What’s so saintly about destroying a happy family?
IT WAS absurd to deny votes to women for so long. But the fashionable new film Suffragette is deeply misleading about how this came about, and rather nasty. Did Meryl Streep know what she was doing when she lent her stardom to this production?
It makes a saint out of a (fictional) workingclass woman, played by Carey Mulligan, who ruthlessly destroys her small, happy family for the sake of an abstraction, ignoring the pleas and kindly advice of good men.
And it makes a heroine out of another fanatic, played by Helena Bonham Carter, who is in fact a terrorist, and helps to blow up a Cabinet Minister’s home. I hope the makers are not prosecuted under the absurd and unBritish 2006 Terrorism Act, which created the offence of ‘Glorifying Terrorism’, though some may think that is what their film does. There is quite a lot of evidence that the militant suffragettes actually damaged the cause they so noisily pursued. The film doesn’t even mention the First World War, which did far more to bring about votes for women than hunger strikes, broken windows or arson.