Angela Down at center as Sylvia Pankhurst (Episode 6 of 1974 BBC Shoulder to Shoulder)
Anne-Marie Duff, Carey Mulligan, Helena Bonham Carter as Violet Miller, Maud Watts, Edith Ellyn (2015 BFI Suffragette)
Dear friends and readers,
You have two tremendous treats to avail yourself of this November where we are enjoying a spate of significant politic films. It’s another one of these re-creations of an excellent, original and effective mini-series of the 1970s 40 plus years on (e.g., Upstairs and Downstairs, Poldark). It’s also another riveting new woman’s film, the kind scripted, directed on some woman’s issue (e.g., Bletchley Circle to The Crimson Field, scripted Sarah Phelps).
On-line at YouTube you can watch six 75 minute episodes of Shoulder to Shoulder, (without commercials), and hear the theme song Ethel Smyth’s grand March of the Women:
Episode 1: Emmeline Pankhurst (Sian Phillips); Episode 2: Annie Kenney (Georgia Brown); Episode 3: Lady Constance Lytton (Judy Parfitt); Episode 4: Christabel Pankhurst (Patricia Quinn); Episode 5: Outrage! (it ends on Emily Davison’s suicide by throwing herself under a group of race-horses, Sheila Ballantine as Davison and Bob Hoskins as Jack Dunn); Episode 6: Sylvia Pankhurst (Angela Down).
And in cinemas, there’s Suffragette, screenplay Abi Morgan (who wrote Truth), directed by Sarah Gavron with a cameo peformance as Mrs Pankhurst by Meryl Streep. It also has the theme song, but it only comes in towards the film’s close (as uplift).
I have no reviews of Shoulder to Shoulder to offer; I knew of it by word-of-mouth from other women, especially anyone who has written or read about the suffragettes. I suspect it’s not available as a DVD for the same reason as the Bletchley Circle was cancelled after a second successful year.
Suffragette has been reviewed, not altogether favorably (see Variety). Perhaps since it is a woman’s film, and also about the woman’s movement, the critics have been very hard on it (see the New Yorker especially). A. O. Scott of The New York Times Suffragette justice.
This one has an argument to make, or rather a series of arguments about the workings of patriarchal power, the complexities of political resistance and the economic implications of the right to vote. You might come for the feminism, stay for the class consciousness and arrive at the conclusion that they’re not so distinct after all.
Probably the re-booting (as in the case of the others this year) of Shoulder to Shoulder into Suffragette will please modern audiences more than Shoulder to Shoulder, with its 1970s staged dramaturgy, slower movement, longer scenes and speeches, less closely graphic violence (though Shoulder to Shoulder is as unbearable in its force-feedings and it has several not just one), and I hope people will be drawn to Suffragette. Both movies show how vulnerable and frail are individual revolutionaries and movements against the power of a gov’t with military and legal powers to control, punish, silence, and kill people. Still over-praising something (I believe) in the end is seen through by people and distrusted so upfront I’d like to say that good as Suffragette is, Shoulder to Shoulder is finally superior art.
*************************
Police breaking up the women’s demonstration and starting to beat them up
Suffragette‘s central problem is it’s too short and it has been influenced by the use of gimmick and juiced-up plots in mystery-spy thrillers common in mainstream films. So the focus in Suffragette comes from a little climax-ridden plot-design where we are supposed to care intensely if a police officer, Steed (Brendan Gleeson) turns our heroine into a mole on behalf of a gov’t bent on surveillance headed by the heartless monster, a fictionalized side-kick of Asquith (Samuel West) and his henchmen. Scenario familiar? Here is Steed trying to secude, frighten, & bribe our heroine:
We then enter into thriller-like story arcs where our heroines outwit the police in planting bombs, breaking windows, and finally managing to reach the newspapers when unexpectedly Emily Davison (Natalie Press, the daughter in Bletchley Circle) throws herself under the horses in a race course watched by the king.
Emily Davison contemplating what to do to reach the king, or attract attention (Maud is unaware of the lengths Emily is prepared to go to)
This is not to say that Suffragette doesn’t do ample justice deeply even (partly due to superb performances) to the human feelings among the women and in delineating the break-up of the marriage of Maud Watts (Carey Mulligan) — though it chickened out in showing us the scenes of harsh domestic violence clearly visited on Violet Miller (Anne-Marie Duff) off-stage. Since a punch-shock element was what the film partly relied on, this was a loss.
