Iron Jawed Angels

I just watched the HBO movie about the Suffrage movement of the 1900s, the "First Wave" feminist Alice Paul and her struggle, along with the National Women's Party, to gain the right to vote for women. The 19th Amendment seems like "old hat" I think to most of us today.

But how old is the issue, really? I remember once when I was teaching, my first class as a Graduate Student, and we were describing Feminist critical theory to the classroom of college students, and one young black woman asked "what's the point?" The three of us grad students were a bit surprised. It seemed like the point of something like a feminist interpretation of the world ought to be obvious, and that any woman would understand that the fight for women's equality is still not over. The 19th amendment was an early step. But there are so many more steps to be taken even 80 years later.

The movie was excellent. Yes, it was a bit melodramatic, showing the forced feeding of the women who went on a hunger strike to force public opinion to recognize the issue. The open hostility of some men (and women) to the women who were asking merely for the right to vote, which I know most of us take for granted, chilled me to the bone because I see that open hostility in a very slightly lesser degree when men say "ah, feminists are all lesbian agitators who hate men and want to kill babies." How easy is it to go from words like that to the open violence that has been done, to chains and prison bars? I'm not really sure it's as far away as I've liked to believe. In that same class I mentioned earlier, when the professor asked students to critique our performance so far about halfway through the semester, a whole lot of students wrote "tell the grad students to shut up". They also wrote disparagements of us being women. They were anonymous, and the hostility of some of those little notes shows the hidden hostility of a lot of people to anyone who refuses to say that what has happened so far is enough.

I know a lot of people, and definitely men, support equality for everyone. Including women. But there are still an awful lot of people who think that what we have today, where women still make a percentage of the money that men make, and women are not fully represented in political power, is enough. I say it is not.

The movie made me cry, and think about how much I myself take for granted as a woman who has the right to an education, the right to vote (even if I have no frickin' idea who to vote for), the right to control my own life. Just a couple of days ago I wondered, as that young black woman whose words struck me to the heart years ago, "what's the point" in this very blog. What's the point of my dissertation, which argues about feminism in popular media, and the image of the witch as feminist/feminist as witch?

This movie reminds me quite powerfully of the point. The public opinion of feminism has been slipping for a long time, what with Rush Limbaugh's smear campaign and the repeated declarations by different media outlets of feminism's death, or irrelevancy. But in a world where women are still 50% of the population but not represented fully in our own government, where even in this First World country where we have incredible privilege, we still are told, as children, we can't do that cause we're a girl, there's nothing irrelevant about feminism. If that makes me strident, or antagonistic to those who would keep me from speaking out and saying it's still unfair, unequal, and wrong, and pointing out that feminism is NOT dead, and we don't have to apologize for our belief that equality matters, then so be it.

The website at HBO has a page on Suffrage history. It also has pictures and interviews. But check out other places too, and learn more about The First Wave, even as we, and I, declare ourselves part of a third wave. It's still the same ocean.