We all know who wrote the Declaration of Independence. But we're not so familiar with the author of the Equal Rights Amendment. Her name was Alice Stokes Paul. She was born in 1885 in Moorestown, New Jersey, not far from Philadelphia. Home Box Office is getting a two week jump on the thirty-one day observance of Women's History Month in March with the release of its new original motion picture, "Iron Jawed Angels." The film is about how Alice Paul and other suffragists fought the battle to win passage of the Nineteenth Amendment.
"Iron Jawed Angels" begins rather MTV-ish with a confusing series of quick-cut edits and some swanky (no pun intended) camera pans and zooms to hold, I guess, the just-tuning-in crowd. And the music is contemporary; no stuff of the first and second decades of the 20th Century in the background. And, although I found some of the music listenable, it was subtly distracting to the visual of how our eye remembers America circa 1912 and on into the Twenties. This doesn't take away from the historical importance and value of the film, although I do get the feeling there's so much more to this story, and what we're getting with "Iron Jawed Angels" is something that's been put through the HBO break-room compactor.
So, I hope that maybe HBO, or another fine producer of motion pictures, will return to the life of Alice Paul sometime. It's seems to me, after seeing "Iron Jawed Angels" and learning more about Miss Paul that she had an interesting life well-lived.
Gary Chew can be reached via email at garychew@comcast.net.
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Hilary Swank plays Miss Paul (as she preferred to
be called), a middle-class, well-educated, Quaker who brought stress to not
just a few prominent males, especially prior and during WWI. It was through
her lobbying and cajoling, along with Lucy Burns (Frances O'Connor), Inez
Milholland (Julia Ormond), Carrie Chapman Catt (Anjelica Huston) and Emily
Leighton (Molly Parker) that President Woodrow Wilson finally capitulated
and gave his support to amend the constitution for a nineteenth time. Wilson
bundled his support, however, into the rationale for supporting the war being
fought in Europe. Women having the right to vote just didn't seem, then,
to be enough for standing on its own merits.