In fact though Suffragette also delivers a kind of history lesson. It may be said to be equally organized as moral paradigm. Maud is a factory worker doing hard labor ironing in a laundry for years, during much of it in her earliest molested by her employer continually as a condition of remaining employed.
Given an extra job to deliver a package at the end if the day, Maud rushes for a bus
Maud is therefore naturally attracted to a hope of some better life she intuits the women’s movement offers; when she agrees to go along to listen to Mrs Miller’s speech, she finds herself persuaded by one of the MP’s wives (Romola Garai) to read a prepared speech. Instead she ends up answering questions put to her by the prime minister, Asquith (Adrian Schiller). He asks her what does she think the vote can do for her. She can come up with nothing; she does not know how it could improve her life. The film’s story then proceeds to teach Maud and us why the vote influences women’s lives. Why votes matter.
Maud is slowly radicalized for the same reasons the women in Shoulder to Shoulder are (see just below), and becomes a suffragette. She demonstrates and is beaten and punished. At this her husband, Sonny (Ben Whislaw) becomes humiliated, shamed, and his manhood so threatened, that he throws her out of their apartment. He has the undoubted right by custom. He clearly also despised her when he married her because he knew she had been molested for years and so he regarded himself as “saving her,” putting her on the “right path.” His attitudes are all screwed up by his society’s norms. They lead him to destroy her and the marriage. Worse, he has the legal right to refuse her any access to her child and the right to give the boy up for adoption, which he proceeds to do when he finds he cannot care for the child himself.
Had women had the vote, laws would not give him such a complete right over her and his child. Could she get the vote now, she could vote against such laws and customs. At the film’s close a series of intertitles tell us that five years after a portion of women were given the vote, the custody laws were changed and women had a right to keep their children. Sonny could no longer punish her, himself and their child like this.
Edith Ellyn (Helena Bonham Carter) works as a doctor, and apothecary in her husband’s druggist shop: we learn she was not allowed to go on to professional school as women were not allowed; the story at the close implies that with the vote, such schools would have to open their doors to women.
Mrs Miller has nowhere to turn from an abusive husband; she will if she can change parliament. There is no help against the employer-molester; there are not enough jobs and those available to women are mostly dreadful hard work. We see a motif in other women’s films, like Water where an older woman saves a young widow who is being coerced into prostitution: Maud rescues a girl from sex harassment and degradation: she knows Mrs Miller’s daughter is submitting to sexual aggression by the boss, so daring arrest, she shows up at the laundry, takes the girl to the house of the MP wife (Garai) and the wife hires her. She is now protected insofar as the system allows: based on a decent kind individual. The movie-viewer can think to her or himself the equivalent of what legislation can provide today: women’s shelters from domestic violence and abuse.
These stories of the fictionalized characters are said to be partly based on real women, but they are enunciated in such a way as to show the viewer why the vote matters.
The only historical women we see are (briefly) Emily Davison and Meryl Streep as Mrs Pankhurst, posed to recall Sian Phillips in the same role:
****************************
There are no explicit paradigms or lessons taught in Shoulder to Shoulder, the cast for Shoulder to Shoulder are not working class women (the “foot soldiers” of the movement, as the policeman tells Maud who her “masters” will dump when they don’t need them, after their lives have been ruined), but the elite types who ran the movement. Except — and it’s a big except — the lesson in the grinding nature of the experience of proselytizing, punishment, political in-fighting and finally prison which we are given a full brunt of, and our heroines (except Mrs Pankhurst the highest ranking) are force-feed repeatedly, humiliated by the clothing they must wear, put into solitary confinement.
Christabel starting out (her first speech)
In comparison to Suffragette our heroines’ sufferings are intangible. Respectability, loss of society (but they don’t want that), companionships, acceptance of a much harder life where they do strain to support themselves by teaching, working in shops (or owning them). As in the other 1970s mini-series, our central characters are drawn from the elite, while in 2015 they are drawn from working people. So it takes a little imagination to enter into what is presented.
OTOH, just about all the characters in Shoulder to Shoulder represent real historical people, much of what is presented is accurate (if much must be left out).
