A privilege and a right not to be forgotten
Iron Jawed Angels starring Hilary Swank, Frances O’Connor and
Anjelica Huston
In my family it’s a sin not to vote. When I turned 18, I picked
up a voter registration card at the library and mailed it off. The
first time I voted was the 1996 presidential election, and though
it might seem a mundane thing for many, I felt power in pressing
out the chads and dropping my ballot into the box.
A privilege and a right not to be forgotten
Iron Jawed Angels starring Hilary Swank, Frances O’Connor and Anjelica Huston
In my family it’s a sin not to vote. When I turned 18, I picked up a voter registration card at the library and mailed it off. The first time I voted was the 1996 presidential election, and though it might seem a mundane thing for many, I felt power in pressing out the chads and dropping my ballot into the box.
That feeling just became stronger after I studied the history South Africa in graduate school before going there for a summer internship. I read and watched the news from Los Angeles in 2005 when the country celebrated 10 years of democracy. The freedom to vote was something that was still new to the majority of the residents who under apartheid were oppressed by the government. People stood in line for as long as five hours to cast a vote for their representatives. Even though change had been slow since the end of apartheid, and the country is still ravaged by poverty and HIV/AIDS, there was a sense of hopefulness around the election that better times were to come.
Iron Jawed Angels
It’s a feeling that often feels lost here in the United States were some residents have never known a world where they did not have the right to vote. But women voters have had the privilege for less than a century. “Iron Jawed Angels,” an HBO film, follows the fight for the right to vote among women in the years leading up to the passage of the 19th amendment.
Released in 2004, the story follows the work of Alice Paul (Hilary Swank) and her close friends starting in the mid-1910s. Women had been working since the civil war for the right to vote, and the members of the National American Women Suffrage Association took on the agenda of winning women the right to vote state by state. Many western states were the first to enfranchise women, but Eastern and Southern governments were holdouts against a national amendment.
In 1913, Paul and her close friend Lucy Burns (Frances O’Connor), started the Congressional Union for Women Suffrage to directly lobby congress. The move ousted them from the NAWSA when Carrie Chapman Catt, the president of the association, turned against them. They eventually created the National Woman’s Party.
The topic of women fighting for the right to vote might sound dry, but filmmakers Katja von Garnier, who directed, and writers Jennifer Friedes and Sally Robinson, made it just edgy enough to keep viewer interest up even for those who are not feminists or history buffs. The actresses chosen to play the suffragists of the NWP are mostly young, sexy starlets. They speak their mind and they speak in sexual innuendos.
The period piece mixes in modern music that is suitable to each scene. During a parade scene, in which the women march for support, before the crowd turns on them the Lauryn Hill song “Everything is everything” plays. The lyrics are especially suiting since the song talks about change coming eventually.
In addition the writers created a romance between Paul and editorial cartoonist Ben Weisman (Patrick Dempsey) who happens to be employed at the “Washington Post.” I don’t know if the relationship really existed or not, but it added an element of tension to the movie as Paul disregards his advances while using his newspaper connection to further her cause.
The pace of the movie is good, which can sometimes be a challenge for movies about a historical event, because the writers and director try to incorporate as much of what happened as they can. The escalation of the action comes when Paul and the women decide to stand at the White House in protest of President Woodrow Wilson who had continued to deny the right to vote. They stood with banners that quoted the President on issues of democracy and liberty.
von Garnier does a good job balancing what needs to be in the story and keeping the pace, something that can be difficult when writing about well-documented events. I might think the scenes were exaggerated except I was able to read the historical newspaper articles from 1917-1919 from the “Washington Post” and “The New York Times.” Paul and the fellow women arrested staged a hunger strike in jail. The wardens and officers force fed them raw eggs through a feeding tube. When news of their treatment got into the papers, the women were released. Wilson presented a wartime measure in support of women’s right to vote.
In 1920, the 19th Amendment was ratified and the rest is history.
