Women's suffrage in film
These films "echoed the vehement cries of politicians, journalists, and preachers who feared that woman suffrage would spell the death of femininity and the family.
"[4] Less than three years after the invention of narrative cinema, George Albert Smith satirized suffragists in his silent short film The Lady Barber (1898).
Fire!, The Reformation of the Suffragettes (1911), and A Lively Affair (1912) showed women humiliated into abandoning the suffrage movement after trying to do the work of men.
[7] Charlie Chaplin played a woman in the 1914 short film A Busy Day (originally titled A Militant Suffragette).
[14][15] Thomas Edison recorded speeches by prominent American suffragists for his Kinetophone, an early system for synchronized sound, in 1913, but the resulting film is lost.
Dorothy Davenport starred in Mothers of Men (1917), a melodrama that depicted a future where a suffragist holds an important political office.
[25] Subsequent historical depictions of women's suffrage included documentaries like This is America (1933), The Golden Twenties (1950), and 50 Years Before Your Eyes (1950); dramas such as The Man Who Dared (1933), Rendezvous (1935), Lillian Russell (1940), and Adventure in Baltimore (1949); musicals like The Shocking Miss Pilgrim (1947) and One Sunday Afternoon (1948); comedies including The Strawberry Blonde (1941), The First Traveling Saleslady (1956) and The Great Race (1964); and westerns like The Lady from Cheyenne (1941), Cattle Queen (1951), and Rails Into Laramie (1954).
[26] Laura E. Nym Mayhall has argued that mid-twentieth-century depictions of suffragists like Mrs. Banks in the internationally distributed Walt Disney blockbuster Mary Poppins (1964) were part of a campaign to soften the history of suffragettes.
[28] However, Anna Stevenson has also highlighted how "the upheaval of the Banks household in the film reflects the chaos anti-suffragists believed would result from upturning social hierarchies based on gender, class, and race.
"[29] Twenty-first century films like Iron Jawed Angels (2004) and Suffragette (2015) have won popular and industry acclaim for reincorporating the radicalism of the suffrage movement.
[32] The NAWSA-produced American pro-suffrage film Your Girl and Mine was shown by the Montreal Suffrage Association shortly after its 1914 release.
Guy-Blaché's Les Résultats du féminisme (1906) depicts a world of gender-role reversal, in which men are sexually harassed by women,[5] while Méliès's For the Cause of Suffrage (1909) and Fire!
[36] The earliest comedies about suffragists, The Lady Barber (1898) and Women's Rights (1899),[37] were produced in Britain before the term "suffragette" was coined.
[38] British suffragettes were frequently featured in films made in other countries, as: "the British suffrage movement, which was the most violent, garnered the most interest among filmmakers—even fictional scenarios made by studios in other countries, such as Germany, Sweden and the USA, were often set in England to capitalize on the colorful protestors, who embraced the term 'suffragette'.
It followed the suffrage movement as it was influenced by three of the Pankhurst women, Emmeline, Christabel and Sylvia and also included the story of the working class activist Annie Kenney.
[39] During the first series of Downton Abbey, Lady Sybil Crawley goes to a Liberal Party rally attended by suffragettes, reads pamphlets about why women should get the vote and discusses female enfranchisement with her irritated father the Earl of Grantham and her romantic interest Tom Branson.
[39] The 2015 film Suffragette is a historical drama about the British movement starring Carey Mulligan, Helena Bonham Carter, Anne-Marie Duff, Brendan Gleeson and Meryl Streep.
These women trained in martial arts (known as Suffrajitsu) and carried concealed weapons to protect their fellow suffragettes from harm and arrest.
[11] Screenwriter Frances Marion participated in the October 23, 1915 parade that brought more than 30,000 supporters of women's suffrage onto the streets of New York City.
[47] Actress Fan Bourke opened The Princess, a 500-seat "votes for women" movie theatre, in New Rochelle, New York in late 1915.
