Those enamoured with BBC Two’s starry second-wave feminism drama Mrs America, which tells the story of the Equal Rights Amendment and its conservative nemesis Phyllis Schlafly, may also enjoy The Vote (PBS America), an in-depth, two-part documentary, which at times plays out like a black-and-white prequel. It kicks off with archive footage of “women’s liberationists” marching to mark 50 years since women won the right to vote in the US – and a male reporter deriding the marchers, raising the possibility of men losing their wives to the movement. Now, 100 years after the 19th amendment was ratified, we learn how women fought for suffrage, with all of the complex, unedifying twists and turns that the process took.
It is well narrated, as you would expect from actors of the calibre of Patricia Clarkson, Audra McDonald and Mae Whitman, and the story is artfully pieced together by Michelle Ferrari, who writes and directs. One of the main threads follows the story of suffragist Alice Paul, who travelled to Britain, was the first woman to take an economics class at the University of Birmingham, fell in with the Pankhursts, became, she wrote, “a heart and soul convert to the cause of woman’s suffrage”, was later imprisoned in Holloway, was force-fed, and eventually returned to the US to hurry the cause along in her home nation. (Though this is American history, it does turn up many nuggets of British trivia, such as the term “suffragette” being a derogatory, diminishing term, coined as a play on “suffragist” by a sceptical newspaper.)
The Pankhursts’ influence on the American movement is hinted at here, mostly through Paul, and through Harriot Stanton Blatch, daughter of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and “the first second wave feminist,” as one historian refers to her, warmly. Blatch had the idea that the nation should be talking about women’s suffrage, so that the idea was familiar to the people whether they agreed or disagreed with it. This seems oddly noble in an era where lines are drawn and sides are taken on the basis of a snatch of a headline, or a Tweet.
A good historical documentary will always lead the viewer to find the contemporary parallels while letting them draw those conclusions for themselves, and there are plenty of opportunities left open for that here. There are photographs of the violent suppression of women’s marches and parades, both in the UK and the US. As the modern political climate can seem to treat violence against women as inconvenient for the perpetrator, rather than any sort of career-ending scandal, it sometimes offers a depressingly cyclical vision.
It begins the history proper with the first women’s rights convention, in Seneca Falls, New York in 1848, but the real focus is the early 1900s, when the women’s suffrage movement is in a state of division and unpopularity, against a backdrop of populism, racism and classism. The women advocating for their right to vote are doing so to a general public suspicious of democracy and a government stuffed with white men who would like to keep it that way.
The Vote is matter-of-fact about race and racism, and one of its strengths is that it does not shy away from documenting some of the terrible betrayals carried out by the most famous American suffragists. While the suffrage movement began with a call for equal voting rights for all, it soon split along lines of race, and this film tells how black figures are repeatedly sidelined, rejected, segregated and discriminated against, from Frederick Douglass to Ida B Wells. It is a story that repeats itself, over and over.
This is an extremely thorough account of the 19th and early 20th century, crafted with skill and care. The link between women’s suffrage and the temperance movement, for example, is explained sympathetically: some women were involved in both, because they were concerned about men becoming violent towards their wives after drinking, and spending all the family money, to which the women had no recourse. But this failed to fly in Ohio, when the reputation of temperance may have lost early campaigners a crucial referendum. Bars offered free beers to men who voted against suffrage. Of course, women needed men to vote for them to vote.
This is an ambitious documentary, done in that particular, detailed American style. It is more than worth the time it asks of the viewer. The Vote is, after all, a celebration – even if it is a messy and complicated one.
