Anjelica Huston spoke with journalists of the Hollywood Foreign Press about the TV movie Iron Jawed Angels (2004) where she played Carrie Chapman Catt, leader of the American women’s suffrage movement.
“I was rather remiss on my history of suffragettism. I grew up in Ireland, and I was quite aware of the actions of the Irish and English suffragettes, but not so much the Americans, so I had to do a bit of research on those ladies. Carrie Catt is the battle-ax of the piece, she was the old guard, they’d been fighting for years and years trying to persuade Woodrow Wilson to come around, and they were very much entrenched until this younger group lead by Alice Paul came along.” 
“It came as a huge surprise to me that one of the only reasons they gave the vote to women was because they were going to have to give the vote to Black men, and they couldn’t possibly give the vote to Black men unless they gave it to women. So that was really extraordinary, and when you think that all of this happened only 80 years ago, it’s staggering. We complain that we haven’t come very far, but in actual fact, when you look at the record, women and people, in general, have come so much further than those days.”
“Men are naturally physically more powerful than women, so there is always the question of who’s got more muscle, but women in an evolving society are showing themselves to be just as mentally fit as men, and possibly soon we will be given a chance to really fly our colors when we have a woman President in the United States.”
“First of all, a woman’s right to do what she will with her body, the right to abortion, shouldn’t be questioned at this point. It’s a very personal choice, more often than not an extremely unpleasant choice, but I don’t think a government should tell women what to do. In terms of perception, women are very easily held up for ridicule in a male-dominated society, and it’s something that we all have to deal with in small ways every day. There still is prejudice against women in America and probably in many other countries, prejudice is alive and well.”
“We’re registering people to vote because it’s through awareness and encouragement that people are inspired to vote. So many young people feel disenfranchised because they think they can’t make a difference and it all seems very complicated, and sometimes, in the cloud of confusion, they lose track of the one thing they can do, which is to vote.”
“When one reads every day about the environment disappearing, drilling in the Virgin Arctic, snowmobiles in Yellowstone Park, the cutting down of our national forests, the fact that global warming isn’t just an illusion, it’s a fact, people feel overwhelmed and disappointed, but one has to do everything one can within one’s reach to change that perception.”