Full disclosure: I've been a devout feminist since coming to understand what the term meant in the 70s, when I joined so many other women as we marched and ranted and had our consciousness raised. The understanding I gained back then has informed my life and beliefs and feelings ever since. If you want to get a taste of what it was like back then, specifically in 1975, which was International Women's Year, you may want to read a memoir I wrote, which I've pasted at the bottom of this blog post.
So it's not surprising that I've been dying to see
Suffragette, which is our pick for November,ever since I saw a blurb somewhere a couple years ago about Meryl Streep shooting a movie depicting the unbelievably brave and dedicated English women who fought for the vote a century ago.
Meryl Streep plays the movement's leader, Emmeline Pankhurst, which seems just right to me. She doesn't have a lot of screen time, though, because the film's point of view is that of a working woman, played by Carey Mulligan, who joins the struggle almost accidentally, but ends up battling cruel resistance from the male-dominated society.
We'll be seeing
Suffragette on Tuesday, October 3, at the Varsity Cinema (ManuLife Centre @ Bay & Bloor). Screen time is 1:20, but let's meet near the box office about 20 minutes earlier. Afterwards, those who wish to have a bite will go escalator ride down to Scaccia. If you plan to join in this, please notify me
no later than noon on Monday, October 2, so I can make a reservation for the correct number of people.
Synopsis: A
drama that tracks the story of the foot soldiers of the early feminist
movement, women who were forced underground to pursue a dangerous game
of cat and mouse with an increasingly brutal State. These women were not
primarily from the genteel educated classes, they were working women
who had seen peaceful protest achieve nothing. Radicalized and turning
to violence as the only route to change, they were willing to lose
everything in their fight for equality - their jobs, their homes, their
children and their lives. Maud was one such foot soldier. The story of
her fight for dignity is as gripping and visceral as any thriller, it is
also heart-breaking and inspirational.
Trailer: http://www.cinemaclock.com/ont/toronto/movies/suffragette-2015/videos
Review: http://www.truthdig.com/arts_culture/item/suffragette_movie_review_domestic_terrorist_or_proud_feminist_20151022
International Women’s Year
by Terry
Poulton
Last Thursday
was International Women’s Day. As I always do on March 8th, I spent
time
reminiscing about 1975, which was the United Nation’s International
Women’s Year.
In many ways, it
was the most exciting year of my life. I turned 30 that January and instead
of
deploring the milestone, as so many women had done for so long, I celebrated it
with
gusto. I had recently embraced feminism and was simultaneously bubbling
with excitement
and bristling with anger.
Every day seemed
to bring fresh evidence of women’s progress, or another outrageous attack on
our aspiration to be equals with men. Some days brought both. I got to
chronicle these events on campus radio at the University of Toronto,
where I was then a mature student studying at night. I was news director at
Radio Women, which was run by a feminist collective that had wangled one
evening per week to do whatever we wanted.
My head was
spinning with all the new possibilities for women, things that didn’t seem to
have been thought about since the suffragettes won us the vote a half century
earlier. I was reading, and being radicalized by, Ms. Magazine, The Feminine
Mystique, The Second Sex and The
Female Eunuch.
Gloria Steinem
came to town and made a speech that still echoes in my mind from time to time.
“Make trouble,” she said to hundreds of cheering women.
With all this
swirling around in my cranium, I wrote and broadcast 15 minutes worth of
stories on the radio every Tuesday evening. Stories like all the “firsts” for
women including: Pauline McGibbon
becoming Canada’s first female Lieutenant Governor; Pauline Jewett taking
office as the first woman president of a major Canadian university (Simon
Fraser); The Times of London naming
its first female news editor in 186 years; Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau
appointing the second woman in a row
as Speaker of the Senate; the RCMP allowing women to join for the first time in
its 101-year history; and even the first policewoman in the United States being
shot and killed on duty.
I reported many
more stories that year, and participated in rowdy protest marches,
rabble-rousing women’s events and many, many private “consciousness-raising”
meetings.
And in my day
job I piloted a big adventure. I was editor of Communiqué, a magazine published by a national lobbying group
called the Canadian Conference of the Arts. We nabbed some of the special
funding devoted to International Women’s Year and produced a special edition
devoted to Women in the Arts in Canada – the only venture of its kind to this
day, which is why it now resides in the National Archives.
It was
incredibly exhilarating and empowering to assemble a team of writers – among
them some of my feminist friends – to showcase women writers, musicians,
dancers, actresses, playwrights, filmmakers, craftswomen, and visual artists.
Along the way, we discovered forgotten facts including that Anna Leonowens, of The King and I fame, came to Canada after leaving Siam and founded what’s now the
Nova Scotia College of Art and Design; and that a Canadian woman named Nell
Shipman produced, scripted, directed and acted in silent movies shot here in
the late 1920s.
I commissioned
then-unknown, now-famous Susan Swan to interview Margaret Atwood, and novelist
Marian Engel to write about our homegrown female storytellers. Little old me
negotiated with the Vancouver
Art Gallery
and the Art Gallery of Ontario to get a painting by Emily Carr for our cover.
When my
brainchild was published, it drew a lot of attention, including congratulatory
letters from the prime minister, senators, cabinet ministers and many others –
some of whom were probably just bowing to political correctness rather than
exhibiting truly raised consciousness in that special year.
I’m grateful for
so much of what happened in 1975, not least the fact that, having discovered me
through Communiqué, Peter C. Newman
spring-boarded my professional writing career two years later, when he invited
me to write for Maclean’s. I also met
and bonded with some remarkable women who are still my dearest friends 37 years
later.
But perhaps most
of all, I’m glad there was something we didn’t
know back then: How many sinister forces would slither into prominence decades
later to try to roll back what we achieved, and to bring back the dark days
when women lacked the power to control their own lives.