The real Annie Kenney
Georgia Brown exuberant as Annie
There is therefore much less false melodrama, and because of its length, we get a long arc of the whole movement from the later 1890s to when Mrs Pankhurst and Christabel supported WW1, and the aftermath of that war.
The most moving episode in Shoulder to Shoulder focuses on the real Constance Lytton (described in my previous blog this week, Victorian into Edwardian, scroll down) who takes on a working class persona and the treatment meted out to working women in prison is inflicted on Lytton.
A photo of Lytton dressed as Jane Warton: remarkably Judy Parfitt comes close to looking just like this
This is the only still I could find on the Net of Parfitt — she is to the left, feeling utterly wretched after having been beaten and force-fed and is now forced to wait for a judicial hearing
The focus in Shoulder to Shoulder is on the human relationships among the characters, and the drama comes out of ideological, political, psychological clashes, its power on how the characters are transformed, variously destroyed, shattered, turned into ruthless political machines who show no gratitude towards those who helped them, especially in the case of Christabel Pankhurst
Christabel fiercely waving her flag
towards the Pethick-Lawrences, a couple who gave up their fortune, respectability, good and moderately useful lives to the movement only to be thrown away, and towards her sister, Sylvia who persisted in wanting equally to fight for social justice for all people, including working class men, immigrants, issues like civil liberty.
Sylvia setting up a shop in a working class neighborhood
Both movies make the point strongly that the prison experience is the second reality the women’s movement contended with that radicalized them, and I now realize this is a central theme of Lytton’s book. Lytton’s book is as much about prisons as it is about the suffragette movement. She makes the point that one way you can gauge your success as a political movement is if the establishment puts its leaders in jail.
The police have kept an eye on and take Maud away
Lytton’s book appears in both Shoulder to Shoulder and Suffragette as Dreams; the title today is Prisons and Prisoners (Broadview Press, edited by Jason Haslam). (I am now in the middle of Constance Lytton’s memoir of her life from the angle of her conversion to the womens’ movement and radicalization through her experience dressed as a working class woman, Jane Warton, in prisons.)
Lytton opens with showing the reader that the votes-for-women movement emerged as a possibly effective force when 1) the upper middle and middle class women enacting leading, and making connections for it realized after 3 decades they would never get the vote unless they severely disrupted the workings of everyday society; and 2)the women were radicalized into real empathy with working and lower class women by their experience of the harsh indifference, cruelty, even torture of the prison system with its principle mechanisms of violent punishment (including force-feeding which led to further pain in vomiting), humiliation, brutalization, and destruction of personalities through alienation. This is what Lytton shows the reader; as a person with a bad heart, she died not long after after her release from the treatment she had received.
Lytton may not appear as one of the characters in Suffragette but her words provide a voice-over as Maud Watts reads her book; and she is the central character of the crucially effective episode of the mini-series.
**************************
The group early on in Suffragette
The group towards the end of Shoulder to Shoulder
The sense of life as on-going, a cycle, so characteristic of women’s art ends both films, in this case politically appropriate. Lytton really emerges only in one episode (3), and Davison in another (5), and of the on-going characters my favorite was finally Sylvia, partly because I’ve loved other characters Angela Down played at the time (she was Jo March in a 1970 Little Women) A long talk with the inimitable Bob Hoskins (very young) precedes Sylvia’s final walk off onto the street with her latest ally, Flora Drummond (Sally Miles). When I get the book (I’ve bought it from a used bookstore site, I’ll blog again). We are made to feel we have gone through so much (6 times 75 minutes is a lot of experience time), and the photography of the two inside the crowd makes the point they are just two women inside a larger group.
In Suffragette after Emily has thrown herself under the horses, we see Maud, shaken, but walking off. She must live on; she has shown she will find her son and communicate with him; Edith’s husband locked her in the bathroom to prevent her from joining lest she be arrested again (she has a bad heart we are told); we see the police officer, Steed, his employers; Maud, Violet Miller and Edith get together again in the WSPC office.
