To celebrate Women’s History Month, the Mid-Valley STC Library will be showing Iron Jawed Angels, a 2004 film about the women’s suffrage movement during the 1910s. This movie follows activists, Alice Paul (Hilary Swank) and Lucy Burns (Frances O’Connor), as they fought tirelessly for a woman’s right to be counted.  Returning to the United States from England, Alice Paul and Lucy Burns learned that their ideas about women and voting were too radical for even the National American Woman Suffrage Association. In response, they created the National Woman’s Party, a group that takes drastic measures to ensure women’s rights. Taking the women’s suffrage movement by storm, Paul and Burns put their freedom on the line as they boldly take action.

In a time when it is easy to take the right to vote for granted, this film reminds us that women once had to fight and suffer to step into the voting booth. One hundred years ago women were denied the privilege of expressing their opinions about our government, but because Alice Paul and Lucy Burns (and a number of other brave women such as Susan B. Anthony) refused to be content with their lives as non-voting citizens, we are all able to be counted equally.

Iron Jawed Angels will be showing Wednesday, March 10, 2010 beginning at 10 am at the STC Mid-Valley Library.  It will also be showing Thursday, March 11 at 12:00 pm at the Pecan Campus Library.

Contributed by Jessica Cruz, Library Specialist at the Mid-Valley Campus.