• 1 See Sally G. McMillen, Seneca Falls and the Origins of the Women’s Rights Movement, Oxford  (...)
• 2 Ellen Carol Dubois, Feminism and Suffrage : The Emergence of an Independent Women's (...)
• 3 Sara Hunter Graham, Woman Suffrage and the New Democracy, New Haven (CT) : Yale Uni (...)

2In 1848, the Declaration of Sentiments was approved at the Seneca Falls Convention. The Declaration, penned by suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton, was modeled after the Declaration of Independence and stipulated that to achieve equality, women must be franchised1. Despite strong momentum across the country, by 1890, women had not yet achieved suffrage. That year, Susan Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton attempted to consolidate suffragists’ efforts by bringing together two rival national women’s groups – the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA) and the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA). The former directed energy and activism at state-level enfranchisement for women; the latter included a small male membership and sought to achieve national suffrage through a constitutional amendment2. With the merger of AWSA and NSWA into the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) came a new commitment to serve as a national umbrella to help mobilize and support suffragists at the state level instead of focusing on a constitutional amendment.3

• 4 See for instance The Indian Copyright Act, 1957.

9Alternatively, the relationship between law and film can be thought of in terms of the rules that govern filmmaking: intellectual property regimes, labor standards, and censorship guidelines. The Motion Picture Association of America, for instance, rates movies and may recommend against viewing by people under a certain age when violence and nudity are portrayed ; laws may also regulate the reproduction and distribution of films.4

• 5 Robert Cover, “Violence and the Word,” in Martha Minow, Michael Ryan & Austi Sarat (eds.), (...)

10Finally, the relationship between law and film can be considered in terms of their mutually constitutive nature. This approach is based on two assumptions : films can reflect actualities about law, or truths about what law is, but they can also suggest other possibilities for law, or what law ought to be. Film, like literature, mythology and other art forms, is a way of telling stories about law. Through film, we imagine and construct new visions of how to relate to one another. Films, like laws, can be, to borrow from Robert Cover, projections of possible futures upon reality5. Accordingly, films have normative power : they play an active role in the circulation and promulgation of certain values, popular beliefs, world-views, ideologies, and expectations about, among other things, law, gender and justice. Moreover, films can elicit different responses from viewers and often in a more immediate register than reading the written words of a legal judgment. It is this understanding of the law-film relation that, I believe, is most relevant to my intersectional reading of Iron Jawed Angels, and according to which I claim that the film generates meanings about women’s legal status at the turn of the 20^th century.

• 6 Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins : Intersectionality, Identity Poli (...)
• 7 For thought-provoking discussions in other fields, see the work of Leslie McCall, “The Comp (...)
• 8 Leslie McCall, op. cit. Patricia Hill-Collins , op. cit. Yet, as Jennifer Nash rightly note (...)
• 9 Angela Davis, Women, Culture, and Politics, New York : Vintage Books, 1990, 18.
• 10 Adrienne Rich, Compulsory Heterosexuality and the Lesbian Existence, London : Only Women (...)
• 11 Nasa Begum, “Disabled Women and the Feminist Agenda,” Feminist Review, vol. 40, 199 (...)
• 12 Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes : Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses (...)
• 13 Patricia Monture-Angus, Thunder in my Soul : A Mohawk Woman Speaks, Toronto : Fernw (...)

11Intersectionality is a metaphor, a theoretical approach and a methodology to understanding how social, cultural, political, aesthetic and juridical subject positions are located within multiple systems of power6. To speak of intersectionality is to locate a subject, in a particular moment of interaction along shifting vectors of privilege, based on race, class, gender, sexual identity or expression, age, nationality, or religion. The intersectional self, or the legal subject, is not fixed, but rather fluid, permeable and contradictory. The intersectional method in feminist legal scholarship is generally attributed to the early work of Kimberlé Crenshaw7. More recently, it has become the method of choice across disciplines in which feminist scholars have worked to destabilize the universal female subject of much of the orthodox feminist thinking and activism8. Before the concept of intersectionality became a dominant trope of feminism, scholars and activists had long established how the feminist movement, by furthering the myth of universal sisterhood, was itself reinforcing interlocking systems of domination by ignoring other discursive categories of race, class, disability, age, and nationality that are fluid and shift over time. Specifically, feminists claimed that universality occluded the specificities of class oppression9, engaged in “white solipsism”, conceded to heterosexual privilege10, displaced the concerns of differently abled women11, exhibited condescension to women of the “Third World”12, and was complicit with colonial and imperial structures13.

