Peter Macdiarmid/Getty ImagesFeminism is everywhere in today's culture. In every interview, no matter the subject matter, actresses are asked about the big F-word. You made a rom-com about two dogs falling in love? Great, but are you a feminist?
It's become so ubiquitous that people like me, self-described progressives or forward-thinkers or whatever semi-pretentious adjective you'd like to slip in there, are almost past thinking about it. I just assume that I'm well-educated on the subject and that any previous debate or contention on the matter is now just a given. But then something happens that makes all of us realize how wrong we are—for me, that was seeing Suffragette.
I've always considered myself to be pretty educated and able to speak at least quasi-intelligently about world issues. But when it came time for me to see the drama, out in limited release on Friday, I realized I know nothing about the suffrage movement. It was shocking, really, to think that I can recall all sorts of facts and figures from history classes of years past, but I wouldn't even be able to tell you a brief timeline of the fight for the woman's right to vote. My knowledge was, embarrassingly, limited to those few scenes in Mary Poppins—I could practically sing Mrs. Banks' "Sister Suffragettes" song on command, but couldn't tell you a damn what it was actually about.
But it turns out that isn't caused (completely) by some deep ignorance on the part of myself or my grade school. I talked to friends, family and coworkers, and they all relayed the same sentiment: They were the women with the sashes, right? And even those behind the movie itself experienced the same knowledge gap—director Sarah Gavron has written that the lack of curriculum on the subject influenced her interest in getting the movie made, and told the Telegraph, "There was so much I didn't know [about the Suffragettes], and it's not just me. It's just not part of general knowledge."
One of the aims of the flick was to bring the history to the public at large, and for me it did just that. The story centers on a particular group of working class women in East London in 1912 and 1913, who are fighting to gain the right to vote. It picks up towards the tail end of the movement, when things have become dire. Women had been fighting for more representation in Parliament for some 50 years, but the Women's Social and Political Union, founded by Emmeline Pankhurst (played briefly yet powerfully by Meryl Streep), took things to the next level with the slogan "Deeds Not Words" and the directive to stop asking and start demanding.
Carey Mulligan plays a laundry worker who is driven to join the movement by both the enthusiastic urgings of one of her coworkers and her continued frustration over being treated, frankly, like crap by the men in her life. Although Mulligan's Maud Watts is a fictional character, she is based off on testimonials from real women of that era, and the movie's plot either rips straight from the headlines or gets darn close. The whole thing might have a happy ending (we did win the right to vote, after all), but the tone of the movie is grim and bleak. These women are marginalized, abused, disrespected, and experience just about every negative treatment one can get while fighting for a cause.
If you're one of the few people who is well-versed on the minute details of the suffrage movement (well done, first of all), scenes like that of police officers beating women during a peaceful protest outside of Parliament or prison workers force-feeding women on hunger strike with nothing more than milk and a tube through the nose may come as slightly less shocking. But for me, each minute of Suffragette was a brutal reminder at how painfully uninformed I was.
The list of things that I didn't know before I watched the movie is practically endless, but a few holes in the standard curriculum of the late '90s stood out. First, it seems that the mere mention of Pankhurst, the aforementioned founder of the movement (and, more specifically, the WSPU), draws blank stares from most young women. We weren't taught about her the way we were about other historical trailblazers (who were, cough, men).
We were also given a sugarcoated version of events: Women put on their sashes, held parades and sang songs, and then went home to their chic London town homes and slid down their fancy banisters with joy. There was no mention of how organized the movement was or how many years they labored with talks and rallies before turning to mild violence (blowing up mailboxes and cutting phone lines). There was no mention of the suffragettes' constant imprisonment (and mistreatment thereof) or the fact that British police established the first forms of surveillance to follow these women around. And there was certainly no mention of the other legal inequalities women were subjected to—like not being able to receive custody of their own children if they weren't married.
And perhaps most shocking of all is that the film's dramatic climax plays out like a surprise ending, despite the fact that the scene in question was the pivotal moment in the fight for the right to vote. As [spoiler alert, I suppose] Emily Davison throws herself in front of King George V's horse as a form of protest, there were audible gasps of shock and surprise from the audience. The woman literally got herself trampled to death so that we could vote, and none of us knew her story. How's that for a guilt trip?
While the movie certainly served as a lesson in an issue that's just as relevant today as it was 100 years ago (and as a reminder that schools need to step up their curriculum game big-time), what Suffragette really taught me was that I need a different outlook on feminism. As a progressive person raised in a progressive neighborhood and living in a progressive city, I've taken for granted the fact that feminism was a given in my life. I've never really thought about what factors into the choice to work for (or even believe in) women's equality or, more importantly, what factored into all the developments of the past.
I've never considered the history that I share with all other women or realized how years of institutionalized marginalization, however "outdated" we think they might be, affect my current life and relationships. I've taken for granted the fact that I've never felt like I didn't get something just because of my gender, when that was an issue that so affected my own mother and grandmother. It makes for a whole lot of weighty self-reflection that goes way beyond the fact that this is, at the end of the day, a movie. But I think that's the entire point.
Suffragette hits theaters in limited release Friday, October 23.