Remembering Women's Activism

Sharon Crozier-De Rosa, Vera Mackie

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429850486
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Remembering Women's Activism examines the intersections between gender politics and acts of remembrance by tracing the cultural memories of women who are known for their actions.

Memories are constantly being reinterpreted and are profoundly shaped by gender. This book explores the gendered dimensions of history and memory through nation-based and transnational case studies from the Asia-Pacific region and Anglophone world. Chapters consider how different forms of women's activism have been remembered: the efforts of suffragists in Britain, the USA and Australia to document their own histories and preserve their memory; Constance Markievicz and Qiu Jin, two early twentieth-century political activists in Ireland and China respectively; the struggles of women workers; and the movement for redress of those who have suffered militarized sexual abuse. The book concludes by reflecting on the mobilization of memories of activism in the present.

Transnational in scope and with reference to both state-centred and organic acts of remembering, including memorial practices, physical sites of memory, popular culture and social media, Remembering Women's Activism is an ideal volume for all students of gender and history, the history of feminism, and the relationship between memory and history.

1
SUFFRAGISTS AND SUFFRAGETTES

Suffragette

In 2015, the British movie, Suffragette, was released.¹ Directed by Sarah Gavron and scripted by Abi Morgan (who also who wrote the Margaret Thatcher biopic, The Iron Lady²), Suffragette detailed the experiences of the fictional Maud Watts, a working-class woman working in a London laundry. She joined the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), the militant wing of the British women’s suffrage movement led by the Pankhursts. Suffragette may have appeared a rather benign historical film; a fictional representation of a women’s movement that had long since achieved political success. Feminist reaction to the movie, though, proved otherwise.

Suffragette raised the ire of many feminist commentators globally, while drawing passionate acclaim from others. Those praising the movie did so because it performed the tremendous – and rare – service of bringing such a sidelined but pivotal moment of historical protest to the big screen.³ Those finding fault with the film did so on numerous levels. Some accused the director of misrepresenting class structure by overlooking the middle-class bias of the WSPU. Others condemned the film for what they saw as its valorization of violence over constitutionalism in the suffrage campaign, thereby mirroring ongoing discord about – and growing fascination with – women activists’ relationship with violence.⁴ There were numerous criticisms of the sacrifice of historical accuracy for the sake of plot devices (for example, Maud unrealistically appears in all key historical scenes).⁵ Still others, particularly those in the United States, criticized the movie for its all-white focus.⁶

Over the past 50 years, a variety of films have capitalized on the drama of the suffrage movement, but none have raised as much controversy among the feminist community as Suffragette.⁷ In attempting to address some of these points of contention, Gavron explained that she understood that there were many ways in which to tell the story – or stories – of the British suffrage movement but justified her selection for both political and cinematic reasons. She concentrated on the militant branch of the suffrage movement because she thought that this was the least familiar aspect of the movement among cinema-goers today. This way, she could fill the existing ‘gap in the cinematic canon’.⁸ More pragmatically, Gavron explained that the militant movement was ‘dramatically and visually’ appealing. There were aspects of militant activism that lent themselves particularly to cinematic representation – ‘the charismatic Pankhursts and the purple, white and green of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), the force-feeding, and the startling, ambiguous death of Emily Wilding Davison [1872–1913] in 1913’.⁹

Ending the movie around the time of Davison’s death – five years before limited female franchise was granted – allowed the director to make the political statement that feminism could not be neatly packaged as a successful but now obsolete movement. As historian Linda Gordon articulates it, Gavron denied audiences the opportunity of indulging in ‘a simplistic “you’ve-come-a-long-way-baby” happy ending’. ‘The truth’, Gordon asserts, ‘is that feminism is unfinished.’¹⁰ This is an assertion that Sisters Uncut – a British feminist direct-action group – affirmed when they brought the London premiere of the movie to a standstill. Around two hundred female activists jumped barriers, some staging a lie-in on the red carpet, in protest against cuts made to domestic abuse services in the United Kingdom, chanting: ‘Dead women can’t vote’.¹¹

Feminist reactions to Suffragette – including Sisters Uncut’s protest against domestic violence – demonstrate that feminism is certainly ‘unfinished’; that remembering women’s political activism in the past is inescapably and controversially tied to ongoing feminist activism in the present. The highly divided response to the film, emanating from Anglophone feminists, reminds us that opportunities to memorialize women’s past activism are still relatively scarce. Inordinate pressure is exerted on those who do choose to publicly remember feminist protest. They are urged to realize the unachievable goal of creating a memorial which represents all interests in what was – and still is – a highly diverse and fragmented movement. In this chapter, we consider how women’s campaigns for the vote have been remembered in different regional sites in the United Kingdom, Australia, and the USA.¹²

