SUFFRAGETTE FEATURES EVENTS IN LONDON DURING 1912
In 1792, Mary Wollstonecraft’s book A Vindication of the Rights of Women launched a movement. Suffragette, directed by Sarah Gavron, takes place in London during 1912, when the movement’s leader Emmeline Pankhurst (played by Meryl Streep) urges suffragettes to engage in civil disobedience, though titles indicate that the episodes during that year were only a part of a larger struggle. The focus is on a Maud Watts (played by Carey Mulligan), who works in a bedsheet washing-drying-delivery company alongside some suffragettes. Watts is tapped by a colleague to testify in front of Prime Minister David Lloyd George (Adrian Schiller), whom she tells that she has not really thought much about exercising the franchise. Much of the film hangs on her transformation from someone frightened as suffragettes break windows in an upscale Oxford Street store into a hardened protester. Filmviewers behold the use of dynamite, mass arrests and brutality of women protesters, fasting and forced feeding in prison, and the martyrdom of Natalie Davison (Emily Wilding Press), who throws her body at the king’s horse at the Epson Derby and dies four days later, resulting in a mass funeral. But women in England had to wait until 1918 to gain some limited suffrage and were finally granted equal voting rights in 1928. Titles at the end inform that thousands of women were arrested and then lists the various countries that gave women the right to vote, with special emphasis on Islamic countries, but oddly excludes Hawaiʽi, perhaps because their rights were granted in 1840 but rescinded in the kingdom’s second constitution of 1852. The Political Film Society has nominated Suffragette as best film on human rights of 2015. MH