Poor Lady Sybil, the Downton Abbey daughter who died in childbirth after flitting on the edges of the movement for a woman's right to vote. Lady Sybil—so beautiful, so sweet, so vaguely impassive when it came to feminism. If, instead of flitting, she'd been portrayed as a fully involved suffragette, we might have enjoyed some knock-down-drag-out scenes. Perhaps we could see teenaged Sybil in jail (or gaol, as it's spelled in England), on a hunger strike with force-feeding tubes down her throat. Or maybe we could watch her trembling as she listens to speakers railing against “white slavery”: the widespread kidnapping of virgin girls by men who prostituted the young innocents and infected them fatally with syphilis.
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