Nine Inspiring Lessons the Suffragettes Can Teach Feminists Today
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Nine inspiring lessons the suffragettes can
teach feminists today
A century after the death of Emily Davison at the Epsom Derby, the movement that gave votes to women still has muchto teach those continuing to fight for equality
Emmeline Pankhurst celebrating with Christabel Pankhurst and others after being released from prison. Photograph:
Hulton Getty
On 4 June 1913, Emily Wilding Davison travelled to Epsom Downs to watch the Derby, carrying two suffrage flags –
one rolled tight in her hand, the other wrapped around her body, hidden beneath her coat. She waited at Tattenham
Corner as the horses streamed past, then squeezed through the railings and made an apparent grab for the reins of the
king's horse, Anmer. In the Manchester Guardian the next day, an eyewitness reported: "The horse fell on the woman
and kicked out furiously". News footage shows racegoers surging on to the track to find out what had happened.
Davison suffered a fractured skull and internal bleeding, and as hate mail against her poured in to the hospital, she
remained unconscious. She died four days later. Thousands of suffragettes turned out on the London streets dressed in
white, bearing laurel wreaths for her funeral. They marched four abreast behind purple banners, urging them all to fight
on.
There has always been speculation about Davison's intentions. The return train ticket she was carrying, for instance,
offered as evidence that she didn't mean to die. But there's no doubt she was prepared to make dangerous sacrifices for
women's rights. As Fran Abrams writes in her book Freedom's Cause, Davison had been imprisoned repeatedly for her
suffrage work, had gone on hunger strike and been force fed numerous times.
In 1912, when she and a large number of other suffragettes were imprisoned in Holloway, there was what Davisonreferred to as a siege – the doors of women's cells were broken down by guards – and she determined that one big
tragedy might save her sisters. Davison threw herself over a balcony, was caught by some netting, then immediately
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tried again, launching herself down an iron staircase. This led to two cracked vertebrae, and a thwack to the head, but
the authorities were unmoved. She and the other women continued to be force-fed, regularly and brutally.
In a movement defined by acts of daring, Davison's bravery was extraordinary. A hundred years later, votes for women
are long since won in most countries – though not all – and the feminist revolution continues. Campaigners worldwide
fight for equal political representation, an end to women's poverty, freedom from sexual violence, control over our own
bodies, and – ultimately – for that most basic, yet radical, demand: for women to be treated as human beings. A century
after Davison's funeral programme declared "She died for women," what can today's feminists learn from the
suffragettes?
Emily Davison is fatally injured as she tries to stop the King's horse on Derby Day. Photograph: Getty Images
Find your voice, and use it
The dearth of women in public life today is often attributed to a lack of confidence, and the suffragettes sometimes
struggled with this too. Margaret Wynne Nevinson, an avid campaigner, once wrote she felt a "dizzy sickness of terror"the first time she stood up to speak publicly, outside a gasworks in south London in 1906. There were shouts of derision
as hundreds of men crowded around her, and she almost succumbed to stage fright before hearing a voice whisper: "Go
it, old gal, you're doing fine, give it 'em."
This echoes the recollections of Kitty Marion, an actor as well as a suffragette. The first time she sold the Votes for
Women newspaper in Piccadilly Circus, Marion wrote, "I felt as if every eye that looked at me was a dagger piercing
me through and I wished the ground would open up and swallow me. However, that feeling wore off and I developed
into quite a champion."
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Sweetness is overrated
Women were bound by feminine ideals at the start of the last century – expected to be submissive, nurturing, self-
effacing – and we still are today. The suffragettes weren't having it. As Emmeline Pankhurst, leader of the militant
suffragettes, once said, "We threw away all our conventional notions of what was 'ladylike' and 'good form', and weapplied to our methods the one test question: will it help?"
This was echoed by Fred Pethick-Lawrence, who fought strongly for women's votes alongside his wife – who was also
called Emmeline. In his 1911 book, Women's Fight for the Vote, he offered a rallying cry. "Nothing has done more to
retard the progress of the human race than the exaltation of submission into a high and noble virtue," he wrote. "It may
often be expedient to submit; it may even sometimes be morally right to do so in order to avoid a greater evil; but
submission is not inherently beautiful – it is generally cowardly and frequently morally wrong."
