40 Fun Facts About Iron Jawed Angels

Which two-time Best Actress Oscar winner plays suffragist leader Alice Paul in Iron Jawed Angels?

Hilary Swank won her second Best Actress Oscar for Million Dollar Baby, which reached cinemas the same year as her turn as Alice Paul.

Suffragists picketing the White House in Iron Jawed Angels are arrested on what unlikely charge?

Obstructing traffic was the charge police turned to in June 1917, after tolerating the pickets for months. The first six women convicted chose three days in jail over a $25 fine.

Inez Milholland leads the 1913 suffrage parade through Washington in Iron Jawed Angels riding what?

A white horse named Gray Dawn carried her at the head of the march, and she wore a crown and a long white cape as its herald.

Harry Burn casts the deciding vote for women's suffrage in Iron Jawed Angels after a plea from whom?

His mother, Febb Burn, wrote urging him to back ratification, and he kept her message in his coat pocket while the roll was called.

Which state's lawmakers cast the final ratification needed for women's suffrage in Iron Jawed Angels?

Tennessee became the 36th and deciding state in August 1920, when its House approved the measure with just 50 of 99 members voting yes.

Jailers force-feed the hunger-striking Alice Paul in Iron Jawed Angels with a mix of milk and what else?

Raw eggs were picked for their protein, and prison doctors pushed the mixture down tubes into the women's throats.

Which future Grey's Anatomy star plays Ben Weissman, the invented love interest, in Iron Jawed Angels?

Patrick Dempsey made the film a year before his debut as surgeon Derek Shepherd. Ben Weissman never existed: the writers created him to give Alice Paul a romance.

Iron Jawed Angels ends with the ratification of which change to the US Constitution, giving women the vote?

The Nineteenth Amendment was certified on August 26, 1920, a date now marked every year as Women's Equality Day.

Alice Paul and Lucy Burns open Iron Jawed Angels fresh from militant suffrage protests in which country?

England was where the two met while campaigning with a militant suffragette union, whose confrontational tactics they carried home.

The 1913 suffrage parade staged by Alice Paul in Iron Jawed Angels is timed for the eve of which event?

A presidential inauguration, Woodrow Wilson's first, followed on March 4, 1913. When he reached Washington the day before, the crowds he expected were off watching the suffrage march.

Which television network produced Iron Jawed Angels, first airing the suffrage drama in February 2004?

HBO's production earned five Emmy nominations without a win, though its camerawork took the American Society of Cinematographers award.

Which actress won a Golden Globe for playing Carrie Chapman Catt, Alice Paul's rival, in Iron Jawed Angels?

Anjelica Huston took the supporting-actress prize almost twenty years after her Oscar for Prizzi's Honor, a film directed by her father, John.

The suffragists who picketed Woodrow Wilson's White House from January 1917 were known by what name?

The Silent Sentinels kept up their vigil for two and a half years, and more than 2,000 women took a turn at the gates.

The 1917 beating of jailed suffragists by their guards, dramatized in Iron Jawed Angels, is known as what?

The Night of Terror began when the workhouse superintendent ordered nearly forty guards to brutalize the women. Lucy Burns spent it with her hands chained above her head.

Suffragists arrested outside the White House in Iron Jawed Angels serve their sentences at which prison?

Occoquan was a Virginia prison farm meant for nonviolent offenders on short sentences. The film's pickets are sent there for 60-day terms.

Ben Weissman, the fictional love interest of Alice Paul in Iron Jawed Angels, earns his living as what?

A newspaper cartoonist who draws on Washington politics, he annoyed historians: the real Alice Paul was a skilled publicist who needed no pressman's help.

Which anti-lynching journalist refuses to march at the back of the 1913 parade in Iron Jawed Angels?

Ida B. Wells really did step out of the crowd to join the Illinois delegation mid-route, though the warm welcome Alice Paul gives her on screen never happened.

Which proposal did Alice Paul co-write and see introduced in 1923, three years after suffrage was won?

The Equal Rights Amendment was drafted with Crystal Eastman and first named for abolitionist Lucretia Mott; in 1943 it was renamed for Alice Paul herself.

The title Iron Jawed Angels comes from a 1917 insult by Joseph Walsh, who held what job?

A congressman from Massachusetts, Walsh fought the creation of a suffrage committee, saying it would mean yielding to the nagging of iron-jawed angels.

Jailers in Iron Jawed Angels move the hunger-striking Alice Paul to what kind of prison ward?

