Make More Noise! Suffragettes in Silent Film – New BFI DVD Collection

by Brent Reid

“You have to make more noise than anybody else, you have to make yourself more obtrusive than anybody else, you have to fill all the papers more than anybody else. In fact you have to be there all the time and see that they do not snow you under if you are really going to get your reform realised.” – Emmeline Pankhurst

Protesting suffragettes, early 1900s

Protesting suffragettes, early 1900s

Suffragette leader Emmeline Pankhurst’s legendary ‘Freedom or death’ speech of November 1913 reflected the energetic and determined tactics of suffragette women, which was to stand up at every public event and cry out “Votes for women!” Cinema was born just as their campaign was gathering momentum and so they made it their business to get in front of the cameras. Make More Noise! Suffragettes in Silent Film opens in selected cinemas UK-wide on 23rd October, two weeks after Sarah Gavron’s major new feature film Suffragette, starring Meryl Streep, Carey Mulligan and Helena Bonham Carter.

Make More Noise! is a fascinating compilation of 21 short films from the BFI National Archive that show how women were being portrayed on the screen, while their battles were being waged on the streets outside. It will be premièred with live music accompaniment at the BFI London Film Festival, alongside Suffragette’s première, with an additional screening on the 18th October before opening nationwide.

Suffragette (2015) film poster with Helena Bonham Carter, Carey Mulligan and Meryl Streep

Suffragette (2015) with Helena Bonham Carter, Carey Mulligan and Meryl Streep

Make More Noise! combines documentary footage of the suffragettes’ public activities with comedy films of the period, which joyously pushed the boundaries of what was considered acceptable behaviour. These gloriously anarchic pre-war comedies are full of bright sparks like the Tilly Girls aka Alma Taylor and Chrissie White, who gleefully disobey society’s strictures. Women are seen acting like men, dressing in trousers and even leaving the men at home minding the babies. The films reveal how girls and women were already acting differently, had higher aspirations and expected more freedom than their grandmothers could have imagined. This goes against the conventional wisdom that female emancipation was a result of changes wrought by wartime.

The actuality footage includes the well organised mass demonstrations of the suffragists: the riot in Whitehall in August 1913 at which Sylvia Pankhurst was arrested and a vast procession of women led by Emmeline Pankhurst marching through London in 1915 to show the Minister of Munitions their offer of help for the war service. There is also the shocking image of suffragette Emily Davison being trampled by the King’s horse on Derby Day. Not realising the significance of this incident (she didn’t die until three days later), the news cameras continued to film the day’s events. Cameras also capture the huge, sombre crowds that gathered for her funeral in Bloomsbury, London and burial in Morpeth, Northumberland.

A young suffragette advertises a London march and rally, c.1909

A young suffragette advertises a London march and rally, c.1909

Scottish Women’s Hospital (1917) is about a hospital funded and run behind WW1 lines in France by the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies. The short documentary A Day in the Life of a Munition Worker (1917) shows the dangerous and uncomfortable yet vital work of women in munitions factories. It was filmed at the National Shell Filling Factory in Chilwell, Nottinghamshire. Barely one year later the factory was the site of one of Britain’s worst wartime disasters when a devastating explosion killed 134 people, of whom only 32 could be positively identified. A further 250 were injured.

Bryony Dixon, the BFI’s curator of silent film, says:

“What I like most about this selection is the combination of films showing the serious business of campaigning for the vote – the real women who did it – with these joyful comedies which are about unrestrained girl power. Comedy was a test bed for all possible outcomes of female emancipation – they visualised the inconceivable.”

Lillian Henley, actor and musician

Lillian Henley

To enhance these silent films, the BFI has commissioned the talented young composer and pianist Lillian Henley, one of the UK’s best up and coming silent film accompanists, to create a new improvised score, which reflects the spirit in which the films were made.  Lillian comments:

“I am thrilled to be working with the BFI and doubly thrilled to be scoring this fantastic new collection. The BFI’s lovingly curated archive film shows female strength, brilliance, comedy and the harsh realities that the suffragettes faced during their long fight for equality. I found the films to be everything from shocking, heartbreaking and uplifting and it’s been a thought provoking and exciting journey creating the music for this film collection.”