Take strength from the haters
Anyone who writes about feminism online knows there can be a nasty response, and the suffragettes received hate mail
too. In Joyce Marlow's essential anthology, Votes for Women, from which many of these recollections are taken, she
includes a letter sent to Hugh Franklin, a male suffrage activist, which has a strikingly familiar tone. "We would give
you and old Mother Pankhurst (the fossil-worm) Five Years Penal Servitude and then burn you both together. YOU
ARE A DIRTY TYKE AND DANGEROUS MADMAN." (All emphases the writer's own.)
But it wasn't just hate mail they had to contend with. Rats would be let loose into suffrage meetings, while rotten eggs
and fish were pelted at the women. Nevinson once wrote that they kept their eyesight largely as a result of the huge hats
that were then fashionable, the wide brims saving them "from hard missiles and the cayenne pepper blown at us from
bellows".
Their detractors were often very powerful. Winston Churchill described the militant movement as a "copious fountain
of mendacity", while Arthur Conan Doyle opted for "female hooligans". The only useful response was to take strength
from the insults. The current deputy editor of the New Statesman, Helen Lewis, has written that today "the comments
on any article about feminism justify feminism", which mirrors Rebecca West's reflections on events of a century ago.
"The real force that made the suffrage movement was the quality of the opposition," wrote West. "Women, listening to
anti-suffrage speeches, for the first time knew what many men really thought of them."
Accept that those haters will include other women
In a male-dominated society, women are often brought up to identify with men, to see men's views and rights as
paramount, and so it's not surprising that many women oppose their own liberation. In the suffrage era the most
prominent was Queen Victoria, who once wrote a letter stating she was "anxious to enlist everyone who can speak or
write to join in checking this mad wicked folly of 'Woman's Rights', with all its attendant horrors, on which [my] poor
sex is bent".
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There were a number of thriving anti-suffrage groups, including the National League for Opposing Women's Suffrage,
run by one Mrs Frederic Harrison, who stated: "Women have to destroy a women's movement." It rarely feels right to
celebrate female failure, but in Harrison's case let's make an exception.
Fortune favours the brave
After a meeting of 30,000 suffragettes in 1906, Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence said she had "never met anyone so fearless
as were these young girls. I never saw a suffragette, under menace of violence, otherwise than cool and collected."
Such bravery was necessary, as the women often faced serious violence. On 18 November 1910, for instance, a date
which became known as Black Friday, Emmeline Pankhurst led 300 women to the House of Commons in a peaceful
protest. There, they were met by police, and reported being beaten and sexually assaulted. One woman, quoted in
Marlow's anthology, said: "Constables and plain-clothes men who were in the crowd passed their arms round me from
the back and clutched hold of my breasts in as public a manner as possible, and men in the crowd followed their
example … My skirt was lifted up as high as possible, and the constable attempted to lift me off the ground by raising
his knee. This he could not do, so he threw me into the crowd and incited the men to treat me as he wished." She later
had to seek medical attention for the bruising on her chest.
Over the course of the militant campaign, around 1,000 suffragettes were imprisoned in the UK, and many went on
hunger strike and had to contend with the torturous process of force feeding. In 1913, the Cat and Mouse Act was
brought in, a cruel law which meant suffragettes could hunger strike to the point of emaciation, be let out of prison to
recover, recalled to serve a little more of their sentence, on and on, until the term was served.
The suffragettes kept going, despite the opposition and immediate consequences. Abrams describes a London action in
the early 1910s when, "on two separate days, at a preordained time and with no warning, hundreds of smartly dressed
women from Oxford Street to Whitehall, all along Piccadilly and Bond Street, produced hammers … and laid waste to
hundreds of square feet of shop frontage." Emmeline Pankhurst was one of 220 protesters arrested. Modern feminists
might balk at some of the suffragettes' more destructive actions, but their audacity is inspiring.
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Christabel Pankhurst at Trafalgar Square, 1908. Photograph: Mary Evans Picture Library
Publicity is power
The suffragettes were a creative whirlwind, constantly devising new ways to catch the attention of politicians and the
public. On one occasion, two women posted themselves as human letters to Downing Street; on another, suffragettes
boarded a boat, and sailed towards the terrace of parliament, where 800 people had gathered for tea. Once in clear view,
they unveiled two banners, the first with details of their upcoming demonstration, the second stating: "Cabinet ministers
especially invited."
