Iron Jawed Angels

Off Our Backs, Mar/Apr 2004 by Roberson, Amaya N

Iron Jawed Angels HBO's original movie, Iron Jawed Angels, starring Hilary Swank, Frances O'Connor, Julia Ormond, Patrick Dempsey and Angelica Houston, chronicles the last eight years of the struggle to win "votes for women" in the United States.

The movie begins in 1912 when Alice Paul (Swank) and Lucy Burns (O'Connor) come to Washington, D.C., to organize a parade in support of a constitutional amendment to gain voting rights for women. Their campaign is met with resistance from all fronts-from the power elite to the man on the street-no one wants these women to have a say in their government.

Luckily, these aren't your average feminists. Paul and her crew represent the radical fringe of the suffrage movement. They break away from their conservative foremothers, particularly Carrie Chapman Catt (Houston), and form the National Women's Party. Their tactics include interrupting a Congressional session and picketing outside the front door of the White House (before today's "Free Speech Zones" made this nearly impossible).

But, much like today, their demands for equality happened to coincide with a war that helped squash dissent. Although their predicament produces one of the best lines in the movie, "Picketing is not treason, at most it's just rude," the powers that be easily concoct a reason to haul these women to jail when they continue to demand equality from a wartime president. Maybe it was Paul's equation of Woodrow Wilson to the German Kaiser that sent the boys over the edge.

Once in jail, the women go on a hunger strike. Their resistance to being force-fed leads to their nickname, the Iron Jawed Angels, and produces the second best line of the movie "[With women] courage is often mistaken for insanity." It seems shoving tubes down the throats of white women to stuff raw eggs in their bellies generates a lot of bad press. The momentum from their actions coupled with the long work of their more conservative allies and suffragists predecessors, finally leads to women gaining the vote in 1920.

Yes, the movie is very inspiring, but there are problems. The suffragists weren't exactly blazing new ground in terms of racial equality, and the movie does hint at this shortcoming. Early in the movie during the planning of the parade for women's votes, Paul has a telling confrontation with black visionary Ida B. Wells. Wells is upset that parade organizers want black women to march in the back. Paul's response is that they will lose the support of southern women if they allow black women to march as their equals.

Come marching day-the scene is set using a song off the Grammy award winning album by Lauryn Hill. It's not so much that this contemporary song seems jarringly out-of-place, it's that they play it right as they show black women marching in the back. Playing a song by a modern black icon as these suffragist heroines are dissing their black sisters may seem subtly ironic, but to me, it's just rude. Wells (acting alone, not with a contingent) did jump into the parade right in the middle of the Barnard group, which elicited a slight smile from Paul. But that's it. That's the last mention of race in the movie.

And what's with all the blind jokes? There were three different jokes that used blind people as a punch line. When Paul told a Washington Post cartoonist (Dempsey) about her meeting with Helen Keller, he quipped "Don't stare, she hates that." I found these jabs completely unnecessary and detrimental to the movie's message.

Iron Jawed Angels played on HBO after the second to last episode of Sex and the City and the feminists portrayed were certainly sexed-up for the occasion. Some of the overt sexuality helped to show these women as complete, three-dimensional characters. But some of it was just demeaning, like the half-naked woman draped in an American flag used as the movie's promotional poster image.

Despite its failings this movie spotlights a crucial period of feminist and American history at a critical time. HBO execs hope this movie will be used for voter recruitment efforts in the upcoming 2004 election. If this movie gets more women hyped-up about voting rights and out to the polls come November, then more power to ya, HBO! As a radical critically-thinking feminist, even I left this movie excited to cast my hard-earned vote to run Bush out of town. Of course, I was excited to do that anyway.