The working women’s fight

THE NEW film Suffragette is a compelling account of the middle period of the British Suffrage movement and the women foot soldiers who organized it from the ground up.

Suffragette makes a refreshing break from traditional narratives about early feminism that too often ignore the contributions of everyday women who worked tirelessly to change society. It's one of the rare attempts to bring women's political history to a mass audience, and, while it's disappointing in some respects, it's well worth watching for anyone thinking through questions of women's rights today.

The fictional protagonist, Maude Watts (played by Carey Mulligan), is a factory worker in an industrial laundry. We learn that she was born on that factory floor and was orphaned at the age of 4 when her mother was scalded to death.

The women laundry workers, who range in age from 10 to 25 years old (as Watts says, it's a short life as a factory girl), are subjected to long hours and brutal conditions, including sexual harassment and assault and the hands of male bosses for whom sexual violence is merely another way to intimidate and demoralize workers.

With relatively little screen time, the filmmakers effectively paint a vivid picture of working class life in the beginning of the 20th century. Watts returns home from an exhausting shift each night to a drab, one-room apartment where she lives with her husband, a fellow factory worker, and their young son.

Watt's work is never finished, with cooking, mending and yet more laundry occupying all her time at home. Free time is nonexistent. When she finally retires to bed, we can see that her body is covered in scars we assume she sustained from hot water burns at work.

These are circumstances designed to stifle all hope and creativity. She seems content to accept her lot until a chance interaction with a politically active co-worker becomes an accidental introduction to activism. Watts is soon swept up in political life and becomes a dedicated fighter for the vote.

In a key scene, Watts is walking home from work and stops for a moment, gazing longingly at a window display showing a quaint, well-dressed family. Suddenly the glass is shattered by a large rock.

She ducks for cover and turns to see several women behind her wearing the iconic purple suffragette sashes, shouting "Votes for women!" and lobbing stones at the shop windows. Watts recognizes one of them as her co-worker, Violet (played by Anne-Marie Duff) but runs to safety as police arrive quickly to detain the demonstrators.

At work the next day, Violet is harshly admonished by their boss for arriving late. Maude intervenes with a distraction allowing her to avoid further repercussion. Later, when out of earshot, she invites Maude to attend one of her suffragette meetings.

While she declines this time, a series of events, including witnessing the rape of a young co-worker leads her to question her lack of involvement. She agrees to accompany Violet to a parliamentary hearing where she will testify about unsafe factory conditions for women workers.

When Violet shows up beaten black and blue by her alcoholic husband, another suffragette recruits Watts to speak in her place. Violet convinces Maude to speak by arguing that if she is fit to run the laundry as head laundress, she can play a leading role in struggle too.

During her testimony, the presiding official asks her what the vote would mean for a woman like her. She responds that she never thought about what the vote means to her simply because she never thought she would get it.

AS THE plot develops, Maude becomes increasingly willing to sacrifice what she holds dear to attend meetings and illegal demonstrations. She is arrested multiple times, bringing shame to her husband who eventually decides to kick her out of their house and forbids her from seeing their son.

This is one of many scenes that convey women's inability to control the most basic aspects of their lives. Women at this time lacked property rights, the ability to seek custody of their children, and, if married, even her wages were not her own.

After a women's rally is violently broken up by police and mass arrests made, a middle-class woman tries to bail out her working sisters, but her husband refuses her access to her own income and drags her away.

A major point of debate for the fictionalized protagonists is the utility of political violence. Emmeline Pankhurst is perhaps best known for advocating the destruction of property to bring attention to her cause, and in the context of the film, Maude and her comrades are swayed by Pankhurst's slogan, "Deeds, not words will win us the vote."

Breaking windows soon escalates to blowing up mailboxes and firebombing the empty house of a member of parliament. Historians disagree about the efficacy of these tactics used by the suffragettes. But what do we, as socialists make of Pankhurst's strategy of individual terrorism?

As Leon Trotsky argued, Marxists must oppose this type of terrorism, which "belittles the role of the masses." He wrote in 1911:

But the disarray introduced into the ranks of the working masses themselves by a terrorist attempt is much deeper. If it is enough to arm oneself with a pistol in order to achieve one's goal, why the efforts of the class struggle? If a thimbleful of gunpowder and a little chunk of lead is enough to shoot the enemy through the neck, what need is there for a class organization? If it makes sense to terrify highly placed personages with the roar of explosions, where is the need for the party? Why meetings, mass agitation and elections if one can so easily take aim at the ministerial bench from the gallery of parliament?

