“Suffragette,” is easily one of the best films of 2015 about women's fight to win the vote in Great Britain. The sacrifices made by these women – physically, emotionally and mentally – (and surely women the world over) is explored in a marvelous script by Abi Morgan. The film focuses on the driving force of working women within the movement in the U.K.

After 50 years of peaceful protest in an attempt to lift women up, to give them a say in the world around them, activist Emmeline Pankhurst (Meryl Streep) puts out a call for civil disobedience on the national level. Pankhurst founded the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) after the death of her husband.

The year is 1912. Maud Watts (Carey Mulligan) has been sent by her lascivious employer Norman Taylor (Geoff Bell), at the Glass House Laundry, to pick up a package in town. As she stands before a shop window admiring the clothes worn by the mannequin mother and children, a voice cries out “Votes For Women!” as stones are thrown through the windows up and down the street.

Violet Miller (Anne-Marie Duff) “made the call.” Violet is not unknown to Maud; she began working at the laundry. The next day, boss man gives Violet a hard time about being late; Maud diffuses the situation by reporting a mechanical defect. And the two women strike up a friendship.

Government officials begin looking into surveillance cameras to catch the suffragettes and put an end to “their cause” and send them back home to their husbands.

One day outside the laundry, a suffragette is giving a speech to encourage the women working there to testify at upcoming hearings for a parliamentary amendment to a bill to force the issue of women’s right to vote, to a vote, although most men of the day believe women incapable of weighing in on important issues of the day. They are best at home, caring for family, under a husband's “protection.” As one character, male, points out, what happens next? Women get the vote and the next thing you know they'll want a seat in Parliament!

Violet, long involved in winning the right to vote, prepares a speech. But, on the day she is to speak, she arrives with a battered face – her husband's handiwork. Maud, out of curiosity and to support her coworker, has decided to attend the hearings. Violet and another suffragette implore Maud to read the statement.

Unwillingly, Maud does speak. But, it isn't Violet's letter she reads. The chancellor of the exchequer, David Lloyd George is leading the hearings. He asks Maud if she, too, works at the laundry. Maud tells him she does and he asks for her story. Turns out she was born in the laundry, started working there when she was 7 as a part-timer and full-time at 12. She is now 24, a foreman of four years. What she leaves out is the sex forced upon her by Taylor – and the sexual advances he has been making on Violet's 12-year-old daughter. But I digress …

The chancellor asks Maud what the vote means to her, why is she at the hearings?

“I never thought women would be able to vote so I never thought about it,” Maud says. “I guess I'm here because there's another way of living this life.”

Before joining in the fight to win the vote, Maud has a normal family life with her husband Sonny (Ben Wishaw), and their 7-year-old son, George. But her involvement with the suffragettes weighs on Sonny. The neighbors are talking. He, too, works at the laundry. Can't he control his wife?

Maud decides to attend the rally where the announcement regarding the amendment will be read. The verdict, that there will not be an amendment, leads to a horrendous police action. As the women shout in protest at the chancellor leaving the scene, police begin striking the women with billy clubs – or their bare hands. Women are being knocked to the ground, once down some are trampled. Several are arrested. Maud is one of them. As is Violet, Edith New (Helena Bonham Carter) – a woman with an education, a degree (a chemist even), and others.

Inspector Arthur Steed (Brendan Gleeson) has been hired by the police to stop all of this right to vote nonsense that is getting more and more out of hand. Inspector Steed strongly encourages the use of surveillance cameras. He is in charge of interrogating the arrested women. He is – until the film nears its end – a hard son of a … gun.

Women were property. They had no rights – not even when it came to their children. After Maud is arrested for the second time and spends a week in jail, and returns home saying she is more than a mother and a wife, her husband throws her out. Does not permit her to see her son. Eventually he even puts his own boy up for adoption – and lets it transpire on the child's eighth birthday! This scene is a heart breaker – and there are a few.

Thousands of women, whether in the U.K., in the U.S.A., Switzerland … name a place; paid a huge price to win the right to vote. As Pankhurst tells them in the one brief scene in which she appears, “It is deeds and sacrifice that must be the order of the day.”

“We don't want to be lawbreakers,” Pankhurst tells the women at the rally. “We want to be lawmakers. We have been left with no alternative but to defy government.”

Women were made homeless, lost their children, suffered brutality at the hands of their own husbands (in many cases, just as some do today – but, again, I digress …), the law, had their backs turned on by other women, and in some cases, lost their lives.

Actual footage of the funeral procession of the suffragette who died in front of the world's cameras, Emily Wilding Davison, is used in “Suffragette.” She was struck by the King's horse in the Derby in 1913. This happened in front of the world’s journalists and cameramen covering the event; the act that finally brought their cause to the world. This was the intention of Maud and Emily’s attendance there; the death of one of them was not, however, part of the strategy.

Women in Britain, over the age of 30, were permitted to vote in 1918. Ten years later women 21 and over were permitted to vote in The Representation of the People Act.

The cast of this film, directed by Sarah Gavron, is superb, particularly Mulligan, Gleeson and Bonham Carter. They, and the film, definitely get my vote!

“Suffragette” opens tonight, Friday, Dec. 4 at 7 p.m. and plays Oct. 5 at 7 and at 2 and 7 on Oct. 6 at The Harbor Theatre in Boothbay Harbor.