Another impossibly high bar
Rosamund Urwin in The Evening Standard:
On Wednesday night, Suffragette opened the BFI London Film Festival. Along with the film’s stars, Carey Mulligan, Helena Bonham Carter and Meryl Streep, Sisters Uncut campaigners had their moment on the red carpet. They let off green-and-purple smoke bombs and staged a lie-in, protesting about government cuts to domestic violence services.
…
But while the feminist fire is burning bright, the flames are sometimes scorching other feminists. The Suffragette cast was understandably supportive of Sisters Uncut (“Marvellous” was Bonham Carter’s verdict: “That is exactly what the suffragettes were about”) but the protesters were less enamoured about the film. Writing for Independent Voices yesterday, Sarah Kwei, a member of Sisters Uncut, said she felt women of colour had been shut out of the story: “Where was Sophia Duleep Singh and her Indian sisters, who led the Black Friday deputation to the Houses of Parliament in 1910?”
Singh was an Indian Princess as well as Queen Victoria’s god-daughter who risked everything campaigning for female suffrage. “She was royalty yet one step away from being destitute,” says BBC presenter Anita Anand, who wrote a biography, Sophia: Princess, Suffragette, Revolutionary. Anand notes that Singh has been “made invisible by time” in that common way female experience is scrubbed out of history.
So when someone does make a movie about women’s history, let’s tear it to shreds for not covering everything, rather than saying great and now let’s have movies about this and this and this.
However, the makers of Suffragette had deliberately chosen to focus on working-class women because their stories have also been under-told. That’s why Streep’s Emmeline Pankhurst is only a cameo part and Mulligan’s laundrywoman Maud is the star. When I interviewed Mulligan for this month’s Elle, she was only too aware that feminism’s foot-soldiers had been historically side-lined and these were women who suffered disproportionately: “The sacrifice was greater for women who had far less.”
If the movie had focused on Sophia Duleep Singh, no doubt the critics would have been asking where the hell are the working class women.
Understanding of intersectionality is vital for feminism, as is debate and criticism. But there’s a pattern emerging where women who do something feminist get written off for being imperfectly feminist. But feminism is supposed to empower women, not tell them they’re failing to reach another impossibly high bar.
Spoken like a true White Feminist.
The solution is obvious, an infinite series of “Suffragette” movies, each one giving centre stage to members of a specific ethnic, religious or social group.
It’s a movie, a creative work, narcissistic objectors are quite welcome to finance their own ‘correct’ versions of movie history.
Is “she felt women of colour had been shut out of the story” equivalent to “tear[ing] it to shreds”?
Is “women of colour had been shut out of the story” an accurate description of the film? If so, it seems to me a worthwhile point to raise, and from this article, has been raised quite politely. And frankly, though I have seen photos of Sophia Singh’s march, I did not know her name, so the criticism has been informative as well.
Much more important than what one film does or doesn’t feature is how feminists handle such conversations.
“Singh was an Indian Princess as well as Queen Victoria’s god-daughter”
I’d rather learn about the Working Class activists myself.
They just should have cast Christabel as multi racial? Or had Emmeline in black face?
‘Intersectionality’ ought to mean space for more realistic breadth of content. Instead it is a license for any crackpot to play the ‘you’re privileged, so you should shut up and let me babble over you,’ card,