Iron Jawed Angels shows some of the violence suffragists endured, but downplays the most brutal episode, the Night of Terror. After picketing the White House, as shown in the photo above, hundreds of women were arrested, and 33 convicted. On the night of November 15, 1917, according to Barbara Leaming in Katharine Hepburn:
"Under orders from W.H. Whittaker, superintendent of the Occoquan Workhouse, as many as forty guards with clubs went on a rampage, brutalizing thirty-three jailed suffragists.
They beat Lucy Burns, chained her hands to the cell bars above her head, and left her there for the night. They hurled Dora Lewis into a dark cell, smashed her head against an iron bed, and knocked her out cold. Her cellmate, Alice Cosu, who believed Mrs. Lewis to be dead, suffered a heart attack.
According to affidavits, other women were grabbed, dragged, beaten, choked, slammed, pinched, twisted, and kicked.2
The film glosses over this brutality, showing only a few men (not 40) roughing up the women and chaining Lucy Burns' hands over her head. However, Angels does not ignore the torture when the suffragists staged a food strike.
A variant on water-boarding, and equally repugnant, is force-feeding, from which this film derives its title. Graphic attention is paid to the tubed force-feeding and Alice Paul's resistance, along with others. When they are unable to keep their mouths closed, the forced feeding induces them to vomit. Later we see the bloody remains of their lips, and their weakening state, until press exposure wins public support. The women are immediately released and President Wilson urges Congress to pass the 19th Amendment.
Inez Mulholland (Julia Ormond) dies in the film, from anemia, as she did in real life, coming to be known as the Suffrage Martyr.
History fans will love the film as much as herstory fans: woman suffrage is an important episode in the struggle for universal equality.
Iron Jawed Angels is playing on HBO thru June 27.
One historian refers to "the New Jersey experience" as if it alone, among all the colonies, included woman suffrage. He seems baffled that NJ expressly enfranchised women in its first constitution (1787), apparently unaware that it merely codified a 123-year-old practice.
Another bias that appears in many historical accounts of voting in America is widespread silence on the fact that blacks, indigenous people, and resident aliens (non citizens) also voted in Colonial times, and in some states after independence. As with white males, restrictions applied but were not uniformly enforced.
1 | 2
