During an interview with the Independent, journalist Danuta Kean asks the author Sarah Waters why she thinks women claim a sort of ownership of her. Kean says that Waters’ readers – gay and straight – feel the lesbian novelist is “the women’s writer, chronicler of our lives, passions and struggles”. Waters thinks it may be her attention “to women’s secret history and lives, acknowledging meaning in their domestic lives,” that inspires her devoted female fans.
I wonder if the same could be said of writer Abi Morgan and film director Sarah Gavron who in the movie Suffragette have created a vivid and moving tale of the working class suffragettes who fought for the right to vote, for equal pay and treatment in law, because they had nothing left to lose.