Resurrecting the suffragettes on screen : spectropoetics and spectropolitics in Sarah Gavron's Suffeagette

Abstract

You have to make more noise than anybody else, you have to make yourself more obtrusive than anybody else, you have to fill all the papers more than anybody else; in fact, you have to be there all the time and see that they do not snow you under, if you are really going to get your reform realised. Emmeline Pankhurst, 1913

These words were uttered on 13 November 1913 by Emmeline Pankhurst, the founder of the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU), in her famous "Freedom or Death Speech" delivered in Hartford, Connecticut with which she incited the women of her militant organization to collectively and consciously unite in their quest to obtain the vote. It was five years later, on 10th January 1918, that Pankhurst's dream as the leader of the Suffragette movement was to be partially fulfilled, when Parliament passed an act granting the vote to certain categories of women over the age of 30 who met minimum property qualifications. The same Act gave voting rights to males over the age of 21. It would, however, only be a decade later, in 1928, the same year in which Pankhurst passed away, that the House of Lords would approve the Representation of the People Act with the "colourless name of the Equal Franchise Bill" by which all women over the age of 21 finally had the same voting rights as men. A struggle which had been waged relentlessly and even bitterly on both sides for over sixty years thus ended unobtrusively and "undramatically", "quietly, without speeches, almost apologetically in the manner of someone repairing a rather obvious oversight".