity to engage in play.

The film instead becomes a guessing game of what horrible thing can happen to Maud next. Suffragette has the chance to contain more dramatic tension when a police captain asks her to be an informant in exchange for dropping charges (another situation with present day parallels). He tells his men, “We’ve identified weaknesses in their ranks. We’re hoping one of them will break.”

But instead of considering the offer or pretending to inform while acting as a double-agent, Maud just writes an impassioned letter to him about the righteousness of her cause. In the end, Maud is just as dull and unimaginative as the film is, which is a shame, because the real-life figures in this fight were never boring.

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Ren Jender is a queer writer-performer/producer putting a film together. Her writing, besides appearing every week on Bitch Flicks, has also been published in The Toast, RH Reality Check, xoJane and the Feminist Wire. You can follow her on Twitter @renjender

Women and Gender in Musicals Week: Accidental Feminism in ‘Mary Poppins’

Julie Andrews as Mary Poppins
“Practically perfect in every way,” declares Mary Poppins, the quirky, assertive and indomitable nanny played with effervescence by stage and screen legend Julie Andrews. For me, that quote could pretty much sum up not only our protagonist but the film itself. 
I’ve been watching Mary Poppins ever since I was about 8 years old. I was forever drawn to books and movies with strong, intelligent and outspoken female characters. And Mary Poppins is no exception. 
Mary Poppins is kind yet stern, possessing a cheerful disposition. Playing games and singing songs, Mary Poppins is the nanny of Jane and Michael’s dreams. She takes them on fantastical journeys into chalk pictures, dances on the roofs of London with chimney sweeps and holds tea parties on the ceiling. Singing about spoonfuls of sugar, she teaches the children how to infuse fun into chores and the value of a positive perspective. She provides the guidance, attention and nurturing they both crave from their parents, especially their father. 
Beyond a strong and charismatic female protagonist, one of the most memorable feminist scenes? Well of course I’m talking about Mrs. Winifred Banks (Glynis Johns) belting out the song “Sister Suffragette.” When I was young I didn’t realize until I heard this song — and heard that “Mrs. Pankhurst has been clapped in irons again” — that women had to fight for the right to vote.

Mrs. Winifred Banks (Glynis Johns)
“We’re clearly soldiers in petticoats, 
Dauntless crusaders for women’s votes! 
Though we adore men individually, 
We agree that as a group they’re rather stupid. 
Cast off the shackles of yesterday! 
Shoulder to shoulder into the fray! 
Our daughters’ daughters will adore us 
And they’ll sing in grateful chorus, 
“Well done, Sister Suffragette!” 

Interestingly, this bastion of film feminism occurred accidentally. Glynis Johns thought she was the one getting the role of Mary Poppins, not Julie Andrews. In order to assuage her potential furor over this fuck-up, Walt Disney told Johns that she had a phenomenal solo. To cover his ass, Disney called up songwriters Robert B. and Richard M. Sherman and said (while Johns was in earshot) that she couldn’t wait to hear the song. The Sherman Brothers quickly researched women’s movements in 1910 England, and wrote “Sister Suffragette” so Johns could hear the song after her lunch with Disney. 

But why did the Sherman Brothers alter the homemaker into a women’s rights activist? Supposedly they needed to concoct a reason Winifred would be away from her children that would make a nanny necessary. So they made her a suffragette, making the movie accidentally feminist. Regardless, it taught many children — me included! — the struggle women endured. 
Now, there are a lot of reasons to question Mary Poppins as a feminist film. 
Carried on the winds by her umbrella, Mary Poppins differs from other nannies portrayed in the film by her fun whimsicality. But her beauty also sets her apart. We see Mary Poppins gazing at her reflection, powdering her nose, and bearing comely rosy cheeks. She is immediately associated as “good” due to her attractiveness.
The film showcases Winifred’s strength to advocate for women’s rights, saying that women will no longer be subservient. Yet that’s precisely what she is with her husband. 
Mrs. Winifred Banks (Glynis Johns)

George Banks (David Tomlinson) fancies himself “a king astride his noble steed,” envisioning his house a patriarchal castle and calling it “the age of men.” He haughtily berates his wife’s choice of nannies, all of who have been “unqualified disasters,” to which she promptly agrees. So George decides to take matters into his own hands and hire a proper nanny. Winifred continually tries to voice her children’s concerns, pointing out that their attempts to help or that they need kindness and understanding. And George continuously puts her down. The personal is political. Yet Winifred doesn’t seem to comprehend that. 
“In six minutes of film time, Mrs. Banks is changed from a balls-out feminist — ‘No more the meek and mild subservients, we!’ — to a surrendered wife. ‘I’m sorry, dear,’ she says. ‘I’ll try to do better next time.’” 
And it’s true. All her feminist badassery seems to unravel the minute her husband strolls through the door. While Winifred remains assertive in her public life, fighting for “political equality and equal rights with men,” in her personal life she speaks her mind yet obediently acquiesces to her domineering and controlling husband’s every whim.
But Winifred steadfastly continues with her suffrage activism even though she knows “the cause infuriates Mr. Banks.” But if she really let him control her, she would abandon women’s rights altogether. Winifred doesn’t cast aside her convictions merely because her husband doesn’t approve of women’s rights. She continues to fight for suffrage.