The writers for the 1970s series are among the best of the era: Ken Taylor, Hugh Whittemore, Alan Plater, Douglas Livingstone (originally they wanted women scriptwriters but the era just didn’t have enough of these); its creators were Georgia Brown, Verity Lambert, Midge Mackenzie, directors Waris Hussein and Moira Armstrong. If their characters are too harmonious and well-bred to begin with, by the end they are strongly pressured, conflicted, angry. Suffragette has a woman script writer, Abi Morgan, woman director, Sarah Phelps, three women producers Alison Owen, Faye Ward.
The title Margaret Mitchell wanted to give her famous historical novel, Gone with the Wind, was Tomorrow is another day. It’s a saying that captures the underlying structural idea of many a woman’s art work
Ellen
P.S. There is an uncanny resemblance of the women planting bombs to today’s terrorists; of course our heroines try hard not to hurt anyone, much less kill them. Steed himself is appalled by the “barbarity” of the forced-feeding and refuses to carry on with this aspect of his work. The parallel is clearly there with today’s situations for whistleblowers too.
Max Vega-Ritter: “Le combat des suffragettes, des militantes américaines et britanniques, pour l’égalité des femmes et des hommes, nous remplit le coeur d’espoir. Merci Ellen de ton blog toujours lumineux.”
In reply to an off-blog comment: “The “votes for women” movement officially begins in the UK with John Stuart Mill sometime in the 1850 or ’60s trying to pass a bill to extend the franchise to women in England. In the US you can date it to 1848 in meeting of women at Seneca Falls, NY (that one included abolitionists);. So the struggle was long and hard and not just in the UK and US.
Someone commented off-blog: “I can’t think of any second version of a film that was better than the first. Can you?”
I replied: yes, many times I’ve seen another film adaptation of a book and it was better. You can get wedded to a previous version and emotionally want to stick with it, so sometimes it can take twice to see that No 2 is as good as or better than No 1. Where? I won’t ever publish it, but I have 5 chapters towards a book on Jane Austen films. In the case of P&P, 1995 is better than 1979; in the case of S&S, it’s hard for me to chose, but in general 1996 is better than 1983 (though I love it), and 2008 is as good as or better than 1996; both are great. I could go through all 6 books. Tom Jones: 1997 is infinitely better than 1966. The Dickens films: often the second is better than the first, but the first remains strong and different: that’s true for the 2 Bleak Houses. Jane Eyre films, so many are so good and different yet many faithful to that goddamn book. And it’s not just true of classic book adaptation; sometimes an original film is re-booted and better the second time. The truth is in some ways the recent Upstairs Downstairs is better than the 1970s but it was not given a chance: it needed more episodes a year and more years.
I didn’t say Suffragette wasn’t good and it had things Shoulder to Shoulder didn’t: the lessons, the violence towards women, the working class milieu. Arthurian films are a treasure trove of sometimes so much better in the different story matter.
Often Andrew Davies beats out the previous: his Dr Zhivago was much better than Leans (laughable in comparison in some ways). I prefered Davies’s 2007 Room with a View to the overpraised Merchant-Ivory of the 1980s. In both cases Davies was truer to the book, presented emotions more honestly and fully, showed the anguish and hurt for real.
Ellen
Diane Reynolds:
“Roger and I saw Suffragette yesterday, which meant a long trek for us. The indie movie house where we went in Pittsburgh was filled with women of “a certain age” and a few men of a certain age–the demographic was almost entirely people in their 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s, though this perhaps reflected going to a 5 o’clock show. But where were the young people in a neighborhood surrounded by universities?
I liked the movie very much. I thought Carey Mulligan, the lead named Maud, was very good–she played Ada Clare in the 2005 Bleak House and has an expressive, vulnerable face. I felt her real pain, as she has to sacrifice her young son to the cause–her husband throws her out and eventually gives the child up for adoption as he can’t care for it. Less realistically, as is so often the case in these movies, women working long hours in a laundry–and with children to care for!–have time and energy to throw themselves into a political movement! I think it would have been more realistic to show some of the terrible exhaustion they must have experienced–or would have if they were real people. It would make sense to show how hard it is on a practical physical level for working people to take on a second political action in this way, dragging themselves out, half dead with exhaustion. But that is a quibble.
