Meryl Streep’s ‘Suffragette’ T-shirt choice sparks social media backlash

The film well lays out the spirit of this year’s festival – the power and presence of female filmmakers.

Meryl Streep and her fellow Suffragette actresses have faced a backlash after sporting controversial T-shirts. Streep and her fellow actresses wore the t-shirts as promo for the film in a TimeOut London spread and interview. With the LFF throwing a spotlight on the problem there is a good chance that this inequality can be examined and, hopefully, resolved. I’m not trying to diminish her work in women’s suffrage, but isn’t it doing a lot of women a disservice to misrepresent this history? “There’s history women have been shut out of”.

Time Out magazine has defended its use of a slogan including the word slave on a T-shirt worn by Meryl Streep to promote the movie “Suffragette“, arguing that critics have taken the quote out of context.

Streep and co-stars Romola Garai, Carey Mulligan, and Anne-Marie Duff posed for the companion photo-op sporting T-shirts emblazoned with the Pankhurst quote “I would rather be a rebel than a slave” for Time Out.

“The word isn’t disheartening-it’s infuriating“, she said.

“I submit to you that men and women are not the same, they like different things. My grandmother was alive then and had a couple of children and would not have been capable of voting so I’m passionate about it”. The words are a quotation from pioneering British suffragist Emmeline Pankhurst, who is portrayed by Streep in the upcoming film.

Saying she wanted to investigate “buzz”, and how people decided which films to see, Streep cited the reviews aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes for its skewed gender balance, saying she tabulated 168 women critics and bloggers on the site, as opposed to a few 760 men.

She said: “What I love about this film is it didn’t feel like a documentary about a time, it felt like a film about today”.

Early Wednesday, “Suffragette’s” creators had not responded to The Washington Post’s request for comment – and Streep, Mulligan et.al. appeared to have remained silent.

Much as civil rights movements have typically been centered around men, women’s rights movements (both in the States and around Europe) have nearly exclusively dominated by upper-class white women. But it’s wise, and ethical, to have an understanding of how specific words might hurt people and what they signify in terms of an entire group’s experience before we employ them blithely.