Summary
A soot-smudged parable of Gilded-Age America, The Woman God Sent weds Dickensian gloom to Capitol-Hill melodrama: Margaret Manning—orphaned by a mother’s early grave and a ward-heeling father’s convenient absence—learns the clang of looms before she masters cursive. The Finns, a surrogate clan whose surname hints at both charity and fatalism, feed her scraps of kindness and send her to the mill where children stoop like aged monks. Night school becomes her candle in that cavern; the classroom’s chalk squeaks out a manifesto against the sin of tiny fingers caught in flywheels. Armed with statistics and a quiver of moral outrage, she rides the rails to Washington, a modern Joan fusing Social-Gospel fervor with first-wave feminism. There she collides with Jack West, heir to a dynasty of smoke-filled rooms, whose silk lapels still smell of campaign cigars. Their courtship is conducted in marble corridors where every whisper ricochets off busts of dead statesmen. Senator Mathews—part kingmaker, part serpent—sees in Margaret’s anti-child-labor bill a blade to eviscerate his rival, Jim Connelly, the very titan who sired her and vanished. A dossier flung across a mahogany desk detonates Jack’s trust: the woman he worshipped is the daughter of the machine he despises. Yet the climax refuses cynicism; Connelly, broken by public exposure, lifts his gray head in a cathedral of reporters and pronounces his daughter the better part of himself. The bill passes; the factory whistles fall silent for one reverent breath; Margaret’s face, framed in a window of the Capitol, becomes a secular icon of absolution.
Synopsis
Margaret Manning, a poor waif who lost her mother early in her childhood and was deserted by her machine-politician father Jim Connelly is raised by the Finns, a poor family who sends her to work in the factory. The evils of such a life make a deep impression on Margaret, who attends night school to better herself. Assuming the leadership in a campaign to abolish child labor, she journeys to Washington, D.C., where she falls in love with Jack West, the son of a wealthy politician. Margaret's bill is backed by Senator Mathews, who decides to discredit his opponent, Jim Connelly, by investigating his past. He discovers that Margaret is Connelly's daughter, a fact that shakes Jack's faith in her. However, when Connelly finally admits that he is beaten and praises his daughter's tenacity, Jack's faith is restored, and the bill is passed to the benefit of thousands of factory workers.
Review Excerpt
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Spindleville’s Joan of Arc
The film opens not with a title card but with the thud of a coffin nail: a mother’s casket lowered into muddy earth while a child’s mitten dangles from a stranger’s hand. Cinematographer William Magner backlights the graveyard so that every tombstone becomes a picket in the fence that will pen Margaret into poverty. The camera then smash-cuts to the factory floor—a Piranesi dungeon of girders and belts—where adolescent bodies jerk like marionettes. No need for graphi..."