Make More Noise! will première during the BFI London Film Festival on Sunday 11th October at 18.45 in NFT3, BFI Southbank, with live musical accompaniment by Lillian Henley. It will also be screened with recorded music at 16:00 on Sunday 18th October at the Rich Mix Cinema, Bethnal Green, and opens on 23rd October 2015 at BFI Southbank, Filmhouse Edinburgh and selected cinemas across the UK.

Make More Noise! Suffragettes in Silent Film 1899–1917 will be released on DVD by the BFI on 23rd November 2015. it will include a 30 page illustrated booklet, featuring several essays, and have 2.0 and 5.1 stereo soundtracks. It will be region 0, PAL format, so will play in most of the world.

Don’t miss our interview with Bryony Dixon and Lillian Henley:


Emmeline Pankhurst’s ‘Freedom or Death’ speech

Suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst giving a speech, c.1910s

Emmeline Pankhurst giving a speech, c.1910s

Emmeline Pankhurst delivered her most famous speech in Hartford, Connecticut on 13th November 1913, during a US fundraising tour. Impassioned as ever, despite being imprisoned 12 times on hunger strike during the preceding 18 months, she sounded a rallying cry which continues to resonate worldwide to this day:

I do not come here as an advocate, because whatever position the suffrage movement may occupy in the United States of America, in England it has passed beyond the realm of advocacy and it has entered into the sphere of practical politics. It has become the subject of revolution and civil war, and so tonight I am not here to advocate woman suffrage. American suffragists can do that very well for themselves.

I am here as a soldier who has temporarily left the field of battle in order to explain – it seems strange it should have to be explained – what civil war is like when civil war is waged by women. I am not only here as a soldier temporarily absent from the field at battle; I am here – and that, I think, is the strangest part of my coming – I am here as a person who, according to the law courts of my country, it has been decided, is of no value to the community at all; and I am adjudged because of my life to be a dangerous person, under sentence of penal servitude in a convict prison.

It is not at all difficult if revolutionaries come to you from Russia, if they come to you from China, or from any other part of the world, if they are men. But since I am a woman it is necessary to explain why women have adopted revolutionary methods in order to win the rights of citizenship. We women, in trying to make our case clear, always have to make as part of our argument, and urge upon men in our audience the fact – a very simple fact – that women are human beings.

Suppose the men of Hartford had a grievance, and they laid that grievance before their legislature, and the legislature obstinately refused to listen to them, or to remove their grievance, what would be the proper and the constitutional and the practical way of getting their grievance removed? Well, it is perfectly obvious at the next general election the men of Hartford would turn out that legislature and elect a new one.

But let the men of Hartford imagine that they were not in the position of being voters at all, that they were governed without their consent being obtained, that the legislature turned an absolutely deaf ear to their demands, what would the men of Hartford do then? They couldn’t vote the legislature out. They would have to choose; they would have to make a choice of two evils: they would either have to submit indefinitely to an unjust state of affairs, or they would have to rise up and adopt some of the antiquated means by which men in the past got their grievances remedied.

Your forefathers decided that they must have representation for taxation, many, many years ago. When they felt they couldn’t wait any longer, when they laid all the arguments before an obstinate British government that they could think of, and when their arguments were absolutely disregarded, when every other means had failed, they began by the tea party at Boston, and they went on until they had won the independence of the United States of America.

It is about eight years since the word militant was first used to describe what we were doing. It was not militant at all, except that it provoked militancy on the part of those who were opposed to it. When women asked questions in political meetings and failed to get answers, they were not doing anything militant. In Great Britain it is a custom, a time-honoured one, to ask questions of candidates for parliament and ask questions of members of the government. No man was ever put out of a public meeting for asking a question. The first people who were put out of a political meeting for asking questions, were women; they were brutally ill-used; they found themselves in jail before 24 hours had expired.

