Iron Jawed Angels

Iron Jawed Angels does a very good job of showing a very important era in US history. It is the struggle of a group of radical suffragists who break away from the mainstream women’s rights movement fighting for the passage of the nineteenth amendment. Alice Paul and Lucy Burns push the boundaries of political protest in the 1920s to secure the right to vote for women.

The two protagonists have very different personalities and have a tough fight in a chauvinistically dominated country.

The first scene of interest to me was when Alice was outside of the factory and the young factory worker called her a college girl, implying she could not relate to her. Alice goes on to explain about factory fires and the young worker realizes that this is a struggle that affects her as well. This point cements the fact that the movement for women’s suffrage was a universal movement and had some benefit to all regardless of class and race.

Another very unpopular notion was Alice and Lucy’s decision to oppose Woodrow Wilson. This was extremely unpopular because he was a war time president. People thought that the suffrage movement should wait for the war to be over but the radicals decided to break from the mainstream policy and boycott Wilson or any other official which was opposed to woman’s suffrage. They were eventually arrested on false charges and punished and force fed after a hunger strike. This information was leaked and when it was made apparent that this could damage Wilson, he used the war as an excuse and pushed for the passing of the amendment.

One very interesting character in the movie was the Senator’s wife. After she was found to have supported the Alice, the senator cut off her accounts and spending money leaving her with no financial independent support. This in today’s society might seem ludicrous but it showed how much power men held in such a society. Then he appalling took away her children stating that she is too busy to raise them when he does not raise them and thus doesn’t know what goes into it, so who is he to decide. It is eventually this same senator that leaks the information of the treatment of the Iron Jawed Angels that gets the 19^th Amendment passed. The most powerful line in the movie came when she states that she is doing this for her daughters. At that point I feel as if the father realized that he does not want his daughters to go through such a struggle and relates to the mother.

Overall, IJA is a terrific film that keeps the viewer grasped until the very end by showing a fight for equality by the other half of the human race.