The Strange Death of Liberal England, which argues that WWI saved England from the Russia-style revolution that was brewing in the early years of the 20th century, devotes a long section to the growing militancy of the suffragette movement in this period, so the window breaking and mailbox bombing rang true to me. I struggled with the amount of ritual humiliation women endure in the film–arguably the humiliation was necessary to depict the reality of their lives and what they were up against–and arguably today that is the same gauntlet women who want equality have to run up against–but the movie perhaps showed too much of it, as if it were needed to “justify” the women having the vote! Or as if it was the only way to domesticate and make acceptable the women’s militancy. At certain point, however, you get the point, and the rest becomes gratuitous. The movie could have chosen other and perhaps more interesting ways to convey what the women were up against, such as not earning enough to live decently (a point glossed over in the film–yes, Maud is poor, but it is a kind of pretty, romantic poverty, with rows of clean white laundry, floral wallpaper, and lace curtains as room dividers in crowded but tidy quarters). Shaw does a much better job of showing Eliza’s poverty at the start of Pygmalion, set in precisely this same time period and same London. The movie, also, as mentioned before, could have shown the working class women being exhausted, living in filth (something Orwell was so good at noticing), getting water from a pump or not have hot water in the flat, etc. These are as much a woman’s issue as humiliation. We learn that the women earn a third less than the men and work longer hours at the laundry, but we never see this translated into real images of want.
That I argue so much show only shows that the movie engaged me. It’s very worth seeing.”
In brief, I agree, but as art and for thought Shoulder to Shoulder was better. Suffragette relied on this gimmicky plot which ratcheted up the emotional atmosphere into climaxes, some of which were maudlin. Shoulder to Shoulder concentrated on the human relationships and the time it was given allowed it to show the woman suffragettes fighting fiercely over tactics and what these mean.
It’s also a good point that Suffragette almost seemed to justify women having the vote. That they clearly do not have it, are nowhere near getting it by the end of Shoulder to Shoulder, though WW1 is well over, makes the ending moving. We are made to feel they ought to without explicit arguments: just as being them, people, the characters we’ve gotten to know and some of them loved. One problem is the ruthlessness of Christabel is used against her so she stigmatized as the over-aggressive woman, yet the ambiguities are enrichening.
I don’t like seeing women beaten but I thought that the cutting out of scenes of domestic violence was a bad sign. Let us see what men did to women and how women could not escape this. Mrs Miller (Anne-Marie Duffy) does not leave her husband because she is pregnant, she stops attending rallies because she’s pregnant: I’m told there were cut scenes and maybe the husband was beating her for going to these suffragette rallies just as Sonny punishes Maud crucially for going.
https://ellenandjim.wordpress.com/2015/11/20/suffragette-shoulder-to-shoulder-re-booted-40-years-on/
In the auditorium I was in were all older people, mostly women, a few men sitting next to wives. The latter is the mark of the woman’s film.
Demoralizing too I thought were the complaints of two reviews: that there were no minority people represented. Yes both pictures are all white, but that substitutes ethnic (and let’s be frank) thus in effect tribal identifications. Both movies wanted us to see the economic structure hurting men as well as women. I have found ethnic quarrels to be stalking horses for erasing social-economic insight.
Ellen
Hi Ellen,
Having not seen Shoulder to Shoulder I can’t comment but I can readily imagine the longer and slower 1970s miniseries offering a more nuanced view.
British TV doesn’t have to — in the 1990s and since, they often don’t tell such stories in the first place; when they do, are more melodramatic, concentrate on individuals the way this cinematic movie did. Reith’s old criteria of “instruct, inform and educate” was scoffed at, but followed to some extent until the mid-1980s or so. I admit Shoulder to Shoulder would seem tame to many, especially the first two episodes. It “gets going” as things get tougher, as the women become violent, and with the story of Constance Lyttons torture (it’s made clear force-feeding is torture as the food does not stay down), crippling and death.
[…] including the remarkable 1979 The Long Good Friday (which maybe I’ll write a blog about), Shoulder to Shoulder into Suffragette. I’ve been glad of less teaching (at the same time very glad of reading and reading about Tom […]
Ellen, you say “You have two tremendous treats to avail yourself of this November,” but your treatment of “Suffragette” does not really present it as a treat, but a sort of sad runner-up. While it has its weaknesses, I thought it had a lot more to offer than that. Still, I appreciate knowing of the link to the earlier drama and will look it up.
