I remember as a child going around with "Votes For Women" balloons. I learnt early what it is to be snubbed for a good cause.
Women's history is the primary tool for women's emancipation.
I think I was a feminist before the word was invented.
With the end of the Victorian era, we passed into what I feel I must call the terrible 20th century
I thought I had been a suffragist before I became a Poor Law Guardian, but now I began to think about the vote in women's hands not only as a right but as a desperate necessity.
I was taught nothing about the suffragettes in school. The version I eventually got was mainly about the peaceful campaigning of the constitutional suffragists. Their work was vital, but there was this other, not widely known story of the women who risked everything, who were prepared to break every taboo.
For 'Rosa Luxemburg,' I read everything by and about her, but the first time I was stuck in that corset, I got an understanding of her that I'd never had before.
It was important to focus on working-class women because we so rarely focus, particularly in period films, on the working people. The suffragettes brought together women of all classes, which was one of the striking things about the movement.
A few British suffragettes everybody laughed at started the cause of equality between men and women.
Before the first World War women were arrested for smoking cigarettes in public, for using profanity, for appearing on beaches without stockings, for driving automobiles without a man beside them, for wearing outlandish attire for example, shorts
We will have gone from men telling us condescendingly to not bother our pretty little heads about important things like politics, to not bothering our pretty little heads without even being told not to! The suffragettes struggled and suffered so much on our behalf; what a travesty of everything they stood for, if we simply look away as though we can't be bothered.
Women's history is women's right-an essential, indispensable heritage from which we can draw pride, comfort, courage, and long range vision.
The only thing the women were after was just the chance to help the world on. But some men were so dreadfully afraid of them that they refused to understand, and talked about 'shrieking sisterhoods' and 'disappointed spinsters' and rubbish of that sort.
People have been writing premature obituaries on the women's movement since its beginning.
I hated the 1960's feminists," she says. "They were dogmatists, you see. In comes ideology, and out goes common sense. This is my experience of life.
I'm not limited by my gender, and I don't think anyone else should be either. Because I am the age I am and I sort of rode the crest of the first profound post-suffragette feminists, I wasn't fighting to burn my bra. Those women fought that fight just seconds before I came into womanhood.
They who say that women do not desire the right of suffrage, that they prefer masculine domination to self-government, falsify every page of history, every fact in human experience. It has taken the whole power of the civil and canon law to hold woman in the subordinate position which it is said she willingly accepts.
A lawyer I once knew told me of a strange case, a suffragette who had never married. After her death, he opened her trunk and discovered 50 wedding gowns.
I grew up so thoroughly imbued with women's rights that it was the most important question of my life from a very early day.
My awakening to the fight for women's votes came when I was 13, and the BBC screened a drama called 'Shoulder to Shoulder' about the suffragettes, with the great Sian Phillips as Emmeline Pankhurst. It made a huge impression on me - not just the history, but because of the debates it triggered at home.
The English prison system is altogether mediaeval and outworn. In some of its details, the system has improved since they began to send the Suffragettes to Holloway. I may say that we, by our public denunciation of the system, have forced these slight improvements.
People feel much more comfortable with the 'Fifty Shades of Grey' version of women's liberation: possibly feeling life would be much simpler if the suffragettes hadn't wanted the vote and just really enjoyed chaining themselves to railings.
We gotta be free - The eagle and me. see Amelia Jenks Bloomer, Emancipation of Women
The woman suffrage movement in the United States was a movement of the spirit of the Revolution which was striving to hold the nation to the ideals which won independence.
It was interesting to portray a character that was so far removed from today's world, but was also at the forefront of feminism at that time.
