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Iron-Jawed Angels
Aug. 5th, 2018 08:33 amI might have liked Iron-Jawed Angels better if I hadn’t seen it so soon after Selma, which did effortlessly a number of things that Iron-Jawed Angels doesn’t do at all. In particular, Selma introduces a wide range of the major players involved in the Civil Rights struggle, giving a view of their positions and motivations and the reasons that they change (or don’t change) over time.
Iron-Jawed Angels, in contrast, basically gives an Alice Paul-eye-view of the last years of the women’s suffrage struggle, with only a shadowy idea of what the hell anyone else is doing. In particular, the movie downplays (almost to the point of demonizing) the contributions of NAWSA, the National American Woman Suffrage Association, even though Alice Paul’s shock campaigns would never have worked without NAWSA’s grassroots work to build support for woman suffrage in the first place.
I think the filmmakers fundamentally don’t understand why the slow unsexy work of building grassroots support is important. How can you work for slow change when injustice is happening now??? Demand immediate change! Never mind that if you change the law and a large proportion of the population hates the change, they may simply ignore the new law and go right on committing the injustice the law was meant to prevent.
I also disliked the way the movie contrasted the sexy young activists with the frumpy old NAWSA members - in fact, the movie’s emphasis on the sexiness of Alice Paul’s group in general. It invented a romance for Alice Paul, who in actuality was wedding to her cause like a real-life Enjolras - a romance with a Washington Post reporter, no less, which makes it look like Paul got news coverage not because she was newsworthy but because a reporter was into her. God forbid a woman get anything through any avenue other than sex appeal!
It really irritated me the way that the movie condemns the NAWSA suffragists for using the rhetoric of motherhood to make suffrage palatable to men, while treating it as wonderful and progressive when Paul and company use youth and beauty to make suffrage palatable to men. Both are ways of saying “See how great we are at performing femininity? Now give us the vote!”
In general I felt like the movie was projecting a Second Wave/Third Wave conflict onto a disagreement over tactics between First Wave activists - an impression heightened by the use of anachronistically modern music and unnecessarily flashy camera techniques. There are ways to integrate modern music into a historical piece without undermining it (Underground does this really well), but it doesn’t work here.
On second thought, I might never have liked Iron-Jawed Angels that much. This movie and I just weren’t meant to be.
Iron-Jawed Angels, in contrast, basically gives an Alice Paul-eye-view of the last years of the women’s suffrage struggle, with only a shadowy idea of what the hell anyone else is doing. In particular, the movie downplays (almost to the point of demonizing) the contributions of NAWSA, the National American Woman Suffrage Association, even though Alice Paul’s shock campaigns would never have worked without NAWSA’s grassroots work to build support for woman suffrage in the first place.
I think the filmmakers fundamentally don’t understand why the slow unsexy work of building grassroots support is important. How can you work for slow change when injustice is happening now??? Demand immediate change! Never mind that if you change the law and a large proportion of the population hates the change, they may simply ignore the new law and go right on committing the injustice the law was meant to prevent.
I also disliked the way the movie contrasted the sexy young activists with the frumpy old NAWSA members - in fact, the movie’s emphasis on the sexiness of Alice Paul’s group in general. It invented a romance for Alice Paul, who in actuality was wedding to her cause like a real-life Enjolras - a romance with a Washington Post reporter, no less, which makes it look like Paul got news coverage not because she was newsworthy but because a reporter was into her. God forbid a woman get anything through any avenue other than sex appeal!
It really irritated me the way that the movie condemns the NAWSA suffragists for using the rhetoric of motherhood to make suffrage palatable to men, while treating it as wonderful and progressive when Paul and company use youth and beauty to make suffrage palatable to men. Both are ways of saying “See how great we are at performing femininity? Now give us the vote!”
In general I felt like the movie was projecting a Second Wave/Third Wave conflict onto a disagreement over tactics between First Wave activists - an impression heightened by the use of anachronistically modern music and unnecessarily flashy camera techniques. There are ways to integrate modern music into a historical piece without undermining it (Underground does this really well), but it doesn’t work here.
On second thought, I might never have liked Iron-Jawed Angels that much. This movie and I just weren’t meant to be.