Remembering suffragists and suffragettes in the United Kingdom

The long-running British suffrage campaign was a contentious protest movement. British and Irish women started campaigning for the vote in the 1860s. The period from 1866 – when the first mass petitions were collected and presented to Parliament – to 1870 has been labelled the first phase of the organized movement and was characterized by ‘optimism and spirited activity’.¹³ Many individual suffrage societies were formed during what has been termed the second phase – stretching from the 1870s until 1905. This was a time when feminist activists helped to enact substantial reform within the wider women’s rights movement. These included reforms affecting married women’s property rights, access to higher education and the professions, and the repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts of the 1860s.¹⁴ It was also, however, a period during which little progress was made as far as the vote was concerned. In recognition of their relative ineffectiveness, many of the more influential individual suffrage societies gathered under the umbrella organization, the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS). The NUWSS was established in 1897 and led for the most part by Millicent Garrett Fawcett (1847–1929) – feminist reformer and founder of Newnham College, Cambridge, the first English university college for women.

It was during the so-called third phase of the movement, beginning in 1905, that sections of the suffrage movement began to adopt strategies of what was later termed ‘suffragette’ militancy.¹⁵ Proponents of militancy were led by the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), a society formed in 1903 by Emmeline Pankhurst (1858–1928) and her daughter Christabel Pankhurst (1880–1958) who were dissatisfied with the NUWSS’s lack of progress.

The ‘confrontational, assertive and “unladylike” tactics’ of the new militant WSPU re-energized the suffrage campaign by forcing the feminist issue into the limelight.¹⁶ From 1905 to 1912, the campaign took the form of heckling politicians, noisily disrupting political meetings, and a willingness to go to prison rather than paying fines for ‘unruly’ behaviour. From 1912, until they ceased their militant campaign at the outset of the Great War in 1914, suffragettes moved on to more violent and often illegal forms of activity such as mass window-breaking raids, vandalizing post boxes, attacking public property, setting fire to buildings, and going on hunger strikes.¹⁷ In 1918, a small section of British and Irish women – those over 30 years old who met property qualifications – received the franchise. British women had to campaign for another decade before those over 21 years old were granted the same voting rights as men in 1928.

It took over 60 years of consistent campaigning – involving tactics from lobbying political parties, collecting mass petitions, repeated deputations to prime ministers, pilgrimages and parades, massive fund-raising endeavours, and violence, imprisonment, and hunger striking – for women to receive equal voting rights in the British Parliament. Not surprisingly, given the ongoing aversion to, and simultaneous fascination with, female-generated acts of violence, it is the militant activities conducted in the years 1905 to 1914 that continue to grab the collective imagination of historians, biographers, and the general public. So too does the violence against suffragists perpetrated by the state, most infamously the force feeding of hunger striking prisoners and the 1913 Prisoners (Temporary Discharge for Ill-Health) Act, commonly known as the Cat and Mouse Act, which allowed for the early release of hunger striking prisoners who were at risk of death, followed by their rearrest once their health was recovered.¹⁸

Feminist scholar and historian of the British suffrage movement, June Purvis, has noted that, in their appraisals of the suffrage movement, generations of historians have tended to favour documenting the more dramatic activities of the militant branch of the women’s rights campaign over the law-abiding methods of the constitutional wing.¹⁹ Not all of this scholarly attention has been positive, however. On the contrary, proponents of the militant movement have been on the receiving end of considerable hostile criticism.

In a reflective essay on her contributions to the historiography of the suffragette campaign, Purvis argued that the WSPU’s prioritising of gender over class led a number of the prominent socialist feminist historians of the 1970s to treat them dismissively or with contempt.²⁰ Since the 1930s at least, she argues, many male biographers and historians have adopted a ‘masculinist’ approach to the writing of suffragette history. This masculinist approach has framed the suffragette movement as deviant, ridiculous, irrational, with the suffragettes portrayed as being akin to naughty schoolgirls.²¹ Purvis cites George Dangerfield’s labelling of Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst as ‘a pair of…infernal queens’ and David Mitchell’s depiction of Christabel as cold, ruthless, and deranged. Mitchell makes the extraordinary claim that not only did Christabel have an incestuous desire for her mother, but that the suffragettes performed in the manner they did because they wanted sex with a man. More recently, Martin Pugh claimed that suffragettes hero-worshipped Christabel as an alternative to physical passion.²² The historiography of the militant is a field ‘riven with debate and controversy’.²³

Film director Sarah Gavron...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Series editors’ foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Gendered memories and histories
• 1 Suffragists and suffragettes
• 2 Revolutionary nationalists
• 3 Workers
• 4 Grandmothers
• 5 Marching on
• Bibliography
• Index