In the provocative three-part series, SUFFRAGETTES FOREVER! THE STORY OF WOMEN AND POWER, Professor Amanda Vickery (THE STORY OF WOMEN AND ART) examines the lengthy struggle for women’s rights in Britain. While the Edwardian suffragettes won the vote, Vickery reveals that they were part of a much longer battle that began in the 18th century.
In a story that puts the battle for the vote in its true historical context, Vickery shows how bloody revolutionary movements, working class radicals, lovestruck philosophers, campaigners in the sex industry, and even the humble bicycle all played a part in tackling social injustice – a fight that continues to this day.
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EPISODE GUIDE:
Episode 1 airs Tuesday, Nov. 1 at 11 p.m. & Sunday, Nov. 6 at Noon - The suffragette campaign was the inevitable conclusion of a fight that women — rich and poor — had been pursuing for hundreds of years against a system that gave men complete legal, political and physical control over the other half of the population. In this first episode Professor Amanda Vickery explains that a wife was considered the property of her husband. If he chose to, he could beat, rape or even sell her to another man. However, the revolutionary politics of the late 18th century cracked open the door to change.
From a wife sale at Hailsham cattle market, to the bloodstained streets of Paris on the trail of the grandmother of British feminism; from the heroic Manchester women attacked at Peterloo, to opportunity presented by the Great Reform Act, Vickery describes how at every step men furiously resisted giving women power.
Episode 2 airs Wednesday, Nov. 2 at 11 p.m. & Sunday, Nov. 6 at 1 p.m. - In this episode Professor Amanda Vickery describes the paradox for British women: a female queen who thought women's rights campaigners deserved a good whipping. Yet, during Victoria's reign extraordinary women gradually changed the lives and opportunities of their gender, despite successive governments furiously resisting to give women the vote.
Vickery introduces the spurned mistress of a prime minister, who lost custody of her own children but won the first piece of modern feminist legislation — child custody rights for mothers. We meet a passionate campaigner who raised the age of consent and overthrew pernicious laws against prostitutes; a Cambridge undergraduate who proved that girls could be even better at math than boys, while undermining the centuries-old prejudice that a Cambridge education was for men only; and, Mrs. Pankhurst and her daughters, who decided that after many years of women campaigning for the vote, it was now time to resort to deeds rather than words.
Episode 3 airs Thursday, Nov. 3 at 11 p.m. & Sunday, Nov. 6 at 2 p.m. - In the final episode of the story of British women's fight for power, historian Amanda Vickery explores how the Edwardian suffragette movement became a quasi-terrorist organization. Pointing to what they achieved with their violent campaign, Vickery argues that the work of the suffragettes are best understood as part of a war still going on today.
Vickery brings to life the enemies of female suffrage too: from the golfing prime minister Herbert Asquith — who had nightmares of being stripped naked by angry suffragettes — to the furious anti-suffrage societies and their mass meetings in the Royal Albert Hall. She describes the political skullduggery to stop women from getting the vote and the increasing extremism of the suffragettes in response.
What did the suffragettes achieve? Vickery describes the political backroom deal that finally allowed some women the vote, the abusive treatment of the first female MP Lady Astor and the misogynistic backlash of the 1920s, revealed through attitudes to a great women's football team.
The series concludes by looking ahead, 50 years after women won the vote, to Margaret Thatcher. Was her election a sign that the suffragette dream had been fulfilled, or is this a fight is still present today?
CREDITS: Producer is DCD Rights Limited. Distributed by American Public Television
