Home Issues XXIII-1 History, Memory and Politics Review article: The Politics of R This review article examines the debates and controversy surrounding the film Suffragette. It considers how historians might best engage with the politicisation of their research, and the role of the activist radical historian.
Yet not all the attention was positive, especially with regards to the race politics of both the film and the movement whose story it told. This posed some difficult questions for me as a historian and as a feminist committed to organising for radical social change.
How should I best engage with the explicit politicisation of my academic research, and how could I use history to inspire present-day struggles without romanticising, demonising or oversimplifying the past? This was a refreshing take on a movement that is often represented, at least on screen and in the school room, as a story of posh and slightly unhinged ladies in impressive hats, to whom we all have to feel extremely grateful.
The WSPU did indeed recruit among the wealthy, and was led mainly by middle-class women. Yet, as feminist historians have been arguing for decades, it also gained significant support from women workers β many of whom joined the fight, despite the difficulties of combining this with jobs in factories or domestic service and their responsibilities as wives and mothers.
Whereas, she argued, North American suffrage had at times excluded Black women from its ranks, this did not occur in Britain. Gavron also maintained that it was anachronistic to demand that women of colour be represented in the film, since in there were very few Black people living in the UK.
