Screening women’s history in the film Suffragette (2015): between intersectional feminist activism and historical memory

Abstract

ABSTRACT Prior to its release, the film Suffragette (2015) generated significant media commentary when its marketing campaign emblazoned a controversial historical quotation on promotional t-shirts. The 1913 Emmeline Pankhurst quotation generated a variety of negative emotional responses across digital, print, and social media because it compared women’s disenfranchisement to slavery. This article builds on recent historical analyses of national and transnational women’s movements that are informed by the history of emotions. It considers the operation of discourses of slavery within the history, memory, and popular culture of the transatlantic women’s suffrage movement. Using Jemima Repo’s concept of feminist commodity activism to situate the t-shirts, this article examines the anger and frustration that dominated media commentary about the Suffragette marketing campaign across the United States, Britain, Australia, and Canada. Both the filmmakers and intersectional feminist activists embraced historical evidence—from primary and secondary sources—to mobilise different narratives about the Women’s Social and Political Union. Yet many journalists and commentators envisioned the film’s construction of historical memory as insufficiently attuned to racism within the history of feminism, and thus as a failure of intersectional feminism. Suffragette reveals significant anxieties about how the women’s suffrage movement should be remembered in the twenty-first century.