Iron Jawed Angels

This was probably one of the best movies that I have seen in a long time, and I cannot believe how much I learned from it. The issues of race and class were one of the things that surprised me the most. I have always thought that African American women were a part of the suffrage movement as well as white women, but in the movie, there was only one African American woman, and she was only shown about two times. I was very surprised by the part when she explained how her committee wanted to march with the rest of the women, and then came the reply that if they wanted to walk, they had to walk in the back because otherwise another committee would not march. I really liked how the response came, if they were marching as women, or as white women. Along with scenes such as this, the rest of the movie requires an incredible range of emotions, from joy, to sadness, to anger. I had no idea the extents to which anti-suffragists were against suffragists until I saw this movie. Even what I learned in high school wasn't anything compared to this movie. In my mind it had always been just women wearing sashes passing out buttons and fliers. There was no violence against them, or hunger strikes, or picketing the White House in my images of the movement. When I saw what it actually was, I was shocked. Probably, the things that I learned the most from this movie were all the different ways they had of getting the public's attention, and as seen, they worked. When their goal was to make it into the newspaper, they did it, even though 100 people ended up in the hospital. But to them, they had reached a goal. The dedication they had to the movement, especially Alice Paul and Lucy Burns was beyond amazing, something I can't even begin to imagine. Overall, this was one of the best movies that I have ever seen.