Sister suffragette

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Sister Suffragette is a song from the Disney film Mary Poppins from 1964. Text and music were written by the Sherman brothers . Glynis Johns sings the song in her role as Mrs. Winifred Banks with Hermione Baddeley as the maid Ellen and Reta Shaw as the cook Mrs. Brill and with spoken breaks from Elsa Lanchester as the nanny Katie. The song is about the suffragette movement and their struggle for women's suffrage .

The German dubbed version with the title “ We are the fighters for women's rights ” was written by Eberhard Cronshagen in collaboration with Heinrich Riethmüller . Käthe Jaenicke takes on the role of Mrs. Banks , supported by Inge Landgut (for Hermione Baddeley), Erna Haffner (for Reta Shaw) and Elfe Schneider (for Elsa Lanchester).

history

Glynis Johns had accepted her role on the assumption that she should play Mary Poppins. She was disappointed to learn that Julie Andrews would be given the title role and she would only be given a supporting role. So Walt Disney promised her a solo song and began to expand her role. The Sherman brothers faced a challenge because the soundtrack was all but finished and they hadn't provided a song for Mrs. Banks. So they revived an earlier draft of a song originally called Practically Perfect , which should have been Mary Poppins' introductory song , but which had since been discarded. They made it into a song for Mrs. Banks. In the Mary Poppins books by PL Travers suffragettes do not exist - to let Mrs. Banks in this movement take part, is an invention for the film.

For the stage musical Mary Poppins premiered in 2004 , Anthony Drewe and George Stiles took up the idea of ​​a song with the title Practically Perfect ; musically it has nothing to do with this. The song Sister Suffragette was one of the few original songs not adopted for the musical, but replaced by the song Being Mrs. Banks .

Music and lyrics

The song is a march in 6/8 time. Mrs. Banks, who has just come home from a meeting of her group of suffragettes , praises the goals and activities of the suffragette movement in the song. The text refers to the activist Emmeline Pankhurst , who is a role model for Mrs. Banks. Mrs. Banks celebrates future generations of women and predicts that they will look back gratefully on you and those around you. The song ends abruptly when Katie finally manages, after several attempts, to get Mrs. Banks' attention and inform her that the children Jane and Michael have run away again and that she wants to quit her job because of this.

Function in the film

The song Sister Suffragette is used to introduce and characterize Mrs. Banks at the beginning of the film. It corresponds to the recognition songs of other characters such as Mr. Banks ( The Life I Lead ), Mary Poppins ( A Spoonful of Sugar ) and Bert ( Chim Chim Cher-ee ). In the further course of the film, elements from Sister Suffragette are used as the theme melody for Mrs. Banks, but they are less common than the theme melodies of the other adult characters.

At the same time, Sister Suffragette - together with Mr. Banks' The Life I Lead - lays the foundation for the central conflict of the film: the neglect of children because their parents are more important about their job and their political commitment.

Despite the serious political issue, there is a comical aspect to the song, especially with the reactions of the domestic servants and the repeated interruptions from the nurse Katie, who wants to announce her resignation and struggles to get through to Mrs. Banks - a scene that soon repeats itself by Mrs. Banks wanting to pass this information on to Mr. Banks, who is no more listening to her than she was to the nanny before.

