Suffragette

When Maud Watts, barred from her husband’s rooms, charges in to give her little son a birthday present, her gift is a silly little toy elephant. The gift is a cheap trinket, pathetically wrapped. That’s all she can afford. So it expresses not just her love but how her circumstances have so direly restricted her emotional and material life. 

The mingy elephant resonates further. It’s exotic, from another world, scarcely more remote than the posh family life of the department store mannequins that captivated her before the suffragettes smashed the windows. 

The context discovers a further irony. Maud finds that her husband has given their son away to adoption. His new parents are there, promising their version of the mannequins’ life.  Maud’s last words to her son are her name. She begs him to remember it and t someday to come to find her. The elephant embodies her appeal to his memory. This unwitting aptness of the gift attests to the power of her intuition, as she gradually engages with the movement and resists the temptation to turn narc. 

This recreation of the early days of Britain’s suffragette movement abounds in scenes of such misery, pathos, and thwarted but resilient spirit. It’s a very touching film with a lasting political pertinence.

The film’s subject is not just the early days of the women’s movement but the harshness of the patriarchal establishment that refused to surrender any of its power. In that way it speaks for the suppressed and silenced of any kind,any class, in any culture. 

The harsh laundry manager who sexually abuses one girl — and by implication similarly violated Maud when she came to work there as a child — is on the same continuum as the dogged police inspector determined to make the women respect the unrespectable law. As Maud brands the former with her iron, she seems to arouse an unarticulated respect in the copper.

Like any serious historical film, this is about the time it was made as well as the period in which it is set. Why else tell that story now? 

We’re in the third wave of feminism in the West, but the battle is far from won. Women have the vote but they are still far from equal. Glass ceilings and walls and lead-box silencers persist. Hence too the horrible stories of women harassed and violated by their colleagues in the fire department and the army and even by the famed RCMP. 

Canada’s new prime minister Justin Trudeau is still asked to explain why he appointed a cabinet with half its members women. Even such a customarily wise columnist as Andrew Coyne trotted out in advance the old concern that women could only be appointed with a compromise in merit. He was suitably impressed by the appointments once made, but he remains diminished by that initial knee-jerk concern. An Alberta MLA finds there is no provision for her unprecedented situation, her imminent maternity leave.  

So you’ve come a long way baby. But frankly we — men and our systemic authority — have a lot further yet to go.

The film is current in an additional sense. End titles record how recently various countries gave their women the vote. Qatar has just done that and Saudi Arabia has promised it. But much of the world does not extend even our inadequate recognition of women’s due equality. London’s brutal attack on women demonstrators here recall the scenes from the Arab Spring Egypt and Iran. Around the world rape is a military strategy.

       In the current cultural war between radical Islam and Western civilization, women’s rights are a crucial battleground. The abuse of women in Muslim countries seems like a time machine flashback to our earlier, shameful days. But with time machines it’s sometimes hard to know if the gear is forward or reverse. The London violence and repressive patriarchal laws here could be a flash forward to Europe under the threatened Caliphate. Time, as usual, will tell.