Mayfair rung with the sound of solidarity last night as Care International held a screening of Suffragette. The film features Meryl Streep as Emmeline Pankhurst, and the pioneer’s great-granddaughter Helen Pankhurst, pictured with her daughter Laura and singer Annie Lennox, was on hand to launch the organisation’s new Walk In Her Shoes campaign.
Laura Pankhurst, Annie Lennox and Helen Pankhurst (image: Julie Edwards/Care International)
“We can talk until we’re blue in the face but we must have action, and that is what we need,” Lennox said at the screening at the May Fair Hotel, also attended by Labour mayoral candidate Sadiq Khan and former MP Emily Thornberry. “I feel ashamed when I see that people step away from the word ‘feminism,’ because they’re so confused about what it means. I’m ashamed. ‘I’m not a feminist’? OK. And people who think twerking is feminist? It isn’t. It really isn’t.”
“We need truth, we need honesty, we need cohesion. Because at the moment in the media there’s a lot of talk about sexuality and celebrity. “And I’m so frustrated, because you watch a film like this and it conveys the truth, and yet where are we now, and where are we in terms of the developing world? We are so far back, we’re in the Middle Ages and it absolutely enrages me.”
Source : Evening Standard