Dear Diane, I’m not saying this is the way you took my blog but a lot of people who contacted me thought I disliked Suffragette. I pay it the high compliment of taking the time to critique its flaws. I say a great deal in its favor. I saw Brooklyn the other day and I will write no blog: the film-makers took Toibin’s serious book and made it a sentimental romance that reinforced mainstream notions of young love. The novel is about the pathologies of family life and how customs, laws, and economic need lead a girl to trump her deeper feelings for her roots (in Ireland) and a more congenial match (in Ireland) for this Booklyn romance which she ends up with; it shows how someone finding out about her life in Brooklyn could have ruined her chances in Brooklyn; how she lies too. The film-makers erased the hard nasty quality of the people so that the suicide of a sister is never explained. Indeed the friend I saw it with said it didn’t appear to be suicide. It was left ambiguous. I wouldn’t go to the trouble of finding stills and giving details. I think my point in the review is the modern way of making a popular film by turning it into juiced up climaxes in a sort of spy thriller subgenre ruins movies unless of course they are spy thrillers, and much experience in life is nothing like a spy thriller.
[…] thriller plot-design increasingly ubiquitous to the extent it forms the spine of the recent Suffragette, a third political film for this season. (A fourth is Bridge of Spies, which apparently boasts a […]
Hi Everyone,
I went this afternoon to see the new film Suffragette starring Carrie Mulligan, Meryl Streep, and Helena Bonham Carter about the movement for women to get the vote in Britain in 1912-1913.
I came away realizing how little I know about this movement and shocked by the police brutality the women endured. The end of the film pictures an event I knew nothing about and was completely shocked by. Meryl Streep places Mrs. Pankhurst and there is one other historical person depicted in the film, and the rest of the characters are fictional. The film was a little slow in places but it was very moving especially at the end. My image of this movement has been a whitewashed one of the mother in Mary Poppins singing about marching for women’s rights along with some other nostalgic and sentimental depictions in other films. What these women actually went through, as this film depicts, to get women the vote was sheer hell.
I definitely recommend it as worth seeing.
Tyler
Tyler, I’ve shared your ignorance. So many of us have had no way to learn about the viciousness with which the establishment crushed any efforts at social justice — in the women’s movement, the union movement, the civil rights movement, the struggle by native Americans, the gay rights movement, etc, etc. Bob
There are a lot of books about it and I did know something but not until I first watched Shoulder to Shoulder, the 1970s mini-series did I realize that the prison authorities force-fed women as a form of torture.
I know Lady Constance Lytton wrote her memoir, Prisons and Prisoners to demonstrate how when the authorities knew she was the daughter of an ex-viceroy of India, she was treated very well, but when she dressed up as a working class woman, they beat and forced her to work hard and when she wouldn’t eat, force-fed her. She had a weak heart and the summer after she was released literally died of the treatment.
Emily Davidson did throw herself under a horse to get the newspapers to start reporting about what was
happening.
Of course the daily restricted and imprisoning conditions of women’s lives we all know; that they had no recourse against sexual harassment on the job, that men had custody of their children; it was not long after they got the vote, custody laws were changed — Suffragette makes that point. The mini-series film-makers Shoulder to Shoulder released a huge book which is informative and touching (filled with photos and testimony).
An interesting conflict within the movement was that Emily Pankhurst and Christabel were pro-war and ceased their suffragette activities during the war and seriously weakened the movement because many suffragettes were against the war (some were socialists even). And to say women got the vote because of what they did in the war soon after is not so. It took a decade and much agitation after the war.
We’ve had three films this season teaching political lessons: there’s also Truth about how the news we get is utterly corrupted by the profit motive; Trumbo about how gov’t agencies and groups destroyed any pro-social democracy movement directly after World War Two. It makes one hopeful to see such movies made and people go to see them.
“Your observations are spot on – we are shown force-feeding by the women in prison, Davison’s suicide (although the film suggests it’s suicide but historians are in disagreement about her true intention) and Mrs. Pankhurst continually being in hiding, as well as the terrible conditions for working women, and how men control women’s property and can take their children from them. It was a moving film overall. The end of the film gave a list of when women received the vote in various countries, the last listed was Saudi Arabia being expected in 2015 – which I heard yesterday succeeded. Tyler.”
