Movies you may not have seen #8

[gwyn_r]

Not long after Hillary Swank won her first Best Actress Oscar, she starred in an HBO movie called Iron Jawed Angels, about the last years of the woman's suffrage movement leading up to the constitutional amendment finally giving women the right to vote in the U.S. I remember at the time the reviews were mostly mixed to negative, not so much because

Comments

[klia]

IJA is a fantastic movie. I never knew the detail of those incidents, and was floored by what those women went through.

[namastenancy]

Yes it is a fantastic movie! It should be shown in conjunction with an old BBC series on the Pankhursts and a newer PBS one on Elizabeth Caddy Stanton so that women understand what it took to get us the vote.

[kirbyfest]

I enjoyed the movie very much, though I didn't see it until well after it originally aired. I'm surprised the reviews weren't great.

Oddly, just before I saw IJA I had finished Sisters: The Lives of American Suffragists (by Jean Baker)-- rather out of nowhere, as I just spotted it out on a carrel at the library and picked it up on a whim. I'm still embarrassed by how little I know of this phase of our country's history. I recommend the book with some reservations-- it focuses more on the personal lives of these women, so it's a little chattier than I generally like my history books to be, but by focusing on five women active from the very beginning to the very end of the suffrage movement, it's a decent perspective on the movement as a whole.

I need to seek out additional books on this topic.

[uranus_ge]

It was a wonderful film, and the acting was powerful.

I felt squeamish when Swank's character was force-fed, but at least the writers didn't water down the scene.

The music at the end (a song sung by Sarah Brightman) really captured the mood and did it fo me. It brought the film into modern times.

~Eva