A showing of Iron Jawed Angels

A showing of Iron Jawed Angels

Event Type

Community

Location

Cunningham Memorial Library, Events Area

Date

Time

Phone

(812) 237-2606

Description

The fight for women's voting rights has rarely been given as dramatic a treatment as in Iron Jawed Angels. Hilary Swank (Boys Don't Cry) and Frances O'Connor (Mansfield Park) star as second-wave suffragettes Alice Paul and Lucy Burns, who led the final fight for the 19th Amendment to the Constitution. Though the movie sometimes tries too hard to avoid the stigma of a period piece (the soundtrack features electric guitars,​ Swank has a steamy moment in a bathtub, and the editing is jagged and flashy), the mounting energy of the fight--and the increasingly nasty opposition--gains real momentum when a wartime picket line leads to Paul, Burns, and their sisters-in-arms being arrested on trumped-up charges and imprisoned. The actors--including Julia Ormond (Smilla's Sense of Snow), Angelica Huston (Prizzi's Honor, The Grifters), and Brooke Smith (Vanya on 42nd Street)--give fervent, determined performances. --Bret Fetzer

Women’s Equality Day commemorates the 1920 ratification of the 19th Amendment, two simple sentences, which gave all women the right to vote in all elections, two simple sentences that represented 72 years of struggle and activism. Women’s Equality Day has been proclaimed by all Presidents since Richard Nixon. In 1973, Representative Bella Abzug (Dem. NY) and her co-sponsors, including Indiana Senator, Birch Bayh, were able to have passed a House Joint Resolution (first introduced in 1971) proclaiming August 26 as the day to celebrate this historic event, right in the middle of the attempt to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment. On-campus programming, spearheaded by Gender Studies, focuses not just on women and voting but also equal rights covering a wide range of topics, both historical and current. During 2018, programming is highlighting the suffrage and voting rights of African-American women as well as Hoosier suffragists.