he headline on the cover of the Observer Magazine of 16 January 1977 – ‘Mrs Pankhurst wasn’t just a pretty face – the truth about the suffragettes’ – certainly has a charge to it, but the headline for the article itself is an even starker reduction of filmmaker Jill Craigie’s argument. It reads: ‘Men against women.’ It’s shocking that 50 years after women over 21 were finally able to vote in Britain that Craigie was moved to write: ‘No political and social movement in British history has been more maligned and misunderstood by male historians than the women’s campaign for the vote.’ The traditional view in those days was that the suffragettes, led by Emmeline Pankhurst and her two daughters, forced the public to take notice of them by ‘disrupting meetings, smashing windows, slashing paintings… chaining themselves to railings and attacking cabinet ministers’. This view, argues Craigie, makes a travesty of the movement. The truth is that women from all walks of life ‘resorted to action so opposed to the accepted view of womanly behaviour that it broke down centuries of taboo’ and that ‘for 22 months during 1910 and 1911 the militant wings joined forces with the constitutionalists to mount the most intensive campaign of peaceful propaganda seen in Britain for a constitutional reform’. Suffragette crimes during the early years were nothing more serious than technical breaches of the peace, obstruction and the heckling of cabinet ministers. ‘A woman had only to ask the vital question at a public meeting to be flung out like a sack of coal,’ says Craigie. In total, just over 1,000 suffragettes went to prison but, according to Craigie, ‘no more than four or five transgressed the official policy by assaulting cabinet ministers, and even then intending injury, not to their bodies, but to their pride. One woman shook Asquith as if he were a naughty schoolboy.’