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For Stories on the 90th Anniversary of the 19th Amendment: Thursday, August 26th marks the 90th Anniversary of the 19th Amendment guaranteeing American women the Right to Vote... A first step in the long history of pioneering women all over the world taking up the mantle of Women's Equality...From Title IX to Equal Pay and beyond...
Next month, the new film MADE IN DAGENHAM, which stars Golden Globe winner Sally Hawkins and celebrates the real women who fought for the passage of an Equal Pay law in the UK, World Premieres at the Toronto International Film Festival.
These Dagenham women are available for commentary on the anniversary of the 19th amendment and their own roles in the living history of the women's movement.
Although far from the Swinging Sixties of Carnaby Street, life for the women of Dagenham, England is tinged with the sounds and sights of the optimistic era, heard on their radios and seen on their TV sets. Rita O'Grady (Sally Hawkins) reflects that upbeat era, along with her friends and co-workers at the city's Ford Motor Factory -- Sandra (Jamie Winstone), Eileen (Nicola Duffett), Brenda (Andrea Riseborough), Monica (Lorraine Stanley) and Connie (Geraldine James) -- who laugh in the face of their poor conditions. Lisa (Rosamund Pike) is a fiercely intelligent Cambridge-educated woman who feels a bit trapped, tending to the home with a husband that suggests she keep her opinions to herself. She may not live in the same world as the other women, but she shares their views. No one thought the revolution would come to Dagenham, until one day, it did.
Rita, who primarily sees herself as a wife and mother, is coerced into attending a meeting with shop steward Connie, sympathetic union representative Albert (Bob Hoskins) and Peter Hopkins (Rupert Graves), Ford's Head of Industrial Relations. What she expects to be simply a day out of work, complete with a free lunch, turns into much more when she and her colleagues become outraged by the lack of respect shown in the meeting to the women employees.With humor, common sense and courage Rita and the other women take on their bosses, an increasingly belligerent local community, and finally the government, as their intelligence and unpredictability proves to be a match for any of their male opponents. Daring to stand up and push boundaries, the women changed a system that no one wanted to admit was broken.