We were called militant, and we were quite willing to accept the name. We were determined to press this question of the enfranchisement of women to the point where we were no longer to be ignored by the politicians.

You have two babies very hungry and wanting to be fed. One baby is a patient baby, and waits indefinitely until its mother is ready to feed it. The other baby is an impatient baby and cries lustily, screams and kicks and makes everybody unpleasant until it is fed. Well, we know perfectly well which baby is attended to first. That is the whole history of politics. You have to make more noise than anybody else, you have to make yourself more obtrusive than anybody else, you have to fill all the papers more than anybody else, in fact you have to be there all the time and see that they do not snow you under.

'What I would do with the Suffragists' anti-suffragist postcard, c.1910s

Anti-suffragist postcard, c.1910s

When you have warfare things happen; people suffer; the noncombatants suffer as well as the combatants. And so it happens in civil war. When your forefathers threw the tea into Boston Harbour, a good many women had to go without their tea. It has always seemed to me an extraordinary thing that you did not follow it up by throwing the whiskey overboard; you sacrificed the women; and there is a good deal of warfare for which men take a great deal of glorification which has involved more practical sacrifice on women than it has on any man. It always has been so. The grievances of those who have got power, the influence of those who have got power commands a great deal of attention; but the wrongs and the grievances of those people who have no power at all are apt to be absolutely ignored. That is the history of humanity right from the beginning.

Well, in our civil war people have suffered, but you cannot make omelettes without breaking eggs; you cannot have civil war without damage to something. The great thing is to see that no more damage is done than is absolutely necessary, that you do just as much as will arouse enough feeling to bring about peace, to bring about an honourable peace for the combatants; and that is what we have been doing.

We entirely prevented stockbrokers in London from telegraphing to stockbrokers in Glasgow and vice versa: for one whole day telegraphic communication was entirely stopped. I am not going to tell you how it was done. I am not going to tell you how the women got to the mains and cut the wires; but it was done. It was done, and it was proved to the authorities that weak women, suffrage women, as we are supposed to be, had enough ingenuity to create a situation of that kind. Now, I ask you, if women can do that, is there any limit to what we can do except the limit we put upon ourselves?

If you are dealing with an industrial revolution, if you get the men and women of one class rising up against the men and women of another class, you can locate the difficulty; if there is a great industrial strike, you know exactly where the violence is and how the warfare is going to be waged; but in our war against the government you can’t locate it. We wear no mark; we belong to every class; we permeate every class of the community from the highest to the lowest; and so you see in the woman’s civil war the dear men of my country are discovering it is absolutely impossible to deal with it: you cannot locate it, and you cannot stop it.

“Put them in prison,” they said, “that will stop it.” But it didn’t stop it at all: instead of the women giving it up, more women did it, and more and more and more women did it until there were 300 women at a time, who had not broken a single law, only “made a nuisance of themselves” as the politicians say.

Then they began to legislate. The British government has passed more stringent laws to deal with this agitation than it ever found necessary during all the history of political agitation in my country. They were able to deal with the revolutionaries of the Chartists’ time; they were able to deal with the trades union agitation; they were able to deal with the revolutionaries later on when the Reform Acts were passed: but the ordinary law has not sufficed to curb insurgent women. They had to dip back into the middle ages to find a means of repressing the women in revolt.

'Feeding a Suffragette by force' anti-suffragette postcard, c.1910s

Anti-suffragette postcard, c.1910s

They have said to us, government rests upon force, the women haven’t force, so they must submit. Well, we are showing them that government does not rest upon force at all: it rests upon consent. As long as women consent to be unjustly governed, they can be, but directly women say: “We withhold our consent, we will not be governed any longer so long as that government is unjust.” Not by the forces of civil war can you govern the very weakest woman. You can kill that woman, but she escapes you then; you cannot govern her. No power on earth can govern a human being, however feeble, who withholds his or her consent.