• 14 Court upheld the constitutional validity of a state law which required persons of d (...)
• 15 On the complexity of the concept of substantive equality, see Catharine A. MacKinno (...)

12Intersectional analyses aim to recognize women’s shared experiences of discrimination and stigma in relation to legal, economic and political institutions while highlighting how the potential for coalitions and solidarity among women is complicated by divergences in access to social, economic, institutional, political and cultural power. Consequently, scholars and activists who explicitly use intersectionality to grapple with gender inequality argue that formal equality – the orthodox liberal view of equality as treating like people alike – is insufficient to effect transformative social projects14. Instead, intersectionality favors substantive equality, that locates the disadvantaged historically, takes into account differences in opportunity or in access to resources, strives to counter the negative impacts of laws and policies that treat everyone “identically”, and protects policies and programs that address discrimination proactively15.

• 16 Sherene Razack, Looking White People in the Eye : Gender, Race, and Culture in Cour (...)
• 17 Merri Lisa Johnson, “Gangster Feminism : The Feminist Cultural Work of HBO's ‘The Sopranos’ (...)

13Intersectional approaches have certainly encouraged critical self-reflection by feminist activists and scholars who occupy spaces of privilege ; it has also permitted the feminist movement to articulate differences among women. Its transformative thrust lies in its utility in merging discursive critique with pragmatic anti-subordination tactics16. Intersectionality draws attention to women’s multiple forms of victimization, but more importantly, it invites an understanding of the specificities of women’s resistance that emerges within intersectional hegemonic structures17. Intersectionality is not simply a means of documenting multiple categories of identity ; rather, it is a political and historically-located structural analysis of power and hegemony that stems from the knowledge produced from the experiences of marginalized women.

• 18 Nikol G. Alexander-Floyd, “Disappearing Acts : Reclaiming Intersectionality in the (...)
• 19 Jennifer Nash, “Rethinking Intersectionality,” Feminist Review, vol. 89, 2008, 6.
• 20 Ibid, 4.
• 21 Ruth Buchanan & Rebecca Johnson, “Strange Encounters: Exploring Law and Film in the (...)

14The intersectional method has been called into question by a number of feminist scholars. Nikol G. Alexander-Floyd, for instance, shows how the intersectional method has been reappropriated in ways that “re-subordinate” marginalized women, especially women of color18. Rachel Luft and Jane Ward have documented how scholars who fail to account for the structural sources of inequality and oppression turn out a flattened and ultimately empty version of intersectionality. Jennifer Nash finds that in an effort to dismantle essentialism, some feminists lock us into divisive and fractured selves that practically render equality-seeking endeavor to mobilize an exercise in futility19. J. Nash also urges us to reconsider in what circumstances it “makes sense” to rally as “women”, as “racialized women”, or as any other “equity-seeking” group; she asks feminists to consider new forms of coalitions that cross identify markers and the systems of power in which they are embedded20. The cinematic media may assist in such a project. Cinema’s aesthetic techniques can jolt us viewers to feel empathy and regard for experiences different from our own21. Films may invoke in us a desire to understand and possibly even do something about injustice.

• 22 See Trisha Franzen, “Singular Leadership : Anna Howard Shaw, Single Women and t (...)
• 23 On the characteristics of working women between 1870 and 1920 generally, see Claudia Gold (...)

16Whereas the suffragist movement of the turn of the century was predominantly the purview of white, socially connected, upper-middle-class married women, with time and resources to devote to meaningful causes22, single, unmarried, migrant women dominated the industrial labour force23. Alice Paul and her contemporaries, however, were part of a new wave of suffragists who were highly educated, yet single, and often childless. These new suffragists sought to expand their pool of allies, especially to forge ties with women in the labour movement.

• 24 Leon Stein, The Triangle Fire, New York : J.B. Lippincott Company, 1962. Arthur F. McEvoy (...)
• 25 Doris Stevens, Jailed for Freedom : American Women Win the Vote, Freeport (NY) : Books (...)

