What would you do to stand up for the rights you enjoy today? March? Hand out leaflets? As we approach the centenary of (some) women being given the right to vote in Britain for the first time, the BBC has ploughed considerable resources into a feature-length, dramatised documentary about the lead-up to the passing of The Representation of the People Act in 1918. And what those women did, the physical and emotional sacrifices they made, really hits home.
Suffragettes with Lucy Worsley (BBC One) brilliantly treads the line between Reithian historical documentary and vividly textured narrative. The pyrotechnics and stunt work you would more usually associate with big-budget drama are used judiciously to bring this never-more-relevant story to life.
Worsley’s sense of the dramatic is fully employed as we meet her, dressed in Edwardian garb and stealing across the low-lit cobbles having assisted her fellow suffragettes in an arson attack. The story of the suffragettes requires drama. It has been told before but not with this emphasis on the physical hardship and all-out violence they were prepared to engage in to be heard. Ordinary women – mill workers, housewives, dancers, artists – banded together in an increasingly radicalised movement with no thought for their own hardship. Worsley’s comparison of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) and a terrorist organisation is understandable.
The quiet protests of law-abiding suffragists of the late 19th century had been systematically ignored for 40 years. When Emeline Pankhurst and her Women’s Political and Social Union began their activities around a Manchester kitchen table, the need for “deeds, not words” was never more apparent. Here, the women of the WSPU, played by a terrific cast of actors, sit before us in their starched blouses, hair in uniform buns, and eyes burning with injustice to tell their stories. Some of the most powerful moments of emotional connection come from their testimony.
The film is written and directed by Emma Frank whose work I was gripped by in Secret Agent Selection: WW2, which recently finished its first series on BBC Two. I hope there’ll be a second. Her instinct for character, whatever dramatic story is playing out behind, is truly exciting. Here she invites the women who fought and starved and endured brutal assault by the police to talk directly to camera, via records of the time and some superb acting. Worsley is a terrific ringmaster, breaking the fourth wall mid-drama to add context. But, paired with Frank, she steps back when personal testimony will have more power. They work beautifully together and I hope they collaborate again.
As the militancy of the protesters increases, the state ramps up its response, bussing in law enforcement from rougher parts of London to deal with the demonstrators in horrific ways. Journalist Henry Brailsford’s interviews with dozens of women who were sexually assaulted and thrown to the mob are harrowing. Those accounts chill the blood and provide a direct bridge to stories still coming out of some parts of the world, not to mention the testimony of the women bravely coming forward in response to the #MeToo campaign. Men can do what they want, and, when angry, vocal women find their voices to protest, they are dismissed as hysterics and less than human. This still happens. This film drove that home without ever saying it.
As you would expect from a programme fronted by an expert, the details are fascinating. I had never seen photographs of triumphant suffragettes emerging from the prison gates to a cheering crowd of their sisters or the haunting, candid portraits taken in the prison yard to help police identify “dangerous” activists who refused to stay still for their long-exposure mug shots.
The information that suffragettes only rarely chained themselves to railings came as a surprise. The photo opportunities were cannily taken and printed as propaganda, giving us the strong visual image of the woman in chains we still think of today. For all the glossiness and impressive productions values, Frank does not shy away from the visceral horror of the force-feeding of hunger strikers. Those sequences – partially dramatised but the descriptions are somehow worse – will stay with me.
As thousands of women march this Sunday, in Belfast, Cardiff, Edinburgh and London to produce a mass artwork called Processions, the purple, green and white of the movement will flood the streets again. And when I join them, I will have a much clearer idea of who we are commemorating and why.