Disney’s Sister Suffragette: how Glynis Johns made Mrs Banks the feminist heart of Mary Poppins
The campaign for women’s votes may be one of the most significant events in modern history, yet few popular films have tackled it. There were films about suffrage during the silent era, while the battle was still being fought, but after women got the vote it was as if the battle was too obvious a cause to be worth celebrating – or perhaps too shameful a blot on history.
In this big-screen vacuum, generations of children first encountered women’s suffrage through, of all things, Walt Disney’s 1964 classic Mary Poppins. Somehow, the arch-conservative Walt Disney and his tale of a magical nanny provided the struggle’s most significant big-screen depiction for 51 years, until Sarah Gavron’s Suffragette in 2015. Perhaps “significant” is a strong word, given that she only gets about six minutes of screen time, but the fact Mrs Banks – played by the wonderful Glynis Johns – exists in this form at all is extraordinary.
The film of Mary Poppins was, of course, based on Pamela (PL) Travers’s books, secured by Walt Disney after a 20-year battle for the adaptation rights. Travers was never happy with the adaptation, and in fact was reportedly reduced to tears when she first saw that her curmudgeonly, homely, Cockney nanny had been transformed into the glowing Julie Andrews.
The setting was removed from the 1930s and a London in the grip of the Great Depression to the Edwardian era, a step further back in time that helped audiences suspend disbelief and buy the story’s more magical elements (the era was also familiar from Disney’s own Peter Pan 11 years before). And Mrs Banks was given a first name (Winifred, chosen by Travers over Disney’s original suggestions of Cynthia) and a cause: votes for women.
The film’s screenwriters, Bill Walsh and Don DaGradi, and songwriters Richard and Robert Sherman (who were heavily involved in the story’s development), had a fundamental problem to solve as they began work on the story: why would the Banks family need a nanny?
In 1960s America, nannies were largely unheard-of outside the very richest families in the Deep South or Upper West Side. Most of Disney’s target audience associated the word with female goats, not childcare. So there had to be a reason for the apparently hale and hearty Mr and Mrs Banks to hire Mary Poppins in the first place.
The writers quickly decided that Mr Banks had to be largely absent. An early notion had him fighting in the Boer War and literally away from home, but the Shermans conceived a better idea. They made Mr Banks emotionally rather than physically absent; his emotional renaissance gives the film much of its heart. As played by David Tomlinson, he’s the image of the stern patriarch but has a comic edge that suggests he is never quite as firmly in control as he likes to imagine, particularly when it comes to his wife.
Mrs Banks was a tougher problem. Disney didn’t like mothers to be failures – his films usually killed them off rather than portray flawed motherhood – but how else to explain her need for a nanny? The Edwardian setting provided an answer: they made Mrs Banks a suffragette and sent her off to march for Votes For Women.
And it’s notable that Mrs Banks is a suffragette, properly so-called, and not one of Milicent Fawcett’s milder, more law-abiding suffragists. Her catchy big song, Sister Suffragette, includes the lines, “Take heart! For Missus Pankhurst has been clapped in irons again!” and “We’re fighting for our rights, militantly!”
(According to the Shermans, the song was cobbled together over a lunchbreak, based on a discarded tune called Practically Perfect. Glynis Johns had, they said, believed she was to be cast as Poppins until she sat down with Walt Disney, and to assuage the embarrassing misunderstanding he promised her that the writers had whipped her up a big number she’d be able to hear immediately after their lunch. The Shermans took their cue and wrote furiously.)
The recasting of Mrs Banks in this way was a neat solution, but it doesn’t stand up terribly well to historical scrutiny. The film is set in 1910, when British and Irish suffragettes had declared an informal truce following the introduction of a suffrage bill to Parliament. Between January 1910 and November 1911 there was little mass protest, except for a few days in November 1910 when Parliament was dissolved without resolution of this Conciliation Bill.
And unfortunately for the Shermans’ historical sheen, Mary Poppins takes place when the cherry trees are in bloom, in early summer. Just then the women’s hopes were at their highest, and there was no occasion when – as Mrs Banks reports – “Mrs. Whitbourne-Allen chained herself to the wheel of the Prime Minister’s carriage. You should have been there! And Mrs. Ainslie—she was carried off to prison, singing and scattering pamphlets all the way!”
That sort of protest would resume in earnest a couple of years later, but perhaps it’s too much to expect historical accuracy in a film about adventures in chalk paintings and flying by umbrella.
Winifred is not, with her mix of fiery passion and devoted submission to her husband’s wishes, an uncomplicated feminist heroine. But she is still a great improvement on the books’ Mrs Banks; no first name, a rather thin character who is treated with generalised contempt by Mary Poppins and most of her family. Even the 2003 stage show falls a little short of the film’s Winifred. There, Mrs Banks is a former actress struggling to fit into her husband’s social circle and singing wistfully about the difficulties of “Being Mrs Banks” and disappointing both her husband and children.
In fact, every other incarnation of Mary Poppins has struggled to give Mrs Banks a purpose while leaving room for their nanny heroine. A proposed sequel to the Disney film in the late 1980s, developed by PL Travers with author and film historian Brian Sibley, would have featured a Mrs Banks who gave up on suffrage and struggled with more domestic concerns after giving birth to twins (a pair always in the books but cut from the Disney film), and Poppins returning to help out.
The removal of the suffragette cause was apparently at Travers’ behest; Sibley said she hated that embellishment. “How could dear, demented Mrs. Banks, fussy, feminine and loving, become a suffragette?” she demanded.
Yet the best incarnation of Mrs Banks, by far, is the one in the film. Glynnis Johns’ Winifred Banks is indulgent and loving to her children, devoted to her husband, cheery despite her neighbour’s cannon-firing, and more capable than her husband ever guesses.
Much of the credit for that goes to Johns herself, whose warmth and charm shines through even in a mere six minutes of screen time. Johns first appeared on stage at three weeks of age, and kept going until her retirement in 1999. She’d worked for for Sir Alexander Korda and Ralph Richardson before she turned 16, and went on to appear opposite James Stewart and Marlene Dietrich.
But Johns herself never achieved quite the cosy home life of Winifred Banks, having married four times and had only one son. She told the Daily Express in 1977 that, “I gave up on my career twice, but I was just no good at being a housewife and I doubt that I’ll ever be one again.”
Reviews at the time of the film were gently dismissive of Johns’ Mrs Banks, with The Sun calling her, “a fluffy, submissive little creature who has somehow got herself mixed up with the suffragette movement…” and The Telegraph settling on “silliness itself”. Certainly she’s not a feminist heroine in the modern sense.
Mrs Banks behaves subserviently towards her husband and the film’s ending, where she takes off her “Votes For Women sash to tie it on a kite for her children, is often read as an abdication of her campaigning role in favour of traditional motherhood; an interpretation that was likely Disney’s intention.
But it’s possible to see that gesture instead as a union of her public work and private life, a case of literally flying her flag alongside her family. If the end of the film sees Mr Banks achieving a better work-life balance, perhaps Mrs Banks’ decision should be seen in the same light, a choice to continue the fight without leaving her children behind.
Mrs Banks’ seeming contradictions are the same issues that women still struggle with: the conflict between a personal life and the political activism required to secure equality. Either way, she is devoted to something important, and she has lived up to the promise of her big musical number. “Our daughters’ daughters will adore us / And they’ll sing in grateful chorus / Well done, Sister Suffragette!”
This piece was first published in 2018
