Iron Jawed Angels: Political Freedoms and Legitimacy

Iron Jawed Angels follows Alice Paul in her role in the movement for women’s suffrage in the United States. The film rightly praises the sacrifice involved in participating in and organizing the movement, and through the hardships presented we eventually get to see the Nineteenth Amendment be passed. The struggle for female political equality has indeed continued beyond the end of the film and continues to this day. With the considerable advance of allowing the right for women to vote, and growing female membership of congress, women have more direct influence over politics than the events of the film. Modern political equality focuses on the role of women in politics, as the female membership of congress remains below representative of the country. A constant between the struggles today and in the 1900s is, as stated in the film, the goals of including women in the democratic process, thereby getting the government to address women’s issues and more importantly for women to be treated as equal partners in society. The difficulty of changing the public imagination of American political life has left much work to be done. As found in “Girls learn early that they don’t have much of a place in politics” while girls in the first grade are equally likely to draw members of either sex when asked to draw a politician, but as they age the more and more likely they are to draw a male politician. That girls are taught that politics is a “man’s world” the democratic institutions drawing on fairness and representation for legitimacy are harmed. The Washington post article “Americans don’t like it when men (and only men) make decisions about women” covers the delegitimizing nature of failing to include women in decisions regarding women, finding that women and especially men are more likely to trust a decision made on sexual harassment if women were included in the panel. Public approval for the inclusion of women in politics is high, but tangible achievements, such as the passing of the Equal Rights Amendment have remained out of reach. Until it becomes policy that women are included in policy making that affects their lives, and that women are at all levels to be treated equally, the democratic foundations of our society will be burdened by an opaque illegitimacy of how it works “in practice”, where women still do not seem to be at the same table.