This review article examines the debates and controversy surrounding the film Suffragette. It considers how historians might best engage with the politicisation of their research, and the role of the activist radical historian. Yet not all the attention was positive, especially with regards to the race politics of both the film and the movement whose story it told. This posed some difficult questions for me as a historian and as a feminist committed to organising for radical social change.
How should I best engage with the explicit politicisation of my academic research, and how could I use history to inspire present-day struggles without romanticising, demonising or oversimplifying the past? This was a refreshing take on a movement that is often represented, at least on screen and in the school room, as a story of posh and slightly unhinged ladies in impressive hats, to whom we all have to feel extremely grateful. The WSPU did indeed recruit among the wealthy, and was led mainly by middle-class women.
Yet, as feminist historians have been arguing for decades, it also gained significant support from women workers — many of whom joined the fight, despite the difficulties of combining this with jobs in factories or domestic service and their responsibilities as wives and mothers. Whereas, she argued, North American suffrage had at times excluded Black women from its ranks, this did not occur in Britain.
Gavron also maintained that it was anachronistic to demand that women of colour be represented in the film, since in there were very few Black people living in the UK. Although she argued for the need to move away from Anglo-centric narratives of the suffrage movement, and to recognise the degree to which it was a global struggle fought for by women around the world, Mukherjee was nevertheless troubled by the uncritical deployment of the photograph.
As she pointed out, the Indian women in the picture were not, in fact, fighting for votes for Indian women living under colonial rule, but were participating in a British suffrage procession that celebrated Empire. The British suffrage movement, however, never experienced such an explicit moment of betrayal and rupture. In contrast to the United States, the primary site in which the racism of the British state and society in the nineteenth and early twentieth century played out was not the metropole, but its Empire.
