Well Done, Sister Suffragists: The Suffragist Movement in Mary Poppins and Iron Jawed Angels

Rachel Miles
Jeannina Perez
WST 3015 (Introduction to Women’s Studies)
1 February 2010

Mary Poppins follows the activities of the Banks family, consisting of George and Winifred Banks and their two children, and the titular nanny’s efforts to reunite them. Both George and Winifred are, for the duration of the film, shown as largely-absentee parents: George is consumed with work at the bank, while Winifred spends her time at suffragist protests and meetings, and the movie makes it clear that those activities are just as described. George’s work provides steady income and allows the household to continue, and is accordingly shown with general respect (even if his verging-on-obsessive devotion to it is not). Winifred’s work, on the other hand, is consistently shown with a mocking air. She speaks of women tying themselves to stagecoach wheels, serving time in prison, and throwing spoiled food at the prime minister, but always with a gleeful, cheery tone. For her, the suffrage movement is a game, entertainment in which to indulge herself before returning home and again becoming the dutiful and subservient wife. With Winifred as the only glimpse of the British women’s suffrage movement Mary Poppins shows us, we are led to believe that all suffragists were the same—flighty, upper-class, White women with only a passing dedication to the cause as a social activity, not a political movement, and often at the expense of their family’s stability. In the end, Mary Poppins’ intervention forces Winifred to realize that her place is at home with her children, and she both metaphorically and literally ends her time a suffragist. Her suffragist sash is used as a tail on her children’s kite and she puts her involvement in the movement to the side, leaving us with the impression that the suffragist cause for British women, while disruptive to the functioning of families and larger society, was short-lived and generally ineffective—even when history tells us otherwise.

Conversely, Iron Jawed Angels presents a more serious, historically-accurate view of the suffragists. The film focuses on the later years of the U.S. women’s suffrage movement, specifically the portion spearheaded by Alice Paul and the National Women’s Party (NWP) she would eventually found. The suffragists here are no flighty socialites; on the contrary, women’s suffrage is, for them, everything. It is their source of employment and their greatest passion; the thing they crave most, and the thing they are willing to suffer the most for. They eat, sleep, and breathe it, such that it is more than a political cause: it, and the burgeoning women’s equality movement, is their cause for existence, and they suffer significant social and penal consequences for making it so. Unlike the punishments Winifred Banks happily sings about, though, Iron Jawed Angels shows these consequences, which range from verbal attacks at public demonstrations to being force-fed in attempts to derail Alice Paul’s in-prison hunger strike, as intense and grueling. In further contrast to Mary Poppins’ image of suffragists, Iron Jawed Angels depicts the movement’s multiracial nature and the racism that accordingly followed, specifically Ida B. Wells’ refusal “to march at the back of the 1913 suffrage parade” in protest of “the ‘back of the bus’ politic of the women’s movement” (Seely 41). This inclusion of women of color introduces issues modern feminism is still attempting to reconcile—namely, the perception that feminism is a White woman’s movement, and the continued (albeit diminishing) reticence within the feminist community to properly consider the impact of race as well as gender on a woman’s life experiences. Overall, the film leaves us with the definitive knowledge that women’s suffrage was hard-won, and that, while women may presently have the right to vote, the larger women’s movement is far from over.


Work Cited

Seely, Megan. Fight Like a Girl. New York: New York University Press, 2007. Print.