An investigation into the life and work of Muriel Matters
A team of young historians investigate a woman named Muriel Matters who fought for equality and broke the law to become the first woman 'to speak' in the House of Commons.
Joe Crowley helps a team of four pupils to uncover the story of Muriel Matters, a campaigner for women to be given the right to vote. The history hunt begins in Hastings where there is a plaque to Muriel Matters – the first woman 'to speak' in Parliament. The children head for the town's archives where they discover that Muriel was a noted campaigner for women's rights to sit in Parliament as an MP and that she was a suffragette. They find out that she was the architect of a number of 'stunts' designed to raise awareness of the issue. The children study newspaper reports and work out that (male) journalists took a biased view of her activities. The children travel to the Houses of Parliament where they get privileged access to the Commons' archive. Here they see a proclamation – an original document – which Muriel Matters unveiled in Parliament when she invaded the chamber to further publicise her cause. Next the children meet the current MP for Hastings, Amber Rudd, who explains that suffragettes like Muriel Matters often broke the law to bring attention to their cause. They discuss whether it can ever be right to break the law in pursuit of a cause. The film ends with the children solving the mystery of why Muriel Matters was the first woman 'to speak' in the House of Commons. During her invasion of the floor of the Commons, she breached a boundary between public access areas and the chamber to give her impassioned speech and so became, not in a conventional way, the first woman to be heard in the Commons.
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