A report in the Daily Express, in 1909, told of the young suffragette Miss Muriel Matters, who "sailed aloft from
Hendon in the diminutive basket of a cigar-shaped dirigible balloon, for the very latest thing in suffragist dashes to
Westminster". Matters dropped leaflets as she flew, finally returning to earth near Croydon, helped "by a friendly
though rather startled farmer".
The suffragettes staged a census boycott in 1911, during which women stayed out all night, on the basis: "If womendon't count, neither shall they be counted." Some took to Wimbledon Common in horse-drawn caravans, others spent
the night rollerskating around the Aldwych Rinkeries – the venue was kept open especially – and Davison hid herself in
a broom cupboard in the House of Commons, with a small picnic of lime juice and meat lozenges. (Many years later,
Tony Benn secretly put up a plaque in this cupboard, in tribute to Davison's extraordinary contribution to democracy.)
If you're trying to create a popular movement, you obviously need to be popular, and the suffragettes were: an estimated
half a million people attended their Hyde Park demonstration in 1908. It was the publicity campaigns and the strength
of the central message that brought them there, as well as the fact that being a suffragette must have looked exciting, a
revolutionary approach to female life. There's often tension today between those who deliver feminism with humour
and those who prefer unfiltered anger – the suffragettes showed that both are necessary.
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Strength through solidarity
There were often major splits in the suffrage movement but there was also enough solidarity to keep the mission afloat.
One strong example arose in 1906, when Millicent Garrett Fawcett, the leader of the non-militant side of the movement,
wrote to the Times in support of the militants. "I take this opportunity of saying that in my opinion," she wrote, "far from having injured the movement, they have done more during the last 12 months to bring it within the realms of
practical politics than we have been able to accomplish in the same number of years." It was a generous statement from
the woman whose conscientious campaigning, over the course of many years, is often credited with being the essential
force in the fight for the vote.
Many of the suffragettes also recognised that women could be oppressed by factors beyond their sex, and went to great
lengths to support their sisters. For instance, when Lady Constance Lytton was imprisoned in 1909, and quickly
released, she was determined to expose the fact that working class suffragettes had faced much more brutal treatment
than her. She therefore disguised herself as Jane Warton, a seamstress, travelled to Liverpool and staged a protest; she
was imprisoned and force fed eight times, proving her point. This experience did her health no favours, and she went on
to suffer a heart attack in 1910 and a series of strokes, but wasn't deterred. Lytton's dedication was such that she once
carved a large "V" for "votes" into her own breast, and she continued to campaign for the suffrage cause until her death
in 1923.
Never give up
Many feminsts today complain of burnout and fatigue over problems that seem to stretch ahead intractably. The
suffragettes must have felt the same at times. Histories often focus on the last 20 years or so of the struggle, but women
fought for the vote for more than a century, with Mary Wollstonecraft helping to kick off the campaign in 1792, in
Vindication of the Rights of Woman, with a reference to the need for women's political representation. Forty years later,
in 1832, the first petition for the women's vote was presented to the Commons, and over the course of the next century
campaigners kept up the pressure – reinventing and re-energising their fight, and passing the baton from woman to
woman. They were finally granted the vote on the same terms as men in 1928.
Accept victory – nothing else
There are often arguments today about who should represent feminism, but the suffrage fight suggests we need the
whole spectrum: the rabble-rousers, theorists, dogged campaigners, sympathetic politicians, those whose wit draws
women to the cause, those whose anger keeps them motivated, and those who quietly, conscientiously chip away at
issues that make others give up in despair. We need those who refuse to see any conceivable option but victory. Women
like the one who wrote to the Daily Telegraph in 1913. "Sir, Everyone seems to agree upon the necessity of putting a
stop to Suffragist outrages; but no one seems certain how to do so. There are two, and only two, ways in which this can
be done. Both will be effectual. 1. Kill every woman in the United Kingdom. 2. Give women the vote. Yours truly,
Bertha Brewster."