Reception and classification

Mrs. Banks with her programmatic song Sister Suffragette is the first encounter with the historical women's suffragette for many children and thus had a lasting influence on the public image of the suffragette. Despite its clear message for women's rights, the song is usually classified as less progressive in its context in the film. It is true that with its combative statement for women's rights it undermines Mr. Banks' self-image and his belief in his unrestricted supremacy, as Mrs. Banks doubts the judgment of men as a collective and thus questions the patriarchy . At the same time, the song makes Mrs. Banks' commitment appear to be a threat to the family, as she shows indifference to the fate of her children while singing. The political concern of the suffragettes in its socio-political context does not appear in the film and is portrayed as a sideline that is only important for Mrs. Banks, but not for any of the other characters, which makes them appear selfish. At the same time, Mrs. Banks takes on a subordinate role in the domestic setting by hiding her activism from her husband on the grounds that it upset him too much and by recognizing her husband as head of the house, albeit occasionally in a slightly mocking manner. The literary scholar Brian Szumsky evaluates the song and the role of Mrs. Banks as an earlier stage of development of her magical counterpart Mary Poppins: The freedom and independence that Mary Poppins enjoys has not yet been realized for Mrs. Banks. At the end of the film, the banner of the suffragette movement serves as a bow for the kite that the Banks family raises together. In the spirit of a Disney happy ending, the social order is ultimately not touched, but Mrs. Banks' struggle is integrated into her family life. The historian Laura E. Nym Mayhall believes that Disney is trivializing and domesticated the protest of the suffragettes and assigns it its place within the family - in the traditional domain of women. According to her, this defusing of the actually much more radical suffragette movement enables a high level of acceptance of the movement even by conservative forces.

Valerie Lawson writes in her biography of PL Travers that a mocking to negative portrayal of the suffragette movement was in the spirit of both Walt Disney and the author. Making Mrs. Banks a suffragette, but portraying her as silly and incompetent as possible, reflected Disney's attitude to the second women's movement that was emerging at the time . Travers, by no means a feminist, was initially appalled that Mrs. Banks was becoming a suffragette, but got used to the idea when she realized that the film's commitment to women's suffrage would not appear positive. Travers had no objection to making fun of the suffragettes - their only fear was that children would not understand the joke at the expense of the suffragettes because they knew nothing about their history.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Mary Poppins. In: synchronkartei.de. German dubbing file , accessed on September 8, 2018 .
  2. ↑ Pat Williams, James Denney: How To Be Like Walt. Capturing the Disney Magic Every Day of Your Life. Health Communications, Deerfield Beach 2004, ISBN 0-7573-0231-9 .
  3. ↑ a b Laura E. Nym Mayhall: Domesticating Emmeline. Representing the Suffragette, 1930-1993. In: NWSA Journal. Volume 11, No. 2, 1999, p. 12.
  4. ^ Mary Poppins in the Internet Broadway Database , accessed September 8, 2018.
  5. ↑ Thomas S Hischak, Mark A Robinson: The Disney Song Encyclopedia. Taylor Trade Publishing, Lanham 2013, ISBN 978-1-58979-713-0 , p. 176.
  6. ↑ Thomas S Hischak, Mark A Robinson: The Disney Song Encyclopedia. Taylor Trade Publishing, Lanham 2013, ISBN 978-1-58979-713-0 , pp. 15-16.
  7. ^ A b c d Raymond Knapp: American Musical and the Performance of Personal Identity. Princeton University Press, Princeton 2009, ISBN 978-0-691-14105-3 , pp. 142-143.
  8. ^ Anna Fielding: Is Mrs Banks really a positive representation of the suffragettes? In: Stylist. January 2018, accessed on August 26, 2018 .
  9. ↑ a b Lauren Laverne : Foreword to David Roberts: Suffragette. The Battle for Equality. Two Hoots, London 2018, ISBN 978-1-5098-3967-4 , pp. 8–9.
  10. ^ A b c d Brian E. Szumsky: All That Is Solid Melts into the Air. The Winds of Change and Other Analogues of Colonialism in Disney's Mary Poppins. In: The Lion and the Unicorn. Volume 24, No. 1, 2000, pp. 101-102, 106-107.
  11. ^ Deborah P. Dixon, John Paul Jones III: For a Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious Scientific Geography. In: Annals of the Association of American Geographers. Volume 86, No. 4, December 1996, pp. 767-779.
  12. ^ Valerie Lawson: Mary Poppins, She Wrote. The Life of PL Travers. Pocket Books, New York 2013, ISBN 978-1-4767-6473-3 , pp. 2, 264-265.