The Lessons of the British Women’s Fight for the Vote

June 1913, England. Women are protesting against their second-class treatment in education, healthcare, and, above all, in suffrage. In no region of Britain do women yet have the right to vote for the government. At the Derby—the most prestigious horserace in the country—a protestor, Emily Wilding Davison, throws herself under the King’s racehorse mid-race. Davison has a track record of arson, stone-throwing, and violence, including a frenzied attack on a man she mistook for a politician. This is how women campaigned for their rights a century ago. As women’s rights are at risk of being eroded today, we should not forget their powerful example. Nowadays we think of suffragettes as glamorous ancestors. Instead they fought to the extreme for their rights as women and their activities were startlingly gritty. It was the drama of this struggle that inspired me to write my new book, a novel called Park Lane. Davison died of her injuries four days later. Born in 1872, she had been a fearsomely intelligent woman, obtaining First-Class Honors at both London and Oxford universities, though the latter did not award her a degree because she was a woman. She then obtained a teaching post with a family: one of the limited range of careers, as opposed to menial work, that a woman could pursue then. In 1908, at the age of thirty-six, she decided to dedicate herself full-time to fighting for the vote for women in the militant and confrontational way - that she and her fellow members of the radical WSPU (Women’s Social and Political Union) saw as necessary for change. She became a “suffragette.”

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Fawcett was not without sympathy for the suffragettes. She admitted that their all-too-visible activities had undoubtedly attracted women to join her own, more moderate, movement and, in 1906, she had arranged a banquet at the Savoy to welcome a group of suffragettes home from their two-month jail sentences. And in that inspirational house on Park Lane, Muriel De La Warr introduced the future leader of Britain’s Labour Party, George Lansbury—whom she supported financially—to Emmeline Pankhurst. However, it was only after this that the suffragettes, frustrated by the government’s continuing failure to pass a suffrage bill through Parliament, fully embarked on their violent campaign.



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Smashing windows was their next tactic. Suffragettes raged along the main shopping streets, hurling stones through the glass panes—they even went to 10, Downing Street, to hurl rocks at the Prime Minister’s home. And they chained themselves to railings, most famously outside Buckingham Palace. Then they turned to arson. Churches and public buildings were burned down across Britain and one politician’s (fortunately empty) house was bombed. A lone suffragette even smuggled a hatchet into the National Gallery and slashed one of the great nude paintings—Velasquez’s Rokeby Venus. As a result several London museums and galleries banned women for several months. Once imprisoned, suffragettes in both Britain and the United States went on hunger strike. Several died as a result of force-feeding, which involved prisoners being held down by up to a dozen warders while rubber tubes were inserted into their throats. This did not however necessarily succeed in preventing the hunger strikers steadily moving towards death. As one of the last things the British government wanted were martyrs on their hands in 1913 they introduced the Prisoner’s (Temporary Discharge for Ill Health) Act, known colloquially as the Cat and Mouse Act. The suffragettes readily adopted the term ‘mice’ for their members who, once released, were evading re-arrest. One supporter’s home, that of Mrs Hilda Brackenbury, in Kensington’s Campden Hill Square, was even known as Mouse Castle.

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So what should women today do to make their case? Admittedly, in the US, the most prominent debate of the moment is not how to win more women’s rights –but to stop them being rolled back state by state. But holding onto hard-won rights is as important as winning them in the first place. I am not, however, going to exhort women to violence but we should learn the lesson from the women of a century ago—our forebears—that change, or prevention, will not happen unless a great deal of noise is made. Happily, today, at least in the Western world, women no longer have to prove that they are capable of understanding politics. Equally happily, increased and mass communication, not least on the internet, enables campaigning groups to network, realize they are not alone, and come together as a single, loud voice—even gather together—though perhaps leaving the Indian exercise clubs at home. This voice has to be loud enough for our daughters (and hopefully, sons) to realize that, if you sit back and do nothing, it is not just that the state of affairs will not progress, but it may turn against you. Keep paddling or you will find yourself sinking. Hopefully novels like Park Lane will remind them to.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/06/13/the-lessons-of-the-british-women-s-fight-for-the-vote.html?utm_medium=referral&utm_source=pulsenews
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these would be the radfems? lol. seems to be the king/malcomx.

interesting.