9/5/15

Suffragette Film Review: The Iron Ladies


While the mass movement for women's voting rights in the United States that reached its most heated moment back in the early 20th century is remembered mostly as a tame affair, apparently the more militant struggle back then in England is barely remembered at all. That is, until now when that one hundred year buried history has been boldly and brilliantly exhumed and brought back to life in the defiant and devastating historical drama, Suffragette.

And in stark contrast to the US where the organized movement was mostly a middle class affair, those fiery female rebels in England were thrust progressively through a combination of oppression and frustration into an explosive battle of the sexes. And fueled in no small part by outright class warfare. Provoked apparently by the rigid British class system, and by England divisively first granting voting rights solely to women of property. Which led to targeting in large part "the sacred ideology of property if we must."

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Prairie Miller

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