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'Suffragette' and the struggle for women's rights -- in voting and in Hollywood

Women devalued by men. Marginalized, belittled, reduced to second-class citizenry.

That's the world of Suffragette, the new drama that chronicles the violent struggle English women undertook to win the right to vote at the beginning of the  20th century.

In a less dramatic way, it's also the world of today's Hollywood.

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Carey Mulligan, who stars as the fictional suffragette Maud Watts, has been doing the press rounds for Suffragette. More than once she's been asked: "What's it like working with a female director?" At first the question struck her as odd. Then she thought about it. Suffragette director Sarah Gavron easily qualifies as a minority in the industry. Women accounted for 13 percent of directors on 2014's top 700 theatrically released films, according to the Center for the Study of Women in Television and & Film.

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"We're still so imbalanced in so many ways," Mulligan says in a phone interview. Asked why it took so long for the story of Suffragette to hit the big screen, Mulligan is blunt: "There aren't very many men in it. There are lots of girls. Our industry is geared toward male-driven stories. It's an inherently sexist industry."

An inherently sexist industry increasingly designed to please teenage boys and overseas markets.

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Mulligan recognizes the difference between the fundamental right to vote and the equitable advancement of women in the movie industry. But there's no denying such imbalances operate on the same continuum. Women's points of view, toward policy or toward storytelling, still have trouble breaking through to society's gatekeepers.

Growing up in London, Mulligan was taught little about the English suffragette movement and its leader, Emmeline Pankhurst (briefly played in Suffragette by Meryl Streep). She certainly didn't know about the police beatings, and the prison hunger strikes and force feedings, and the bombing campaign undertaken by the movement's more radical factions.

"I just think a lot of it was written out of our history books, largely because it wasn't documented properly at the time," she says. "I think there was a paragraph in our history book about the women's movement."

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Watching Suffragette is a little like occupying a parallel universe. Was it really less than 100 years ago that England -- and the U.S. -- granted women the right to vote? That's mind-boggling. So is the movie's postscript, which lists the years that other countries instituted women's suffrage (Switzerland: 1971. As Mulligan asks with wonder, "What the [expletive] was happening in Switzerland?")

In the movie, Mulligan plays a laundry worker who joins the suffragette movement gradually, then vehemently. Suffragette includes historical figures, including Pankhurst and Emily Wilding Davison, and fictional characters, including Mulligan's Maud. She endures regular sexual harassment from her boss and works obscenely long hours for a fraction of the wages paid her male peers. That was the beginning of the century, in London. In 2014, in America, women working full-time made 79 percent of what men made.

"In the Western world, we've come a long way," Mulligan says. "But the things in the film are still happening all over the world in terms of women's access to education and sexual violence and treatment in the workplace and all those sorts of things."

Hollywood, by comparison, isn't too bad. But it's still nowhere near good enough.