Iron Jawed Angels (2004) on Netflix
After the suffrage fight in England, Alice Paul and Lucy Burns bring a plan for women's votes nationwide, beginning in Washington, D.C. Established suffragist leaders find it too forceful.
- Netflix3.8/5
- IMDb7.3/106,780 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes89%
Trailer
Plot summary
Fresh from the suffrage fight in England, Alice Paul and Lucy Burns bring their plan before the National American Woman's Suffrage Association: to campaign in the capital itself for national voting rights for women. Leaders such as Carrie Chapman Catt judge their approach too forceful for the movement, but Paul and Burns win the right to lead the association's Congressional Committee in the capital, and they organize a suffrage procession for the day before Woodrow Wilson's inauguration. Soliciting donations at an art gallery, Paul persuades labor lawyer Inez Milholland to ride a white horse at the head of the parade, and she meets Ben Weissman, a Washington newspaper political cartoonist. Disagreements about fundraising drive the pair from the association, and they start the National Woman's Party.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Iron Jawed Angels (2004)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- The title comes from Massachusetts Representative Joseph Walsh, who in 1917 opposed creating a committee to deal with women's suffrage, calling it yielding to "the nagging of iron-jawed angels" and describing the Silent Sentinels as "bewildered, deluded creatures with short skirts and short hair".
- The film creates a fictional love interest for Alice Paul, the cartoonist Ben Weissman, although there is no evidence she had a sexually intimate relationship with anyone; it suggests she needed a newspaperman to get publicity when in reality Paul was a highly talented publicist in her own right.
- The parade scene never happened in reality: Paul marched in the college section in her cap and gown, not with the Illinois delegation that Wells-Barnett joined, and Wells-Barnett marched with two white Illinois women who had supported her right to march, Belle Squire and Virginia Brooks.
