Consider the following thought experiment, not a revisionist view of history. The film Suffragette (2015) brought protests in London to the red carpet. Protestors blew smoke and laid down on the carpet. The actresses and screen writers simply smiled and thought this was in the spirit of the film. I agree, suffragettes were a protest movement just as Third Wave Feminists are today. The previous fighting for the vote and the former for nuanced issues such as the pay gap, rape and domestic violence.
After watching the film I wondered an extreme thought. If the suffragettes were here today and used the tactics they employed, would they have been considered a terrorist group? Not the majority of protesters that simply wanted the vote, but the militant wing you see brewing in the trailer and expressed in the film. To be clear in Britain, suffragists sought to create democratic change in the constitution, and this was overshadowed in the film by the suffragettes that informed the more militant wing of the Women’s Social and Political Union.
Mainstream suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst, one of the only historical characters, played by Meryl Streep, encouraged rebellion. In real life, Union members spat on officers, disrupted democratic meetings, threw rocks, committed acts of suicide, arson, smashed windows, cut telegraph lines, attacked works of art, and attempted to kill democratically elected opponents. My favourite story was one union member, Theresa Garnett, got past a cordoned area of detectives, made her way to Sir Winston Churchill, repeatedly insisted he was a brute, and punched him dead in the face.
In one article on BBC Online a few years ago, entitled Were extreme suffragettes regarded as terrorists? by Melissa Hogenboom who examines this possibility. I did not read this article before having considered the idea, but the article entertains the notion, but eventually dismisses it for a feminist historian’s perspective. This was almost a moment of self-awareness, instead reinforces the party line and says more about the honesty of academia and journalism today. Reminds me of the scene in the trailer were the main character is looking though a window at herself, only to have a suffragette destroy it with rocks. When I read this I do not think they considered the Union’s tactics with our definition of terrorism. Even in the film, the police treat the group as if they were an insidious terrorist cell and in many scenes in the film interrogate the new terrorist initiate. As mentioned earlier, the film and in history, the Union deployed every threat considered terrorism today by MI5:
‘The use or threat of action designed to influence the government or an international governmental organisation or to intimidate the public, or a section of the public; made for the purposes of advancing a political, religious, racial or ideological cause; and it involves or causes: serious violence against a person; serious damage to a property; a threat to a person’s life; a serious risk to the health and safety of the public; or serious interference with or disruption to an electronic system.’
If we look at the events, the Union escalated further and further destruction and violence. What stopped this? Why did women get the right to vote? Simply speaking: the First World War. Even suffragette leader Emmeline Pankhurst argued there was no point campaigning for the vote if there was no country left to vote in. At the time most men could not vote either, only after the government wanted to help soldiers that fought for Britain was this considered. It was due to the disenfranchisement of men and women serving in the war effort. The Representation of the People Act (1918) removed restrictions for men over 21 years old (19 year olds in the military) and 40% of women over 30 to vote. Even though there were further Acts developed by Parliament that finally got everyone the vote, this was a start to rebuilding the new world. As the Union put its anarchy aside, many were forced to work in factories and were able earn money in a way they had not done in history.
Why is this important? Because we look at movies and feminists in culture today through a fictional window, we see true change comes through democratically passed laws, larger geopolitical change, and technology, not simply the destruction of protest movements. Admittedly, they bring ancillary awareness, but they also blur the issue for people that support protests in the first place. Just like the red carpet protest that argued dead women cannot vote. Even though they meant victims of homicide, many of the woman that helped the war effort, who are dead today, could finally vote and this film shows the violent struggle that the protests miss in their smokey haze. Even the image above with Meryl Streep was considered offensive to Intersectional Feminists despite it being a quote by the suffragist the film was based on Emmeline Pankhurst. But these modern protestors serve the hype surrounding the poor box office release and critically recieved film. In retrospect, the Union’s efforts could’ve gotten worse if it were not for the Great War. The massive scar that dug its way into the world. What was left behind was earning the right to vote for both men and women that fought and died for a country in crisis.
Dick Burns 