Some have criticized and admonished her as a mother for neglecting her children in order to attend meetings and protests. I call bullshit. Yes, she’s flighty. But I say her advocacy bolsters her motherhood. She continues to advocate for women’s rights, trying to make the world a more equitable place for her daughter and son. 

While Winifred talks about Mary Poppins to her husband, and how she positively impacts the children’s lives, the two women never speak to one another. Really? They never talk to each other once?? Bechdel Test fail. Weird, especially considering how both Winifred, in hiring nannies and helping preserve the household trinkets during Admiral Boom’s cannon blasts, and Mary Poppins, as a caretaker to the children, occupy domestic spheres.

Julie Andrews as Mary Poppins
With George’s job in banking and Winifred’s suffrage protests, each gains happiness outside the home. But Mary Poppins whole purpose revolves around the home. She flits from household to household healing dysfunctional families. But what about her personal life? We never really know what makes her happy. While she admirably makes her own decisions always on her own terms, Mary Poppins’ maternal role is strictly to serve others.

Even in the end, when she’s about to leave with the changing wind, her talking umbrella complains that the children never even said goodbye. While she clearly cares for Jane and Michael and her parting is bittersweet, Mary Poppins seems content. She’s finished her job and now she can go. Is that the lesson here? That we should sacrifice our own desire and always serve others? That goals other than family and home are detrimental to personal growth and happiness? 

Walt Disney considered the song “Feed the Birds,” his favorite song, the cornerstone of the movie. Mary Poppins sings about the merits of charity and the generosity of love. It’s this song that helps nudge Mr. Banks changed perspective from emotionally detached and controlling to warm and loving. And charity is certainly a noble trait. But is this subtly reifying traditional gender roles? That men are brutish while women are gentle and nurturing?

Jane Banks, Mary Poppins, Michael Banks
In the beginning of the film, George revels in patriarchy. But Mary Poppins challenges his long-held beliefs with her frivolity and refusal to explain herself. By the end, George realizes the value and importance of spending leisurely time with his family. Sadly, it’s not suffrage or feminism that spur him to realize the folly of treating his family like servile subjects. It’s not even a woman — not Mary Poppins, not Jane his daughter or Winifred his wife — who ultimately causes George’s transformation. Bert’s discussion of toiling away at work (“grind, grind, grind at that grindstone”) while childhood and time slip away “like sand through a sieve” tips George’s metamorphosis. 
You could argue that Mary Poppins’ brand of feminism, her outspoken assertiveness, truly changes all their lives. But George still couldn’t trust a woman’s words. He needed a man to reinforce her advice. 
Many have complained about the “perceived anti-feminist ending,” that Winifred gives up fighting for women’s rights because she attaches one of her “Votes for Women” sashes as the kite’s tail. Author P.L. Travers notoriously despised the film, for its animated sequences and for making Mary Poppins character less strict. But she also supposedly hated its anti-feminist ending. 
The Banks Family

 But I never saw it this way.

In the beginning of the film, Winifred gives out various sashes to Ellen the maid, Mrs. Brill the cook and Katie Nana. So clearly she possessed extras. Why assume she was automatically giving up feminist activism? Since George abhorred suffrage, I saw Winifred’s public display of her sash as a union of the personal and the political. She was bringing feminism into her family rather than merely advocating for equality politically. She was no longer hiding her identity. Finally, Winifred let her feminist flag fly. Literally. 

Portraying a suffragette and an outspoken female protagonist, Mary Poppins possesses brilliant moments of feminist clarity. How many other musicals contain overtly feminist songs advocating gender equality and sisterly solidarity? While it simultaneously seems to reinforce the traditional gender roles it initially rails against, the movie forever reminds me of the need for women to speak their minds and fight for their rights, in politics and in the home. 
It may not be “practically perfect” after all. But it’s pretty damn close.

‘One Woman, One Vote’: A Documentary Review

Seneca Falls. Susan B. Anthony. Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Alice Paul. Lucy Burns. Iconic American names that we recognize from our last history course, but often without knowledge of the full extent of their courage and suffering. The suffrage movement is one filled with small victories, setbacks, and defeats, and with men and women of often clashing ideas and ideologies.

Women’s suffrage was a 72-year movement that finally attained nation-wide victory in 1920 with the ratification of the 19th constitutional amendment prohibiting sex discrimination at the polls. Up to this point, women met, organized, marched, fought amongst themselves, lobbied, and protested. They were threatened, ridiculed, attacked, beaten, tried, arrested, and placed in solitary confinement for their actions. In retaliation, they fought harder. They organized hunger strikes in prison. They surrounded the White House in protest, despite angry mobs of men who dragged them to the ground and tore not only their banners, but also clothing from their bodies.