Psychiatric confinement was the prison's answer once she stopped eating. Sentenced to seven months, she walked free after five weeks.

Which suffragette founded the Women's Social and Political Union, where Alice Paul and Lucy Burns trained?

Emmeline Pankhurst founded the union in 1903 and ran it with her daughter Christabel, the speaker who first won Alice Paul over to the cause.

Alice Paul, the heroine of Iron Jawed Angels, was raised in which faith that also founded her college?

Quaker ideals of public service shaped her childhood, and she died in 1977 at a home run by the same faith, less than a mile from her birthplace.

Alice Paul first met Lucy Burns in what unlikely setting, after both were arrested at a suffrage protest?

A police station brought them together: Paul introduced herself after spotting the American flag pin on her fellow prisoner's lapel.

Forced out of the mainstream suffrage association, Alice Paul founds which group in Iron Jawed Angels?

The National Woman's Party took shape in 1916 and held the party in power responsible, campaigning against Democrats in the 1918 midterm elections.

Carrie Chapman Catt, the cautious rival of Alice Paul in Iron Jawed Angels, founded which group in 1920?

The League of Women Voters was launched six months before ratification, so that millions of first-time voters would be ready to use the ballot.

A notorious 1917 picket banner outside the White House likened Woodrow Wilson to which foreign ruler?

Kaiser Wilhelm II ruled the enemy America was then fighting. The banner said 20 million American women were no more self-governed than his subjects, and crowds tore it down.

Pickets in Iron Jawed Angels wear sashes in which three colors of Alice Paul's suffrage party?

Purple, white and gold appeared on the sashes and usually on the banners too, so the line at the gates always read as a single movement.

Harry Burn, whose vote decided women's suffrage, had turned up wearing which anti-suffrage symbol?

A red rose marked opponents of ratification while supporters wore yellow, which is why his sudden aye enraged the anti-suffrage camp.

Jailed suffragists in Iron Jawed Angels demand to be treated as what, a status America had never granted?

Political prisoners in much of Europe were spared searches, prison clothes and forced feeding, and the American women claimed the same standing.

Reviewers and historians faulted Iron Jawed Angels for telling its 1910s story with which stylistic choice?

A modern soundtrack struck one TV Guide critic as music fit for a Lilith Fair tour, jarring against an otherwise flawless period production.

Which star of The Conjuring films plays Polish-born mill worker Ruza Wenclawska in Iron Jawed Angels?

Vera Farmiga's character was a real suffragist: Wenclawska started work in a Pittsburgh hosiery mill at the age of eleven.

Which Australian actress, the lead in 1999's Mansfield Park, plays Lucy Burns in Iron Jawed Angels?

Frances O'Connor grew up in Perth and went on to earn Golden Globe nominations for Madame Bovary and The Missing.

Which Legends of the Fall actress plays parade leader Inez Milholland in Iron Jawed Angels?

Julia Ormond became a star in the 1990s, also playing Queen Guinevere in First Knight and the title role in Sabrina.

Which German filmmaker, known at home for the 1997 hit Bandits, directed Iron Jawed Angels?

Katja von Garnier had never directed in America before. Her film-school project Making Up! had drawn 1.2 million cinemagoers after several producers turned it down.

Iron Jawed Angels had its premiere in January 2004 at which American film festival?

Sundance showed the film on January 16, 2004, a month ahead of its first television broadcast.

The 1913 suffrage parade organized by Alice Paul marched along which famous Washington street?

Pennsylvania Avenue was so mobbed by spectators that police failed to keep the route open, and cavalry had to help the marchers through.

Which Iron Jawed Angels character, a senator's wife played by Molly Parker, was invented for the film?

Emily Leighton and her senator husband Tom were invented for the film, as were Ben Weissman and his child.

Alice Paul recruits Inez Milholland in Iron Jawed Angels while seeking donations at what kind of venue?

An art gallery is where Paul talks Milholland into heading the parade. The real Milholland was once suspended from Vassar for organizing a women's rights meeting.

News of the force-feeding leaks in Iron Jawed Angels when a prisoner slips what to her visiting husband?

A letter slipped to a senator during his visit breaks the silence. Until then the jailed women had been cut off from visitors and legal counsel alike.

What did Alice Paul's pickets burn in the watch fires they lit outside the White House?

The president's own words went into the flames outside his gates, and in February 1919 the protesters burned his image in effigy as well.