Movie Review: Suffragette directed by Sarah Gavron

It is not often that a movie engenders such separate, clear and disparate emotions in me. Suffragette, starring Cary Mulligan in the role of Maud Watts, is such a movie. Intense anger - when I saw women beaten and kicked by police officers. Inmmense gratitude - that I, and most women today, can think, act and feel independent of men because of those women that were beaten and kicked. And great sadness, when I saw the conditions that whole families lived in while mothers, sisters, aunts and cousins supported their men’s lives with manual labour at home and outside of home.

The character of Maud Watts, was inspired by the real life suffragette, Hannah Webster Mitchell. Maud Watts was a representation of the working class woman of the early 1900’s. Married, with one child she worked in a large laundry. She, like other women, had begun work in the laundry as a child along side mothers and sisters. Emmeline Pankhurst, played by Meryl Streep, established The Women’s Social and Political Union as an embodiment of her vision for freedom for women. Maud Watts did not come to Emmeline Pankhurst’s movement easily, however a series of events, as well as the drudgery that was her life, slowly moved her into the ranks of ‘the Pankies’ .  

Although there were men that supported their wives, family estrangements, social rejections and cruel imprisonments were the fate of many of the suffragettes that fought for women’s right to vote. A right that has given us all of our other rights in this life. Suffragette is a ‘close-hand view of the misery and unhappiness’ that was the lot of women. This is a view of our past that men, women, young and old, should see.

“I had to get a close-hand view of the misery and unhappiness 

of a man made world, before I reached the point where 

I could successfully revolt against it.”

~ Emmeline Pankhurst, Suffragette, My Own Story

Director: Sarah Gavron

Written by: Abi Morgan

Partial Cast of Suffragette
Carey Mulligan - Maud Watts
Anne-Marie Duff - Violet Miller
Adam Michael Dodd - George Watts, Maud Watt’s son
Ben Whishaw - Sonny Watts, Maud Watt’s husband
Helen Bonham Carter - Edith Ellyn
Finbar Lynch - Hugh Ellyn, Edith Ellyn’s husband
Brendon Gleeson - Inspector Arthur Steed
Natalie Press - Emily Wilding Davisone
Meryl Streep - Emmeline Pankhurst

www.biography.com/news/suffragette-movie-history provides a more detailed history in relationship between history and cast.