Her acute awareness of the inequalities that women faced in the workplace, including low pay, little control over their working conditions and sexual harassment by bullying male bosses, brings her into the struggle for the parliamentary vote.
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Actresses Meryl Streep, Carey Mulligan, Anne-Marie Duff, and Romola Garai recently wore shirts with the Pankhurst quote “I’d rather be a rebel than a slave” for Time Out London.
The focus of the film is on the years 1912-13 when, after years of mainly civil disobedience, the suffragettes turned to more militant tactics, such as mass smashing of shop windows in London’s West End, vandalising pillar boxes, cutting telephone wires and setting fire to empty buildings.
The issue was thrust to the fore when a dozen demonstrators stormed the London unveiling on Wednesday and sprawled on the red carpet to express their anger over a U.K government plan to cut funding for domestic violence services.
The pic, which opens in North America on October 23, is the story of the foot soldiers of the early feminist movement as they fought for the right to vote.
One of its stars, three-time Oscar victor Meryl Streep told the London press conference today: “For me, it is recent history”. Where was Sophie Duleep Singh and her Indian sisters, who led the Black Friday deputation to the Houses of Parliament in 1910?
There are real women’s stories here that intersect too briefly and deserve their own films, but Suffragette is an inspiring introduction to a part of our history that’s been disgracefully ignored.
But the phrase didn’t sit well with many people, who said it was racially insensitive, and Time Out later released a statement defending their project.
Helena Bonham Carter also applauded the protesters, saying: “I think it’s marvellous”.
Basically, she was the Patricia Arquette of the United Kingdom women’s suffrage movement, positioning white women as “the n-gers of the world” long before John Lennon and Yoko Ono penned the lyrics.
Suffragette writer Abi Morgan said the protesters who gatecrashed her film’s premiere had the “spirit” of Emmeline Pankhurst, as she revealed she used declassified records of police interrogations of the original campaigners to create her characters. Morgan addressed the controversy by saying: “It would be a pity if the negative connotations of that conversation – and it is an important conversation – overshadowed the true and honest intentions of the film, which is to empower all women, globally, to look for equality for all women”.
Carey Mulligan, Meryl Streep and Helena Bonham Carter will be surrounded by the stars on the red carpet late for the gala broadcast of period drama Suffragette. This fight has concerned half the human race and won’t officially end until that first Saudi woman casts her ballot a couple of months from now. I know that after my crash education on that, there was really no turning back to the level of enthusiasm I’d once shown for “Suffragette”.
Maud’s husband Sonny (Ben Whishaw) is aghast that his wife becomes a militant suffragette and takes to breaking windows as she adopts the WSPU motto of “Deeds, not words”. Sometimes they like the same thing but sometimes their tastes diverge.
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She said: “Hopefully this film will inspire everyone in the way they view the world”.
