Sometimes we forget: Once upon a time, feminism wasn't just something we debated on Twitter using Beyoncé GIFs. In earlier struggles for equality, women got hurt and killed and even had their children taken away. Suffragette commemorates those battles, along with the British women who went on hunger strike and committed arson to bring attention to their cause: the right to vote. Glamour talked with costars Carey Mulligan and Helena Bonham Carter and director Sarah Gavron about why the world needs this movie now. GLAMOUR: It took six years to get this movie made. Why? SARAH GAVRON: There was so much material—but had we been ready with the script a few years earlier, we may not have gotten the financing. Now there's such an appetite for voices that challenge repression all over the world. GLAMOUR: Carey, your character, Maud, is a laundress and mother who joins the fight for women's rights. But at first she resists getting involved. CAREY MULLIGAN: She's a working-class woman, and it was so important to be respectable: a good wife, a good mother. SG: Working women had so much more to lose than their middle-class and upper-class counterparts. [Protesting] was considered more shameful for them.