17Ruza Wenclawska, sometimes referred to in newspapers and other cultural artefacts by the anglicized version of her name, Rose Winslow, played a crucial role in marshalling immigrant working-class women around broad issues, including universal suffrage24. Wenclawska had long sought out alliances with her male counterparts in the factory and workers’ advocates within the mining industry. She was well-versed in classical Marxist critiques of the work structure and she favored solidarity among all workers rather than adopting a universal sisterhood model of social transformation25. In Iron Jawed Angels, Alice Paul meets Ruza Wenclawska (Vera Farmiga), a Polish immigrant, outside a factory in Pennsylvania. The scene begins as the young factory worker, in close-up shot, performs repetitive tasks in near darkness; there is sweat on her brow and the diegetic sound is a mix of the metal cranks from the factory floor and the voice of Lucy Burns :

• 26 Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique, New York : W.W. Norton & Company, 1963. Sheila Rowb (...)
• 27 Catharine A. Mackinnon, “Feminism, Marxism, Method and the State : An Agenda for Theory,” (...)

22While Iron Jawed Angels does not explicitly articulate a socialist feminist analysis, with one phrase from Ruza, “You have children ?”, it conveys a complex and an enduring question in feminist movement: how do we alter the conditions of ownership, production and reproduction to enable women to choose or refuse motherhood without also incurring economic disadvantage26. The scene also points to another reality: the on-going relevance of socialist feminism and its challenge to leftist discourses and practices that indirectly or directly overlook women’s experiences of class oppression27.

• 28 Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote 1850- (...)
• 29 Glenda E. Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow : Women and the Politics of White Suprem (...)
• 30 Following Crenshaw, Black Women is capitalized as they constitute a “specific cultural gr (...)

24The federal amendment of 1920 granted white women the right to vote. Women of African descent, however, did not obtain full suffrage until well into the 1960s with the advent of the Civil Rights Movement28. Until then, constitutional exemptions and Jim Crow policies of racial segregation ensured African American women’s disenfranchisement29. The film tells the story of two young, white suffragists, leaving aside a less visible story : African American women’s organization and the leadership of women, and the alliances forged between African American women, African American men, and white women30. Indeed, women of African descent had long been mobilized to counter discrimination and oppression and had been lobbying for universal suffrage through voluntary organizations and Church groups. One example is Ida Wells Barnett (1862-1931) who stands out for her work to secure universal suffrage; she also devoted her life to further challenge the bans on miscegenation and worked tirelessly to have lynching recognized as a violation of fundamental rights. In 1893, for instance, she gave an impassioned speech insisting that :

• 32 Chesapeake, Ohio, & Southwestern Railroad Co. v. Wells, 85 Tenn. (1 Pickle) 613, 4 S.W. 5 (...)
• 33 “A Darky Damsel Obtains a Verdict for Damages against the Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad,” Me (...)

25It is this kind of analysis and discourse that indicates what Hill Collins has argued, namely, that Ida Wells Barnett prefigured intersectional analysis in her work by making explicit connections between race, gender and sexuality. She herself had dealt with the formal justice system when, as a young teacher, she purchased a ticket for the ladies car in first class where “respectable women” could avoid the “smoking and obscene language” in the second class compartment. When she boarded the Southwestern Railroad train, the conductor refused her access to first class ; she protested and was forcibly removed32. In 1887, judge Piece of the Shelby Circuit Court awarded Ida Wells Barnett 500$ in damages : 300$ of which was for the company’s failure to provide her with first class accommodation, despite having accepted her fare; 200$ was “for the greater wrong” of forcibly ejecting her from the train33. The decision was reversed, however, on appeal before the Supreme Court of Tennessee.

• 34 Vron Ware, “Moments of Danger : Race, Gender and Memories of Empire,” History and Theory  (...)

26Iron Jawed Angels makes no reference to these facts. It could, consequently, be criticized for failing to commit to a historically informed and anti-racist agenda that reclaims this history and a past that is too often ignored in mainstream accounts of feminist movement34. The film nonetheless invokes a race analysis through a brief interaction between Alice Paul and Ida Wells Barnett (Adilah Barnes). We hear Ida Wells Barnett (IWB) before we meet her and we get a sense of her influence and power: the sound of her voice alone gets Paul’s attention and her self-introduction : “Ida Wells Barnett, from the Chicago Delegation.” In a wide shot, Ida Wells Barnett stands in the doorway. She is framed by sunlight and barred windows. There is a cut to a medium shot of Lucy Burns (LB) who looks uneasy, wipes her brow and takes a deep breath. The camera moves to Alice Paul (AP) who walks over to greet Ida Wells Barnett with a handshake. In a shot-reverse shot sequence, each moment of dialogue is captured through an alteration of identical medium shots separated by cuts : (1) IWB, arms by her side, framed in natural light and seen from over AP’s shoulder; and (2) AP, arms behind her back, seen from over IWB’s shoulder and with LB in the background standing with a hand on her hip.