Both films brought home how the authorities at the time — parliament, the police under their control, prisons and wardens — were determined to destroy these woman if they could not silence or stop them.
Since the early Shoulder to Shoulder was (like many BBC films of the 1970s) still centered on the upper class, and was actually a historical film it did not show how badly working class women were treated directly. It’s a stretch to say Meryl Streep starred in Suffragette as you know: she makes a cameo appearance. Sian Philips in her role as Mrs Emily Pankhurst is a major character in 4 of the 6 75 minute episodes. Much of Shoulder to Shoulder is based on real historical events and the central characters all existed. Suffragette wanted us to see people we could directly identify with and unfortunately working women have rarely left diaries so the stories in Suffragette are composites and based on the kind of thing that happened to women — and children too, with some attention to working men. Bob Hoskins played the one working class man we see in Shoulder to Shoulder.
I’ve linked in all 6 YouTube Videos, which are complete and watchable. Another aspect of women’s movements is they are erased and it’s just in line with that that Shoulder to Shoulder has never been reprinted as a VHS cassette or DVD.
The Establishment used the Prison Service and the Police to strong arm the women. By grandmother was a rarity, a working class suffragette. After on meeting, on exiting the hall she was accosted by a policeman. Realising she wasn’t a ‘lady’ but merely a working woman, he spun her around and saying ‘get on home b…h, before I arrest you’ smacked her across the bottom with his long truncheon. She said not only did it hurt but it was the loss of dignity. She was only 4’11” and I’ve always been proud of her pluck. It seems that the English Establishment always reacts to any threat to the status quo in this vicious manner and has done so since the 18th century.
Clare
I wish you had been at my last Tom Jones class. After we watched clips from the two Tom Jones film, I was asked if men termed women as a matter of course “bitch:” Squire Western does his daughter as well as his female servants, and we see the soldiers call women bitches too. I couldn’t say yes for sure; they wanted to believe that men did not do that. They did – another sign of the low status of a woman as a woman too.
It was common for “figures of authority” to call the poor names, including the b word. However, they wouldn’t have dreamed of calling a conformist middle class woman so. In the case of the upperclass suffragettes the police seemingly were given carte blanche by the Establishment.
Tyler again: “It’s wonderful there was a Shoulder to Shoulder miniseries back in the 1970s that looks to have been far more detailed and in-depth. I may never get around to watching it but I’m glad it’s on YouTube at least.
I agree with you on the points you made in the blog about Suffragette. I would only add that I was surprised the film didn’t give us a happy ending where Maud eventually got her son back – that has bothered me — and it’s a good thing, because it shows just how real and terrible the situation was for women and that life doesn’t always have happy endings.
Tyler
[…] Movement, now Black Lives matter, anti-nuclear power activists for decades, to go back in time the Suffragettes in the early twentieth century and before that native people’s in colonized countries. So attention is focused on these […]
From Latchkey: A Journal of New Women Studies. I’ve mentioned this one before: it’s available publicly, all the essays. So it’s not an ad for a journal as too many of these are.
Here’s a thorough thoughtful review of Suffragettes which found it disappointing but praises it strongly too — for being there, as well as Carey Mulligan’s performance:
http://www.thelatchkey.org/Latchkey7/br/Bickle.htm
I am puzzled that she thinks that no reason is given for the vote; no explanation. I thought that was the fim’s strong point. Each story told was made to show that had women had the vote an egregious injustice would not go forward. Not long after they had the vote, women gained custody rights for example.
Ellen
[…] moment: here after Wolfe’s death, a letter by Wolfe reaches Perkins where Wolfe thanks him. Suffragettes suffered from having been turned into a ratcheted up chase thriller. Two ostensibly art movies […]
[…] Shoulder to Shoulder. Script: Ken Taylor, Alan Plater, Midge Mackenzie. Dir. Waris Hussein, Moira Armstrong. Perf: Sian Philips, Angela Downs, Judy Parfitt, Georgia Brown. Six 75 minute episodes available on YouTube. BBC, 1974. Suffragette. Script. Abi Morgan. Dir. Sarah Gavron. Perf: Carey Mulligan, Helena Bonham Carter, Anne Marie Duffey. Ruby, Pathe, Film4, BFI, 2014 […]