Some women these days seem lackadaisical about having equal rights with men, except when it comes to their paycheck. And yet it isn’t even 100 years since women were allowed to vote in our country. It is well less than a century since women were allowed out into the streets wearing trousers—and NOT wearing uncomfortable and medically harmful corsets. These days, women are successful doctors and lawyers, scientists and experts in fields of high technology. We dress as we please.
It has not always been so.
Two films—one showing now in theaters and the other just released to the home market—remind audiences that the plight for equality has been quite a struggle.
SUFFRAGETTE, starring Carey Mulligan, offers a strong dose of the pain and aggravation that went into obtaining the vote for women during the first decades of the 20th century. What is it about Mulligan that allows this baby-faced thirty-year-old actress to transcend the cuteness to which she was born and give such tense, dramatic performances? With her turned-up nose, that tiny flirtatious mole just below her lip, and her round and innocent eyes, one would think she couldn’t play more than youthful campus comedy or romantic melodrama. Wrong! In such films SUFFRAGETTE and FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD, which recently was released to the home market, Mulligan plays strong-minded women whose life ambitions are challenging, even bruising.
SUFFRAGETTE is a hardship to sit through. The slope of characters’ lives in the Abi Morgan screenplay goes from bad to unthinkable. The plot follows several early 20th century British working women who become foot soldiers to suffragist Emmeline Pankhurst (played by Meryl Streep). There is much violence in the real-life British history of women attaining the right to vote, and SUFFRAGETTE follows these working women as they blow up mail boxes with home-made bombs, break department store windows on Oxford Street, and then suffer the brutal consequences in prisons and with their families.
Mulligan’s character, Maud Watts, leaves viewers paralyzed as she experiences all sorts of loss. This character, and Mulligan’s stark performance, are at the heart of the film’s success, and the reasons I would recommend it to viewers.
Another film that calls attention to the inequality of men and women in England before and during World War I is TESTAMENT OF YOUTH, based on British writer and pacifist Vera Brittain’s powerful memoir. Swedish actress Alicia Vikander stars at Vera, an independent and often difficult young woman who must struggle with her father to try for a place at Oxford University, where her brother is studying. While young men enjoy independence in many avenues, young women are chaperoned, constantly watched over to maintain propriety. When the war begins, Vera feels that she must take a meaningful role.
Remembering the feminist outcries of the 1970s that movies were not offering full-blown roles to female actors, it is heartening to note that there are such recent films as SUFFRAGETTE, TESTAMENT OF YOUTH, and FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD.
Audrey Kupferberg is a film and video archivist and appraiser. She is the former Director of Film Studies at the University at Albany and has co-authored several entertainment biographies with her husband and creative partner, Rob Edelman.
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