• 36 The suffrage movement, for instance, is scarred by its association with eugenic policies (...)
• 37 Barbara Smith, “Ain’t Goon Let Nobody Turn Me Around,” in The Black Scholar (ed.), Court (...)
• 38 See Goli Rezai-Rashti, “Anti-Racist Feminism: Connecting Race, Class and Gender (...)
• 39 Patricia Hill-Collins, op. cit., 96.

28The interaction between Alice and Ida demonstrates the pitfalls of unholy alliances such as those between some feminists and conservative fundamentalists36. Without trying to “pit racial oppression against sexual oppression”37, Ida W. Barnett challenges white women to stop neglecting race in an effort to further social conditions for certain women38. The scene highlights how mainstream feminist efforts to promote equality at the turn of the 20th century were embedded within existing intersecting power relations. Importantly, it also conveys how women of African descent were already deploying intersectional frameworks to reveal the limits to “mono-categorical thinking”39 about equality and social change more broadly. Whether or not Alice Paul and Lucy Barns exhibited racist animus is irrelevant to the scene; the point is that Ida W. Barnett takes the role of a judge and determines Alice and Lucy to be engaging in tactics that promote racial segregation. The final moment of interaction, when Ida turns away and leaves is a mirror held up for Alice, showing her what the white suffrage movement actually is. It is also, a projection, showing her what the movement ought to and can be. In the next scene, the film invites the viewers themselves to judge Alice Paul for her reductive assessment of other women.

• 40 Cultural capital refers to the competences, skills, habits of mind and resources that per (...)
• 41 Leslie McCall, “Does Gender Fit ? Bourdieu, Feminism, and Conceptions of Social Order,” T (...)
• 42 Terry Lovell, “Thinking Feminism with and against Bourdieu,” Feminist Theory, vol. 1, n°1 (...)

29In his pivotal work on social reproduction, Pierre Bourdieu argues that one’s relative social and cultural capital reflects the “aggregate of the actual or potential resources […] linked to possession of a durable network of more or less institutionalized relationships of mutual acquaintance and recognition.”40 Bourdieu’s framework is generally used to understand class dynamics ; it has, however, been challenged by socialist feminists for its androcentricism41. More recently, his conceptual frame has nonetheless been deployed as a device to understand and articulate how patriarchal and capitalist relations intersect42. The institution of marriage, for instance, can be examined as a means of achieving cultural capital and a social area through which are reproduced differential access to cultural and social capital.

• 43 Ellen Carol Dubois, op. cit., 39-40.

33Alice essentially claims that women who adhere to a different set of values – those often attributed to maternal feminism – are of little use, and worse a liability for the suffrage movement, and for women’s equality more broadly. Maternal feminism, associated with more conservative understanding of gender roles, favored policies and structures that would enable women to remain committed to home and family, and to exercise their moral influence over the men in their lives within the private sphere. At a time when some women were entering higher education, having less children, and ensuring the right to divorce43, maternal feminists’ gendered beliefs were a threat to women’s achievements. At the same time, their money and connections were necessary to advancing those achievements, including suffrage.

• 44 The work of cultural feminists, informed by Carol Gilligan’s ethics of care, are particul (...)

34Some may read that Alice is challenging Emily as though she were an equal : pointing to her hypocrisy, calling upon her to acknowledge her privilege, take a stand and do something to help herself and her sisters. This reading is informed by an idealism to call out orthodox feminists to be mindful of their social and political power. I am of the belief, however, that the film also articulates something else. Feminist tactics that aim only to humiliate our interlocutors wound in ways that do not further feminist values and that further alienate alternative modes of conflict resolution founded upon inter-subjective dialogue and the valuing of everyone’s specificity and world-views44.

• 45 Dianne Post, “Why Marriage Should Be Abolished,” Women’s Rights Law Reporter, vol. 18, n° (...)
• 46 Mary Louise Fellows & Sherene Razack, “The Race to Innocence: Confronting Hierarchical Re (...)

35Emily’s confinement to the private sphere, psychological and intellectual restraint and adherence to norms of femininity may make her tactics less explicitly disruptive but they are subversive nonetheless. Her method of resisting conditions of constraint is non-confrontational, sentimental perhaps but certainly within an ethos of care for her family and for the suffrage movement. Two later scenes illustrate the film’s own tension around the difficult question of difference. Emily will, in the end, support the movement, picket alongside Alice; she will also be arrested with the other suffragists. However, her public engagement with the movement will only occur after her husband wields his economic advantage and legal status, threatening to leave her destitute. The threat to have her children taken from her is, of course, backed by a legal system that still considers women to be men’s chattel45. Rather than critically examining how multiple systems of oppression commingle in ways that operate differently, but with no less material consequences, in her life46, these later scenes call into question Alice’s assessment of Emily as quintessential upper-class oppressor.

