Plot
The film begins as Alice Paul (Hilary Swank) and Lucy Burns (Frances O'Connor) return from England, where they participated in the women's suffrage movement. Once the pair becomes more active within the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), they begin to understand that their ideas were much too forceful for the established activists, particularly Carrie Chapman Catt (Anjelica Huston). The pair leave NAWSA and found the National Women's Party (NWP), a better way to fight for women's rights.
Over time, problems occur as NAWSA leaders criticize NWP tactics, such as protesting against a wartime President Woodrow Wilson and picketing outside the White House with "Silent Sentinels." Male supremacists famously (and infamously) label the women "iron-jawed angels." Relations between the American government and the NWP protesters also intensify, as many women are arrested for their actions, though the official charge is "obstructing traffic."
The women are sent to the Occoquan Workhouse for 60-day terms where they suffer under unsanitary and inhumane conditions. During this time, Paul and other women undertake a hunger strike, during which paid guards force-feed them milk and raw eggs. News of their treatment leaks to the media through the husband of one of the imprisoned women, a U.S. Senator, who has been able to lobby for a visit (the suffragists are otherwise unable to see visitors or lawyers) by putting a letter in his shirt. Pressure is put on President Wilson as the NAWSA seizes the opportunity to try for the nineteenth amendment to the Constitution.
Paul, Burns and all of the other women were all pardoned by President Wilson.
Read more about this topic: Iron Jawed Angels
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“Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“If you need a certain vitality you can only supply it yourself, or there comes a point, anyway, when no one’s actions but your own seem dramatically convincing and justifiable in the plot that the number of your days concocts.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“We have defined a story as a narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence. A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. “The king died and then the queen died” is a story. “The king died, and then the queen died of grief” is a plot. The time sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it.”
—E.M. (Edward Morgan)