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Surprisingly, the activists were not exceptional women to begin with. Mrs. Pankhurst, it is true, came from the radical city of Manchester, where, as a child, she had demonstrated against slavery. But she and her daughters were exactly the kind of high-minded, humorless people who under other circumstances would have been pillars of empire. The movement transformed them: Emmeline (Sian Phillips) revealed a gift for fiery oratory and martyrdom; Christabel (Patricia Quinn) became a genius of strategy; Sylvia (Angela Down) provided the movement's heart and integrity.
Unlike today's women's libbers, the suffragettes were an isolated elite. Idealistic socialists for the most part, they believed the vote was enough to free them from second-class citizenship.
Women now know better; a thicket of prejudice and privilege remains. Christabel, however, was a portent. As she disentangled herself from the traditional female role, her independence often appeared wayward, willful and puzzling.
It was Sylvia who discerned why: "When you're looking at Christabel, you're look ing at an emancipated woman."
It is unfair to single out one per former in what is a superlative cast.
Yet as the invalid spinster Lady Constance Lytton, Judy Parfitt provides the uncanniest sense of the past recaptured.
When Constance goes to prison under an assumed name—in order to be treated like her commoner sisters—she no longer seems a historical figure but a flesh-and-blood participant in that sad, violent, wholly romanticized period mislabeled the good old days, when men were men and women were voteless.