• 47 Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen, vol. 16, n°3, Autumn 1975, 6- (...)

36There are always multiple and competing stories, voices, and ideologies at play in any film. It is unsurprisingly then that Iron Jawed Angels circulates contradictory messages at times. Indeed, the screenplay may suggest a less empowering image of Alice Paul by insisting that she has a heterosexual love interest, albeit a single father and leftist ally. Moreover, the film’s jacket cover – a woman’s bare back draped only by an American flag – might, according to some feminist theorists, invite heterosexual male identification and female objectification47. The camera’s gaze is, according to this view, created by and for male desires and fantasies; the camera objectifies women’s bodies purely for the pleasure of male spectators.

• 48 In Boys Don’t Cry, she plays a non- or pre-operative trans-man and in Million Dollar Baby (...)
• 49 Merri Lisa Johnson, op. cit.

37The film remains a feminist legal text nevertheless. It attempts to promote and reproduce new understandings of women's equality, of gender roles, and of strategic coalitions. The scenes that depict Alice Paul’s suffering must be read in light of Katja von Garnier’s aesthetic, political and normative commitment to portray the sacrifices and struggles that her protagonist faced. Alice Paul challenged her own class privilege by advocating the rights for women workers; she refused to shield herself from the legal sanctions associated with the movements for passive civil disobedience ; she challenged orthodoxies by advocating more direct action and tactics; she was sentenced to prison for attempting to further women’s rights; and she was violently force-fed (graphically depicted near the end of the film). Further, the choice of actors in the film invites a feminist understanding of the film and its protagonists’ motivations, actions, and choices. Consider what difference it would make if Alice Paul’s character were played by anyone other than Hilary Swank who has played romantically ambivalent characters who challenge hetero-normativity48. Moreover, the film was produced and marketed to an audience familiar with HBO’s commitment to releasing intelligent, progressive, and complex material49.

• 50 These comments were made during Rev. Peterson’s Sunday service “Exploring Your Destiny,” br (...)

38Iron Jawed Angels is a powerful medium for exploring feminist concerns about law and political institutions. It conveys how hierarchies among women play out in a more subtle and implicit manner depending on one’s shifting location along vectors of privilege and disadvantage. It tells a partial yet realistic story of Alice Paul’s involvement in the American women’s suffrage movement that takes several women’s vantage points, including women differently located along axes of privilege and disadvantage. It is a rich and complex site where gendered meanings about law and justice continue to be circulated today. Strangely enough, the film is also timely and almost anticipates fundamentalist attacks on women’s suffrage in the West. Recall that in May 2012, Reverend Jesse Lee Peterson made the shocking remark that granting women suffrage was “one of the greatest mistakes America made” as women are “voting for people who are evil.”50In this landscape, it is more important than ever to remember the struggles of the feminist foremothers, to honor their sacrifices, to accept them as flawed human beings who were attempting to craft more meaningful life conditions within their own varying conditions of constraint, and to remember their oversights in an attempt to avoid them in our own equality-seeking efforts.

• 51 Several film scholars reject the opposition, and often hierarchical ordering, of fictional (...)

39My cinematic study of Iron Jawed Angels is not meant to assess whether the film is a perfectly accurate depiction of the historical events that led to women’s suffrage in the United States. The meanings audiences attach to particular scenes are contingent and ultimately emerge from each audience member’s lived experience. My interpretation of Iron Jawed Angels, like any other audience member’s, occurs through and within a particular interpretive community: law-and-film scholars and feminist law-and-film scholars especially. Consequently, the film’s (necessarily contingent) meanings, as I present them here, include my interpretation of director Katja von Garnier’s intended messages. They are an evaluation of its ability to meet my expectations given its form (a biopic or fictionalized account of real events)51, aesthetic devices (continuity conventions blended with more experimental editing and modern music), subject matter (the story of a white woman’s role in the suffrage movement), and marketing (the trailer and tagline insist on its factuality). Each of these devices and choices carries contradictory feminist messages, critiques, and understandings about equality. These contradictions permit Iron Jawed Angels to work as a contemporary feminist reappropriation and critical engagement of the suffragist movement.