One of the more shocking discoveries I had from watching One Woman, One Vote was that women were not united in the cause of suffrage. There were a number of women who believed that politics were corrupt, and that women would only participate in the corruption, and sully their clean, domestic image, by voting. There was even strong disagreement amongst the suffragettes; they divided and formed separate groups on different occasions, opposing each others’ strategies and tactics for earning the vote, and finally unified when ratification of the amendment seemed inevitable. There were many diverse opinions and motivations driving the movement and its opposition, including racism, temperance, religion, and cultural norms.

The documentary was made in 1995, but only the graphics seem dated (and, despite the fact that One Woman, One Vote is part of the PBS American Experience series, the film has no official website). Susan Sarandon narrates, and the film is full of varied voices, letters, film reels, photos, and cartoons. There are great clips of historic songs throughout, too, which are often funny, incisive, and scathing. I learned so much about a part of American and women’s history that is so often summarized into a single paragraph.

Here are a few highlights of the women who made the movement.

On November 5, 1872, Susan B. Anthony led a dozen women to the polls in Rochester, New York, and convinced the worker there to allow her and the others to vote—despite the fact that it was against the law. Four hours later, U.S. Marshals arrested and handcuffed Anthony. She was later convicted of a federal crime by an all-male jury–after being forbidden to testify on her own behalf (women were deemed incompetent to testify because of their sex). Before her sentencing, however, she was permitted a statement:

“In your ordered verdict of guilty, you have trampled underfoot every principle of our government: my natural rights, my civil rights, my political rights. I have been tried by law made by men, interpreted by men, administered by men, in favor of men, and against women. May it please, your honor, I shall never pay a dollar of your unjust penalty. Resistance to tyranny is obedience to God.”

African American women were quite unified in their support of suffrage. However, mainstream groups were seeking the support of Southern Democrats, who strongly opposed suffrage for black women, and thus largely left black women out of their cause. Mary Church Terrell was one of the few black women invited to speak at national conventions, and there she urged white suffragists not to forget black women:

“Not only are colored women handicapped on account of their sex, they are everywhere mocked on account of their race. We are asking that our sisters of the dominant race do all in their power to include in their resolutions the injustices to which colored people are victims.”

Despite the efforts of Terrell and other African American leaders, they never enjoyed mainstream acceptance from the suffrage movement. Regardless, they organized and grew their supporters to half a million members, including active support from men.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who first called for women’s rights at Seneca Falls (the right to vote was her most radical demand; the group met to call for property rights, divorce rights, and a woman’s right to her children), told her friend Susan B. Anthony that as she grew older, she grew more radical. Their relationship is widely considered one of the greatest relationships of the 19th century, and Stanton’s radicalism seems to be one of the few areas of disagreement–though it did not end their friendship. When Stanton was in her 70s, frustrated by women who still refused to join the suffrage movement, she denounced the church as responsible for the oppression of women.

“The Bible teaches that woman brought sin and death into the world. I don’t believe that any man ever talked with God. The Bible was written by man, out of his love of domination.”

She rewrote every section of the Bible that degraded women, and published The Woman’s Bible, which was translated into six languages. The Woman’s Suffrage Association denounced the work, and rebuked Stanton. After her death, Stanton’s daughter, Harriet Blatch, led the movement.

Alice Paul earned numerous academic degrees in her lifetime, and also served numerous prison sentences for acts of civil disobedience in her campaign for women’s suffrage. When she arrived in Washington in 1913, she was one of the few women in the United States who held a doctorate degree in political science. While in prison she led hunger strikes, and was tortured with forced-feedings:

“Dear Mama,
The forcible feeding was terrible. They tied me to a chair because I struggled. One wardress sat astride my knees, two others held my arms and hands while two doctors forced a tube five or six feet long through my nose, like driving a stake into the ground.”

Rather than defeat her, the experience only made Paul more determined to devote her life to the suffrage movement. Among her many accomplishments were the organization of a parade that essentially upstaged the inauguration of newly-elected president Woodrow Wilson and caused a riot in the streets that brought out the U.S. Cavalry, and a “perpetual delegation” of women who picketed outside the White House, six days a week, in which women from all backgrounds stood silently with banners protesting the administration’s refusal to support a federal amendment to enfranchise women, and even outrageously mocking the president’s hypocrisy. Finally, police began to arrest the silent protesters, who were regularly being physically attacked, and charged them with obstructing traffic and imprisoned them–sometimes for months at a time.

The year was 1917. It took an additional three years for the 19th amendment to be passed and ratified by all of the states.

Remember the women who fought for women like us. We’ve only had the vote for 88 years. Exercise your right: Vote today.

Rent One Woman, One Vote from Netflix.
Purchase the DVD from PBS.