Suffragette

London, 1912. Maud Watts is twenty-four and has worked in an East End laundry since she was a child — steam, scalding water, chemical burns, twelve-hour days, and a foreman whose interest in the younger girls everyone knows about and nobody names. She has a husband, Sonny, who works beside her, and a small son, George. She has no politics at all. She is not looking for a cause.

Delivering a parcel across town, she walks straight into a suffragette action — women hurling stones through shop windows in broad daylight — and recognises one of them: Violet Miller, from her own laundry. Drawn in almost by accident, Maud finds herself at the edge of a movement that is asking for something she has never let herself want. When the campaign is invited to give evidence to a parliamentary committee, Violet is chosen to speak. On the morning itself Violet arrives with her face beaten by her husband and cannot go in. Maud speaks instead.

She has prepared nothing. Asked what the vote would mean to her, she describes her own life out loud, perhaps for the first time — the years in the laundry, the wages, the future she can see waiting for her daughter's generation. It is the film's quietest and best scene. Then the government announces that the franchise will not be extended after all. The women outside the gates surge forward, the police charge, and Maud is arrested.

A week in prison is enough to change everything. Neighbours cross the street; the laundry lets her go once her photograph appears in the police files. Sonny, humiliated and frightened, locks her out of the house. Under the law of the time he does not need her permission for anything concerning their son — and while she is out fighting, he gives George up for adoption. Maud is allowed one goodbye. She kneels in front of a small boy who does not understand, tells him her name over and over so that he will remember it, and is taken away.

She keeps going. She meets Edith Ellyn, a chemist whose shop hides more than medicine, and hears Emmeline Pankhurst speak briefly from a balcony before the police move in. Inspector Steed, the officer building a file on her, offers her a way out: inform on the others and get her life back. She refuses. Arrested again, she goes on hunger strike, and the film shows what the state did to hunger strikers — held down, a tube forced in — soberly and without spectacle. It is short, and it is very hard to watch.

By now Maud has become what she never intended to be: a woman with nothing left to lose. She cuts telegraph wires. She posts small explosive devices into letter boxes. She is part of the team that blows up a half-built house belonging to a government minister — a building deliberately chosen because it is empty.

The women decide they need the one thing the newspapers cannot ignore: the King. The Derby at Epsom is the great public event of the racing year, and the King's own horse is running. The plan is to get a banner in front of the cameras. In the end only two of them get through the crowd — Maud, and Emily Wilding Davison, a veteran of prisons and hunger strikes who has spent the film at the edge of the frame.

At the rail on the bend, with the horses coming, Davison says something to Maud, steps under the barrier and walks out onto the track. The King's horse cannot avoid her. The film does not tell you what she meant to do, and it is right not to: nobody knows. She never regained consciousness and died four days later.

Her funeral becomes the demonstration the movement could never have organised for itself — thousands of women in white, moving through London behind the coffin, and a city that finally has to look. The film's last images are not staged at all: they are the real newsreel film of that procession in 1913. Then the screen tells you what happened next, in plain text, country by country, year by year — how long each nation made its women wait.

The film shows you one wing of a much larger campaign. The suffragists of the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies, led by Millicent Fawcett, were far more numerous and strictly constitutional: petitions, meetings, patient lobbying, decade after decade. The suffragettes were the militant breakaway. Emmeline Pankhurst founded the Women's Social and Political Union on 10 October 1903, at her house in Nelson Street, Manchester, with her daughters Christabel and Sylvia. Membership was women only. The motto was "Deeds not words".

Even the name was a weapon first used against them: suffragette was coined in 1906 by a Daily Mail journalist, Charles E. Hands, to belittle the new militants as something less than serious suffrage workers. The WSPU picked the insult up and wore it — reading it, with some relish, as the women who would get the vote.

What followed escalated hard. Windows, then arson: roughly 250 arson or destruction attacks in a six-month period in 1913 alone, and at least seven churches bombed or burnt in 1914. The half-built house of the Chancellor, David Lloyd George, was bombed on 19 February 1913 — two devices, one of which exploded, causing serious damage. Note what the film gets right about this: the buildings chosen were generally empty. The WSPU attacked property, and set out not to take life.

