Suffragette

I took my grandmother to see Suffragette at the cinema today. I was unsure of how this would go as she is able to be simultaneously tremendously strong and independent for a woman of her generation, while chronically traditional. At times she exhibits the heartbreaking internalized misogyny that was so prevalent in the culture in which she grew up. However, I needn’t have worried; she was completely enchanted by the film and made sure the whole cinema could hear her loudly declare how brave the suffragettes were at least every ten minutes.

I approached the film with trepidation myself as despite the rave reviews Suffragette was receiving critically I had read bits and pieces online that displayed more than a little disdain for its depiction of events. People online seem determined to knock it and critique its feminism and because of this I was half expecting it to miss the mark. Having now watched the film myself I send an exaggerated eye roll at the wannabe critics.

Suffragette is a powerful and unique portrayal of a war that was entirely women’s. Male wars, both literal and figurative, have enough cinematic depictions to warrant a library all of their own, but women as warriors fighting for a cause of their own is virtually non-existent in any kind of visual medium. These women are not sexualized, they are not bit players propping up male leads, and at no point are they rescued by men.

The film opens with a scene of backbreaking manual labour. Women sweat, bleed, heave, and work machinery in a hot, hostile laundry/wash house. There are no stereotypical scenes of tittering and gossiping. These women are not made to stand around talking about men. These characters are strong, determined, staunch, and are being absolutely flogged. Those first images gave me goosebumps. A thrill of pride and anticipation was incited by the music and powerful imagery.

We meet our central character Maud and it is through her that we are shown the reality of a working class woman’s life in Britain at this time. She is slave to her work where she must work longer hours than the men while still earning less pay, she is bound by her husband’s will, and she is tasked with raising the next generation of men. She has endured child labour, sustained and repetitive sexual assault, and is viewed in society as worth nothing. As we follow her gradual empowerment through joining the women’s rights movement, we see her lose what little she had in the world and like any good hero, it is when she hits rock bottom that she gets back up with the most vengeance.

One of the most important parts of the film for me was the way men were depicted. The director and producers got the portrayal of men critically right, in my opinion. With the exception of the repugnant Mr Taylor who truly is the devil incarnate, the men of Suffragette are not painted as evil. They are ordinary men who love and are loved. They hold conflicting views and are questioning a lot about life themselves. However, they are nonetheless complicit in the oppression and inhumane treatment of women. They stand by while women remain second-class citizens subject to slavery and domination. They seem to hold the position that ‘this is just the way it is’, an excuse that has been used to justify a number of sins throughout humanity’s dark history. What’s more, they support the barbaric state response to the women’s protests. Women are beaten, thrown in jail, humiliated, force fed, and dehumanized, and men shrugged because they believed it was justified. It really brought to mind the saying that in order for evil to triumph all that need happen is for good men to do nothing.

Whether intended or not, the humanization of the men spoke to me of how we respond to much of the tragedy that surrounds our lives today. In keeping with women’s issues, if we examine the appalling rates of domestic and sexual violence committed against women we see a trend of painting the perpetrators as monsters and ‘not real men’. This serves to help men distance themselves from the problem and helps them justify not examining their own behaviour and culture. We must do what Suffragette has done and see men as humans who love and are loved, who watch sport or play video games, who have insecurities and hang ups, and who in alarming numbers inflict violence on women. We will not achieve change and a better world for women until we realize that violent men are not shadows on the edge of society, they can be our brothers, fathers, husbands, sons, and friends. And if we are one of the lucky ones who has not a single violent male in our life, then we best remember that just like the men who weren’t actively policing the women in Suffragette, by standing by and not challenging the dominant masculine culture they are complicit anyway.

Much of the critique I had read prior to seeing the film was centred on the idea of the film being about rich, white women who didn’t know real oppression. First I would like to address that although there are always varying degrees of oppression and persecution along sex and race lines, the oppression a wealthy woman faced in in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century was far, far greater than a wealthy woman would face today. These women were breathing dolls traded from father to husband and restricted to a life revolving around their appearance and their husband’s whim. Wealthy women did not have rights anymore than poor women did. Being a woman was simply a shite state of affairs. Secondly, I was surprised to find that the film revolved almost entirely around incredibly poor women who were treated as no better than slaves in conditions that saw them live incredibly short lives. Ill-informed commentary had me imagining that the film would follow Meryl Streep’s Emmeline Pankhurst when in reality Streep’s part was a glorified cameo. The imagined privilege that armchair activists have imposed on women who lived in unimaginably awful circumstances and whom we owe so much to simply does not exist. The widespread movement to discredit and undermine the value of Suffragette reeks, to me, of misogyny. It says that women should not be allowed to tell their own stories and that when they do tell them they will be shot down and painted as ‘less than’.

I almost cried a number of times while watching the film. I felt immense empathy for these women who had fought so that a hundred years later (at least on paper) women like me could live with the same rights as men. At the very end real footage of British suffragettes played and I felt genuine love and gratitude for the passionate women in the grainy images. I wondered if men felt this kind of pride and affinity when they watched one of their many war films. Perhaps that’s why those films are so popular. I only hope Suffragette is popular enough that studios and production companies might just see the value in making more women’s films. Just before the credits rolled, a list of countries and the date they gave women the right to vote silently slid up the screen. With a final bubble of pride in my chest I watched the first country lead the way: New Zealand 1893. Thank you, Kate Sheppard.