Women's suffrage, the legal right of women to vote, has been depicted in film in a variety of ways since the invention of narrative film in the late nineteenth century. Some early films satirized and mocked suffragists and Suffragettes as "unwomanly" "man-haters,"[1] or sensationalized documentary footage. Suffragists countered these depictions by releasing narrative films and newsreels that argued for their cause. After women won the vote in countries with a national cinema, women's suffrage became a historical event depicted in both fiction and nonfiction films.

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Early silent films, 1898–1915
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Renewed campaigns for women's suffrage in France, the United Kingdom, and the United States coincided with the invention of the motion picture and the creation of the film industries in these same countries. Because of this, women's suffrage was a topic in some of the earliest narrative films. Film scholar Martin F. Norden views "suffrage films" as a distinct genre that had its "one and only heyday during the years prior to World War I".[2] Like most films of the silent era, very few of these motion pictures survive,[3] though descriptions from film magazines of the time help us understand their content and messages.[2]

Early comedies and melodramas lampooned or attacked women's suffrage. Comedies created laughable suffragist characters, while melodramas showed suffragists ruining their lives, families, and communities. These films "echoed the vehement cries of politicians, journalists, and preachers who feared that woman suffrage would spell the death of femininity and the family."[4]

Less than three years after the invention of narrative cinema, George Albert Smith satirized suffragists in his silent short film The Lady Barber (1898). In this comedy, a woman suffragist takes over a barbershop and begins cutting the hair of the "bewildered" male customers.[4] Many such films explored what might happen if men and women switched gender roles, or if women took on the activities and responsibilities of men; examples include Alice Guy-Blaché's Les Résultats du féminisme (1906); She Would Be a Business Man (1910); and Georges Méliès's Fire! Fire! Fire! (1911).[2] While Guy-Blaché's film used satire to demonstrate the sexism and abuse women face in a society ruled by men,[5] films like Fire! Fire! Fire!, The Reformation of the Suffragettes (1911), and A Lively Affair (1912) showed women humiliated into abandoning the suffrage movement after trying to do the work of men.[2][6]

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A Busy Day (1914)
Comedies also used cross-dressing to parody suffragists. In the 1899 film Women's Rights, two men dressed as women unknowingly have their skirts nailed to a fence.[7] Charlie Chaplin played a woman in the 1914 short film A Busy Day (originally titled A Militant Suffragette).[8] Other films depicted women in male attire, including The Suffragette's Dream (1909), Méliès's For the Cause of Suffrage (1909), and A Cure for Suffragettes (1913, written by Anita Loos).[9]

Carrie Nation may have been the first suffragist to be the subject of a film, though it was her hatchet-wielding temperance actions that were caricatured in Kansas Saloon Smashers and Why Mr. Nation Wants a Divorce (both released in 1901).[2]

Not all early films were anti-suffrage. In 1911 and 1912, Alma Webster Powell published two pro-suffrage photoplays. One of these, The First Woman Jury in America, was made into a film starring Flora Finch.[10] Our Mutual Girl, a weekly serial that began in 1914 to promote Mutual Film, had several pro-suffrage chapters; in one, the heroine attended a suffrage meeting in Times Square and was introduced to Harriot Stanton Blatch and Inez Milholland.[11]

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