In our eyes, individual terror is inadmissible precisely because it belittles the role of the masses in their own consciousness, reconciles them to their powerlessness, and turns their eyes and hopes toward a great avenger and liberator who some day will come and accomplish his mission.

Suffragette sincerely grapples with the inherent problems in substituting individual acts with wide-reaching struggle. Several women decide to leave the movement after Watts and others participate advocate bombings.

What the film lacks in the way of complex political analysis, it tries to make up for with strong character development among a few individuals. What gets lost though is any clear connection between mass action and strategic victories for the movement.

We only get a vague sense of the efforts that went into building the Women's Social and Political Union and other organizations that provided the necessary infrastructure to sustain a struggle that lasted for decades.

It's not entirely believable that a working-class woman like Watts would give up everything in the fight for the vote simply because she believed so passionately in the rhetoric of Pankhurst (played by Meryl Streep) who urges, "Never give up, never surrender!" a phrase that's repeated probably more than it needs to be throughout the film.

In the U.S., the upper-class leadership of the suffrage movement long failed to recognize that working-class women saw voting rights as only one aspect of how they would win their liberation. For elite suffragettes like Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the primary concern was equality among men and women.

But Black women and working-class white women largely recognized that the vote alone would be insufficient to challenge racist oppression and class exploitation which fundamentally linked their interests with the men of their class. As Angela Davis explains in Women Race and Class,

while their men's sexist behavior definitely needed to be challenged, the real enemy, their common enemy was the boss, the capitalist or whoever was responsible for the miserable wages and unbearable working conditions and for racist and sexist discrimination on the job.

While the choice to structure the plot around the lives of working-class women is a major step forward, there was a missed opportunity to detail how class divisions and political debates played out in the movement.

NO REVIEW of Suffragette would be complete without acknowledging the intense criticism it attracted before it even hit theaters in the U.S.

To promote the film, some of the starring actors, including Streep and Mulligan, appeared in a photo shoot for Time Out London wearing T-shirts with the slogan "I'd rather be a rebel than a slave." Many anti-racists on twitter and elsewhere have argued that the shirts make an inappropriate comparison between sexism and racism, sighting this as an example of colorblind "white feminism."

As I described in a previous piece for SocialistWorker.org, the U.S. suffrage movement was founded by women abolitionists that saw women's rights as a natural next step following emancipation for Black people. They would often draw comparisons between racism and sexism to argue for the involvement of more women in the struggle to end slavery.

Angela Davis described the period as "a critical moment in the development of modern racism--its major institutional supports as well as its attendant ideological justifications." The fact that leading suffragettes ultimately capitulated to racism as the movement entered the last decade of the 19th century is a tragedy that greatly weakened the movement politically and alienated Black women and white working-class women whose participation was so desperately needed to win.

Unfortunately, Suffragette is silent about any connections that might have been made between the fight for women's rights and racism and other forms of oppression. Notably, contributions by Indian British suffragettes who saw winning the vote as beneficial to advancing the fight against British colonial rule were not included. The all-white cast is yet another missed opportunity for the film to show that solidarity is the only way that movements can succeed.

I don't however feel that the film deserves boycott level attacks such as one review titled "http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/feminism/2015/10/what-did-suffragette-movement-britain-really-look" in a similar vein as previous criticisms. In a thoughtful article appearing in the New Statesmen, "What Did the Suffragette movement in Britain Really Look Like?" two historians explain the background.

"Britain was a white society in the main, and the movement reflected that," Dr. Paula Bartley told Anna Leszkiewicz at the New Statesmen. According to Dr. Sumita Mukherjee, a fellow at King's College London researching Indian suffragettes, the women's suffrage movement in Britain was "very different from the American case or the Australian case or the New Zealand case, because although there were ethnic minorities in Britain at that time, there wasn't the same scale or the same questions of citizenship as there were in other countries."

Bartley said, "The American women's suffrage movement was very different, and was in some respects very racist: they often refused to have Black women included in it. Race was a much bigger issue in the U.S., and you can't compare the two movements, because of that issue."

Despite its shortcomings, Suffragette still manages to captivate with the story of a factory worker who is politicized by her day-to-day experience of oppression and exploitation and finds hope among the ranks of the women's movement.

The slow, sometimes frustrating pace of the film managed to have me in tears by the end where a massive funeral procession (a depiction of the actual events following the controversial death of suffragette Emily Davison) with thousands of women dressed in white marching, accompanying the casket as thousands more look on.

It seems a somewhat peculiar place to end the film in 1913, 15 years before women could vote on the same terms as men (at the age of 21) but it rightly suggests that the fight never really ended and continues still today.