When they put us in prison at first, simply for taking petitions, we submitted; we allowed them to dress us in prison clothes; we allowed them to put us in solitary confinement; we allowed them to put us amongst the most degraded of criminals; we learned of some of the appalling evils of our so-called civilisation that we could not have learned in any other way. It was valuable experience, and we were glad to get it.

I have seen men smile when they heard the words “hunger strike”, and yet I think there are very few men today who would be prepared to adopt a “hunger strike” for any cause. It is only people who feel an intolerable sense of oppression who would adopt a means of that kind. It means you refuse food until you are at death’s door, and then the authorities have to choose between letting you die, and letting you go; and then they let the women go.

Now, that went on so long that the government felt that they were unable to cope. It was [then] that, to the shame of the British government, they set the example to authorities all over the world of feeding sane, resisting human beings by force. There may be doctors in this meeting: if so, they know it is one thing to feed by force an insane person; but it is quite another thing to feed a sane, resisting human being who resists with every nerve and with every fibre of her body the indignity and the outrage of forcible feeding. Now, that was done in England, and the government thought they had crushed us. But they found that it did not quell the agitation, that more and more women came in and even passed that terrible ordeal, and they were obliged to let them go.

Then came the legislation – the “Cat and Mouse Act”. The home secretary said: “Give me the power to let these women go when they are at death’s door, and leave them at liberty under license until they have recovered their health again and then bring them back.” It was passed to repress the agitation, to make the women yield – because that is what it has really come to, ladies and gentlemen. It has come to a battle between the women and the government as to who shall yield first, whether they will yield and give us the vote, or whether we will give up our agitation.

'Feeding a Suffragette by force' anti-suffragette postcard, c.1910s, #2

Anti-suffragette postcard, c.1910s

Well, they little know what women are. Women are very slow to rouse, but once they are aroused, once they are determined, nothing on earth and nothing in heaven will make women give way; it is impossible. And so this “Cat and Mouse Act” which is being used against women today has failed. There are women lying at death’s door, recovering enough strength to undergo operations who have not given in and won’t give in, and who will be prepared, as soon as they get up from their sick beds, to go on as before. There are women who are being carried from their sick beds on stretchers into meetings. They are too weak to speak, but they go amongst their fellow workers just to show that their spirits are unquenched, and that their spirit is alive, and they mean to go on as long as life lasts.

Now, I want to say to you who think women cannot succeed, we have brought the government of England to this position, that it has to face this alternative: either women are to be killed or women are to have the vote. I ask American men in this meeting, what would you say if in your state you were faced with that alternative, that you must either kill them or give them their citizenship? Well, there is only one answer to that alternative, there is only one way out – you must give those women the vote.

You won your freedom in America when you had the revolution, by bloodshed, by sacrificing human life. You won the civil war by the sacrifice of human life when you decided to emancipate the negro. You have left it to women in your land, the men of all civilised countries have left it to women, to work out their own salvation. That is the way in which we women of England are doing. Human life for us is sacred, but we say if any life is to be sacrificed it shall be ours; we won’t do it ourselves, but we will put the enemy in the position where they will have to choose between giving us freedom or giving us death.

So here am I. I come in the intervals of prison appearance. I come after having been four times imprisoned under the “Cat and Mouse Act”, probably going back to be rearrested as soon as I set my foot on British soil. I come to ask you to help to win this fight. If we win it, this hardest of all fights, then, to be sure, in the future it is going to be made easier for women all over the world to win their fight when their time comes.”

'Why Not Go the Limit' US Puck magazine centrefold, vol. 63, no. 1620 (March 18, 1908) by Harry Grant Dart (1869–1938)

‘Why Not Go the Limit’ US Puck magazine centrefold, vol. 63, no. 1620 (March 18, 1908) by Harry Grant Dart (1869–1938)

The darkly witty brochure, Beware! A Warning to Suffragists, is typical of the material being produced and distributed by the Artists’ Suffrage League at the time.

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