Iron Jawed Angels, a Film About Suffragist Alice Paul

Iron Jawed Angels is a made-for-TV historical drama that tells the story of how a key leader in the US suffrage movement, Alice Paul (played by Hilary Swank), took the voting rights fight to Washington, DC. The movie first premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2004 before being shown on HBO.

The film follows Paul and fellow militant activist Lucy Burns as the pair clash with old-guard suffragists from the National American Woman Suffrage Association—or NAWSA—over tactics and strategy. Paul and Burns wanted, for instance, to push for an amendment to the US Constitution guaranteeing women’s voting rights. (Though it also lobbied Congress for a constitutional amendment, NAWSA put at least as much energy into its parallel effort to change the constitutions of individual states.) Paul and Burns break off from NAWSA and eventually turn to confrontational protests that land them in jail.

The movie shows how, while locked up in the Occoquan women’s prison in Virginia, Paul and her National Woman’s Party co-activists go on a hunger strike and are force-fed in response—hence the moniker “iron-jawed angels.”

In the film, the hunger strike pays off. Public sympathy for the suffragists grew after word leaked out about the hunger strike and the brutal tactics used to break it.

The official website for Iron Jawed Angels is informative, filled with links to reviews, a detailed synopsis, video clips, and information on where to buy the movie. You can also see the movie’s IMDB page for more information.

An academic review of the film, written by Kristy Maddux, appeared in the February 23, 2009 issue of the journal Feminist Media Studies (vol. 9, issue 1), pp. 73-94. You can access the review’s abstract—and purchase access to the full piece—here, via Taylor & Francis Online.

Film: “A Busy Day” (originally titled The Militant Suffragette), 1914

A Busy Day (1914) is Charlie Chaplin’s first female impersonation film. In this short film, Chaplin plays a “militant suffragette” who is jealous of her husband’s flirting with another woman during a parade. Chaplin (as the wife) follows her husband around, trying to catch him with the other woman. In the process, she disrupts a film set and ends up being pushed into a pier. By presenting the wife as comically angry and jealous of her husband’s flirting, the film promotes the stereotype of suffragettes being belligerent, unreasonable, and ultimately unlovable women.

This description is an excerpt from an SF Silent Film Festival Blog post, “Silent Films and Suffragettes“:

In director Mack Sennett’s 1914 short A Busy Day (originally titled A Militant Suffragette), Charlie Chaplin plays an obnoxious female character who [spoiler alert!] is knocked into the sea and left to drown. The film in its current state contains no overt references to the suffrage movement, but film historians believe the character would have been recognized by movie audiences of the time. It also features Mack Swain, Phyllis Allen, Ted Edwards, and Billy Gilbert with cinematography by Frank D. Williams. Chaplin, uncredited, according to the film’s IMDB listing, edited the short.

You can find information about A Busy Day and other silent films related to suffrage in Kay Sloan’s documentary Suffragettes in the Silent Cinema.

You can also read a review of A Busy Day at the Chaplin: Film by Film website.

C-SPAN Video: The Role of the Media in Women’s Suffrage

C-Span offers the video and a transcript of this event. The video is also embedded below.

A panel of journalists, authors, and academics gathered at the National Press Club in 2013 at an event honoring the 100th Anniversary of the 1913 Women’s Suffrage March on Washington, DC. On the panel, moderated by Eleanor Clift, were Jill. D. Zahniser, author of Alice Paul: Claiming Power; Erika Falk, author of Women for President: Media Bias in Nine Campaigns; and Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, author of African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote, 1850-1920.

The panelists discussed the role of the media in the women’s suffrage movement, how newspapers became the locus of much of the debate over women’s rights, and how the press both helped and hurt the cause.

A Video Career Celebration of Carol Ellen DuBois

A celebration of the career of University of California, Los Angeles professor of history and gender studies Ellen Carol DuBois, highlighting her work on women’s suffrage, Victoria Woodhull, and the women’s rights movement.

You can find a list of DuBois’ books here, via Google Books, including Feminism and Suffrage, Harriot Stanton Blatch and the Winning of Woman Suffrage,  Votes for Women: A 75th Anniversiary Album, and Woman Suffrage and Women’s Rights.