What counts as "radical"? The film "Suffragette" is perhaps the best example of judging "radical or not". Its heroine is Carey Mulligan, globally recognized as the "girl next door" with a cabbage face in the style of Ada Clare.
Ada Clare is the character in Dickens's novel "Bleak House." An orphan, who could have lived a peaceful and prosperous life with his beloved cousin when he was an adult, but because of the dark and pedantic Victorian judicial arena, he lost his lover and his entire net worth in an inheritance lawsuit. In his early 20s, he became a lonely mirror The widow.
In 2005, 20-year-old Carey Mulligan successfully played Ida Claire, a little beauty with a tragic fate in the TV series "Bleak House" produced by the BBC. Ten years later , Carey Mulligan changed from the poor little widow in the TV series "Bleak House" to the "Suffragette" in the movie "Suffragette)" in order to fight for women's suffrage. (Maud Watts).
The Industrial Revolution to the beginning of the 20th century was the era when European capitalist sweatshops flourished. On the one hand, women had to follow the Victorian social norms of "family first", with Queen Victoria as the idol of "the oldest husband and children" ; on the other hand, having to do low-paying, low-skilled jobs like "laundry, dressmaking, cleaning" to help support the family. Because men think women are only fit for this kind of work. In 1911, 28% of women in the UK were in Doing this type of work and being supervised and abused by the male foreman.
Maud Wa is one of those million women workers. Every morning, she put on a cheap factory girl's cloth skirt over her corset, waited for her husband and son to have breakfast, and went straight to the laundry to do laundry for the ladies who also wore corsets but didn't have to do it themselves. Ironing. Like her poor mother who "responded to the wave of the Industrial Revolution and went out to work to earn money", Maud Wa was born with detergents, irons, and workshops with extremely poor health conditions. From child labor to skilled craftsmanship, the world is big, but it can't go anywhere. She was also paid a low enough salary to endure sexual harassment and assault by male foremen from time to time. The only way out to not be sexually assaulted is to find a male worker to marry, the sooner the better, and then have children, and then pin the hope of "living another life" on the next generation.
Who "radicalized" the feminist movement?
Sweatshops treated workers like vampires. Coupled with the harsh environmental pollution, many female workers often died before the age of 40. According to the writings of a British historian at the time, the poor who were born in the factory districts in the mid-19th century were lucky to live to the age of 30.
Why did Carey Mulligan play the laundress Maud Vale? The moral of the film is obvious: not because there are no better actors in the UK, but because she has the face of Ida Claire, a face that is distressing, sad, and her tears flow like a fountain. Face. This face is more able to restore the truth of the movement: "The backbone of the movement for women's suffrage is these women workers who are oppressed at the bottom, because they really have nowhere to go."
In Dickens' novel, Ida Clare, no matter how turbulent her heart may be, is powerless to change society in the early 19th century.
The early 19th century was still a very harsh era for women. Chinese women are still bound by their feet, and Indian women are still buried; once a British woman gets married, her property will be listed in her husband’s name, and once divorced, she will lose custody of the children; the first female student in France was born in 1861; in 1864 In the past, unmarried women in Sweden did not have the same power as men in commerce; women in Italy did not have the same inheritance rights as men; women in the United States could not control their own wages...
By the beginning of the 20th century, the laundress In the days of Maud Wa, although the situation of women improved a little, it still did not see much improvement. The reason is simple, because women still have not had the right to speak in public politics. Fighting for women's right to vote is the only way for a democratic civil society and women to gain the right to speak and change their destiny.
Maud Wa, a washerwoman who looks exactly like Ida Claire, finally got tired of the miserable life of copying and pasting between generations, so she thought of "transformation". She saw female workers secretly handing out flyers on the street to fight for women's suffrage, and she felt that this was a "shortcut" to change her own destiny, so she involved herself - if this is considered "radical", then Ida Claire Where is the way out with Maud Wa?
Ironically, the patriarchal elites, on the one hand, consider the ideal of women's resistance to oppression to be "radical", but on the other hand, they do everything possible to "radicalize" this ideal. This paradox is especially evident in the case of the washerwoman Maud Wa.
Maud Wa, who was usually timid and fearful, gained the right to speak in the parliament by accident. Finally, she was able to tell the fact that she was oppressed as a female worker, in front of male members. If the male MPs listened to her demands and started to revise the labor law to improve her working environment, then her struggle would not "reduce" to the level of "street movement", she would not be arrested by the police and put in jail, Forced to go on a hunger strike. However, they did not, and they were neither willing to listen nor to change; if her husband loved her enough to accept her as a wife and a loved one after she was escorted home by the police, she would not be on the streets, without He was able to return home, and even lost custody of his son, becoming a "radical who abandoned his family" in the eyes of everyone. However, he didn't. He neither accepted nor supported her. Instead, he regarded her struggle as a disgrace to the family, and kicked her out, which resulted in her eventual dismissal from the factory. He lost his wife's financial support, and as a low-level worker, he was unable to support his son at all, and finally had to give his son to others - such a basic consciousness, he would rather abandon his wife and son for his "male self-esteem" .
No matter how "radical" the laundresses Maud Wa were, they just marched on the streets, smashed the windows of several shops, and threw a few homemade explosives in the open space. Emily Davidson, the "most radical" pioneer in that operation, who was jailed 9 times and went on hunger strike 49 times, just wanted to put the "Let women vote" banner on the horse. Yes, she was kicked to death by King George V's racehorse, which doesn't mean she was bent on dying. If the kings and nobles listened to her advice and sided with her in persuading Parliament to accept women's suffrage, she would not have created an "Emily Davidson tragedy" of her own.
The good news is that the feminist movement that lasted for nearly a century finally ended in victory, bringing great progress from economic to ideology to Western countries. Thanks to the liberation of women's minds around the world brought about by that victory, today, we can openly criticize the "Campus Aphrodisiac Case" and the "Sanqi Banner Incident" without fear of being labelled "radical". Imagine, in a typical patriarchal society, if the situation of women is not improved, especially the situation of women at the bottom, will they follow the madness of men and become suspects in bus bombings or kindergarten slashing incidents ? If it's true to that level, even scolding "radical" a hundred times won't help.
(Text / Wang Bang, senior media person, film director, writer. Published the film collection "Yingcheng Chronicle" and a number of novel collections, etc.. Filmed the documentary "Tiao People", etc. He has set up several columns in "Southern Metropolis Daily" and so on. )
(Special column, may not be reproduced without permission. Personal opinion, does not represent the position of this website. WeChat pays attention to lovematterschina and lovemattersCN, and make an appointment with He Xiaoai! )
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