Q: What key books did you read to research the story?
ABI MORGAN: Emmeline Pankhurst's memoir [Suffragette: My Own Story, 1914] was very significant, and I was quite affected by Rebel Girls, which is a really good book by Jill Liddington, specifically about working-class mavericks in the movement. And then there was a beautiful book about Princess Sophia Duleep Singh by Anita Anand [Sophia: Princess, Suffragette, Revolutionary], which is about this aristocratic suffragette who was the god-daughter to Queen Victoria. Also reading declassified records that were opened in 2003 that exposed the level of surveillance and interrogation of these women at the time. And then I read Voices From History: East London Suffragettes by Sarah Jackson and Rosemary Taylor. The film effectively is located within a two-and-a-half-mile radius of East London, so that was a very significant book for me, as well.
Q: Given how long the fight for the vote actually went on, how did you decide where to start and stop the narrative?
Abi Morgan: In many ways, it was useful that I had worked on a couple of biopics before. I have known the joy and frustrations of when you take on a whole life, how you squeeze it into a hundred and twenty minutes. The suffragette history is immense. When we come into the movie, we've been through nearly forty years of peaceful protest, and we focus on this very intense sixteen months where some of our central characters who were passive observers suddenly move into activism. And that's what I became very curious about, these four or five big historical moments around this time, which opened with the Night of the Broken Panes, and ran us through the suffrage riots outside the House of Parliament, and then led into Emily Wilding Davison's death. It felt like a lot to take on, but I really wanted to capture the basic questions of, Would I have been a suffragette? And: What makes a woman move from being a passive observer into being militantly active in a movement?
Q: Was the level of violence leveled against them surprising to you?
Abi Morgan: We knew that these suffragettes had learned to do jiu-jitsu. The women used to make cardboard armor to put under their skirts and corsets to protect themselves because the police would go in and kick the women and twist their breasts -- it was believed at the time that if you twisted the breast you could cause breast cancer. And then when you look at the force-feeding, these women were at the forefront of torture techniques that we see in the twenty-first century still. They used to have their cells sprayed with water. Davison was an extraordinary maverick -- she was force-fed forty-nine times. We had a medical historian who explained the level of damage that it does to you physically and mentally. Many of these women never fully recovered. So it really surprised me.
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