iron jawed

Iron Jawed Angels

Iron Jawed Angels is a 2004 film about the American women's suffrage movement during the early 1900s. It was filmed in Virginia, produced by HBO Films, and released in 2004. It received a standing ovation at the Sundance Film Festival,

The film, directed by Katja von Garnier follows political activists Alice Paul and Lucy Burns as they revolutionize the American feminist movement to grant women the right to vote.

Plot

The film opens as Alice Paul (Hilary Swank) and Lucy Burns (Frances O'Connor) return to the United States from England where they have been actively involved in the suffrage movement. As the duo becomes more active within the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), they begin to realize that their ideas were much too radical for the established activists, particularly Carrie Chapman Catt (Anjelica Huston). Both women eventually leave NAWSA and create the National Woman's Party (NWP), a much more radical organization dedicated to the fight for women's rights.

Over time, tension between the NWP and NAWSA grows as NAWSA leaders criticize NWP tactics such as direct protesting of a wartime President and picketing directly outside the White House with their Silent Sentinels. Relations between the American government and the NWP protesters also intensify, as hundreds of women are arrested for their actions, though the official charge is "obstructing traffic." They are sent to Occoquan Workhouse for 60-day terms where they suffer poor conditions. During this time, Alice Paul and other women undergo a hunger strike during which prison authorities force feed them milk and raw eggs through a tube. News of their treatment leaks to the media through the husband of one of the imprisoned women who had been able to lobby for a visit (the suffragists are depicted as otherwise unable to see visitors or lawyers). The media dubs these women 'Iron Jawed Angels.' Pressure is put on President Wilson as NAWSA seizes the opportunity to lobby tirelessly for the nineteenth amendment to the Constitution.

Paul, Burns and all of the other women are eventually pardoned by the President and the Supreme Court rules that their arrests were, in fact, unconstitutional.