What’s a suffragette?" ask a whole lot of people younger than 40.

That is reason enough for a film about women’s struggle to win the right to vote in the early 20th century. But "Suffragette" is also a fascinating story of ingenuity, sacrifice and English women who resorted to such unladylike behavior as breaking windows and blowing up mailboxes "because war is the only thing men listen to," as rabble-rouser factory worker Violet Miller (Anne-Marie Duff) puts it.

"SUFFRAGETTE" Rated PG-13 Opens today at Kahala 8

American women got the right to vote with the ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920, about a decade before their counterparts in England. "Suffragette" mixes real-life characters, including movement leader Emmeline Pankhurst (Meryl Streep in a small but powerful role) with fictional ones, chief among them Maud Watts (Carey Mulligan).

Maud is a lower-class laundress who loves her husband, Sonny (Ben Whishaw), and dotes on their young son. She manages to rise through the ranks at work, fending off gropings by her lecherous boss. She catches the brewing fever of the activists around her and draws the attention of Irish detective Arthur Steed (a perfectly understated Brendan Gleeson), who employs cameras to track the women’s movements in one of the earliest uses of surveillance technology.

Maud and her partners in righteous civil disobedience give up a lot for their dedication. They are imprisoned, violently force-fed on hunger strikes and see their children taken away. This is no Merchant-Ivory-style, sun-drenched, gauze-filtered period drama.

Mulligan delivers as her character goes from workaday mum to first-wave feminist superhero.

Screenwriter Abi Morgan ("Iron Lady," "Shame") does a decent job of balancing fact with story-advancing fiction, though the narrative gets muddled at times. Director Sarah Gavron fails to develop some crucial characters enough for the audience to remember their names, let alone care about their fates. One such character is bomb-maker Edith Ellyn (loosely based on real-life suffragette Edith Garrud) played by an underused Helena Bonham Carter.

"Suffragette" begins with a politician’s voice-over opining that women don’t need to vote because their concerns are already "well-represented by their fathers, husbands and brothers." That statement brings guffaws of incredulity now, but was the prevailing attitude of its day.

At a time when the word "feminist" has taken on similar pejorative connotations, and Hollywood continues to shortchange women everywhere from the director’s chair to star salaries, the film is a reminder of both how far equality has come and that the battle continues.

Review by Kristin Tillotson, Minneapolis Star Tribune