Imprisoned suffragettes began refusing food in July 1909, starting with Marion Wallace Dunlop. The government's response was force-feeding, and it was not rare or symbolic: one suffragette, Evaline Hilda Burkitt, was force-fed 292 times between 1909 and 1914. When the public reaction to that turned ugly, Parliament passed the Prisoners (Temporary Discharge for Ill-Health) Act 1913 — release a starving woman, let her recover at home, re-arrest her to finish her sentence, repeat. It was nicknamed the Cat and Mouse Act, after the way a cat lets its prey escape a few times before killing it.

It did not work. The police struggled to find the women again, who were sheltered by networks of supporters and physically defended by Garrud's Bodyguard. What the Act did achieve was to turn imprisoned suffragettes from figures of ridicule into objects of public sympathy. This is the strongest argument on the militants' side, and it is worth stating precisely: the militancy did not persuade the government — it provoked the government into acts that damaged the government.

On 4 June 1913, at Tattenham Corner at the Epsom Derby, Emily Wilding Davison ducked under the rail and was struck by Anmer, King George V's horse, ridden by Herbert Jones. She died on 8 June of a fracture at the base of the skull. She was forty. Her funeral on 14 June was led by a procession of five thousand women through London.

Everything after that is contested, and two popular claims deserve care. First, the famous return ticket: it is often produced as proof she did not plan to die — but researchers have established that on Derby day only return tickets were sold at all, so it proves much less than it is asked to prove. Second, the flags: police records list two WSPU flags folded and pinned inside her jacket, together with a race card, a diary, and a ticket to a suffragette dance that same evening. In 2013, forensic examiners digitally cleaned the surviving newsreel footage for a documentary and concluded that her movement is most consistent with an attempt to attach or throw a flag over the horse — not with a deliberate suicide. The coroner's verdict at the time was misadventure, not suicide.

So: probably not a planned martyrdom; certainly an act she knew could kill her. The film's refusal to resolve it is not evasion — it is the state of the evidence.

Here is the uncomfortable chronology. Militancy stopped in August 1914, when war broke out, the government granted an amnesty to suffrage prisoners and the WSPU suspended its campaign. The vote came four years later, in peace negotiations of a very different kind. The Representation of the People Act 1918 enfranchised women over 30 who met a property qualification — about 8.4 million women — while giving the vote to virtually all men at 21 (19 in the armed forces). The electorate leapt from roughly 8 million to 21 million.

Read that qualification again, because it is the sharpest fact in this lesson: the women the film is about were largely excluded from the victory. Domestic servants were shut out; so were women living in their parents' homes; so was everyone under 30. A twenty-four-year-old East End laundry worker like Maud Watts would not have qualified in 1918. Full equality waited for the Equal Franchise Act 1928 (royal assent 2 July 1928), which brought women in at 21 on the same terms as men and added roughly five million more.

And that is where the historians divide. For the militants: nothing else had worked in fifty years; the WSPU made the question impossible to ignore and forced the state into self-defeating brutality. Against: many suffragists at the time — and some historians since — argue the bombings hardened Parliament, cost the cause sympathetic MPs, and delayed a reform that was already advancing; the vote arrived, they point out, only after militancy had been abandoned. Both positions are held by serious people, and the evidence genuinely underdetermines the answer.

Two honest criticisms. First, by telling only the militant story, the film can leave the impression that the WSPU was the campaign, and the far larger constitutional movement all but disappears. Second, the film is almost entirely white, and the movement was not. Princess Sophia Duleep Singh (1876–1948), daughter of the last Maharaja of the Sikh Empire and a goddaughter of Queen Victoria, was a WSPU member, a leading figure in the Women's Tax Resistance League, and was on the deputation to Parliament on 18 November 1910 that ended in the violence known as Black Friday. The publicity did not help: in September 2015 the cast were photographed in T-shirts printed with a Pankhurst line, "I'd rather be a rebel than a slave", and critics called the choice tone-deaf.