One hundred years ago hundreds of thousands of men and women in Britain and across the world were engaged in an epoch defining movement -to force their governments to recognise womens right to vote. It was a campaign of strength, courage and perseverance with heroes and martyrs - none more infamous than Emily Wilding Davison who stepped onto the race course at Epsom on June 3rd 1913 waving a suffragette flag and who died in hospital four days later having been trampled to death by the kings horse. She took Emmeline Pankhursts instruction 'Freedom or Death' to its ultimate expression and in doing so epitomised the bravery and passion which defined the suffragettes of the time.
She lived in a world in which she was unable to live and act freely, in which her worth and identity would be measured by her abilities as a wife and mother not by her abilities as a human being so, like thousands of others, she resolved to change the world.
Emily Wilding Davison was a first class honours student in literature and science. While she was prevented from studying for a degree at Oxford because they did not allow women in, she eventually completed her degree at a London university, supporting herself and her studies by working as a governess.
She joined the WSUP full time in 1908, which was the year that Cristabel Pankhurst, a first-class law graduate, who because of her sex could not practice law, first lashed out at a police officer causing a media frenzy and putting the suffragette movement firmly on the map. Over the following two years the movement gained enormous popularity and support through the publicity these militant stunts generated. By 1910 the government was actively suppressing coverage in order to prevent this, and many stories, including the attempted assassination of the primeminister, were not made public.
The fundamental frustration of the suffrage movement was that the liberal coalition refused to see womens' votes as a human rights issue. Llyod George was busy reforming labour laws for the working man and trying to get land owners to pay tax and at a time when society was built on the adage 'A womens place is in the home', votes for them seemed like a waste of parliamentary time, but the suffragettes would not give up or give in, even when things got nasty. Winston Churchill famously did an about face in parliament after Henry Brailsford had been promised a hearing of the conciliation bill addressing womens' votes in 1910. After sticking to an agreed amnesty on the understanding that the bill would be heard, when it was rejected without a hearing, the suffragettes marched on parliament from Caxton Hall and the suffragette era took a turn for the worse. During the protest outside parliament known as 'Black Friday' two women were beaten to death and two hundred were arrested. In a first hand account of one of the women at that protest she describes how she was taunted, groped and thrown by poilcemen, and told to 'get back to the sink'. When I read this I resolved to try and understand where, how and why the deep rooted sexism in our society came from and why women, one half of humanity, could be so devalued, disrespected and degraded by our own government. It convinced me that the Suffragette movement was inevitable and necessary and that had I been alive then I would have been standing shoulder to shoulder with them.
Womens' value during the industrial years was inestimable, in the building of the new world and the emergence of the dark satanic mills that made a few people very wealthy, men and women were working hard long days in unmodernised homes uprooted from familiar villages and families - in womens' case they were voteless, unpaid cogs in the machinery of commerce - women who did work were uniformly paid much less than men for doing the same job and with no hope of finding a political voice to fight for legislative justice.
It isn't surprising that John Stewart-Mill made himself unpopular in aristocratic circles by writing about gender equality and human rights - his values led him to write books that would emancipate, unlike the land owners and factory bosses whose main interests were making money and maintaining the status quo. Almost more than the endless lives began and ended in drudgery, the worst thing about this era was the assertion and reinforcement that women were intrinsically inferior to men, that they were of less value and therefore not deserving of equal pay, but far worse than that, not deserving of equal rights as human beings. Quite obviously equal rights means equal pay, no rights equal less pay or none at all.
In the late 1700's in New York, women had the vote but it was taken away from them in 1809 presumably after someone realised that women, just like african americans were potential free/cheap labour as long as they were denied their human rights. It was a revelation to me to realise that the seed of sexual inequality was financial greed and I realised that my research had become about much more than the history of suffragettes, it had become about investigating my own questions about the origins of the pervasive sexism in which our society is steeped.
The most chilling aspect of the suffrage movement was reading all anti-suffrage material that convinced people that women were just not capable of shouldering the responsibility of choosing a primeminister, that they were in every way the fairer, gentler, weaker, simpler sex, built and intended for supplication to men. It was easy to see the parallels between this and the propaganda rhetoric that justified slavery for four hundred years - the insidious, spurious 'evidence' that suggested that african slaves were intellectually inferior and therefore not capable of being self-determining free men and women in society.
Exactly this kind of propaganda was used to brainwash women into believing that they were not intellectually or biologically built for a life of freedom and choice and the powerful female-led anti-suffrage societies were a testament to its persuasive power.
In many ways the task facing our young men and women today is almost more complex than that of those women a hundred years ago campaigning for the vote. We are faced with society still riddled with the propaganda rhetoric of oppression, a society in which gender differences are fetishised and exaggerated, where intelligent young women in the public eye from all professions are routinely expected to pose like porn stars in mens magazines if they want to 'get on' and instead of being valued and enjoyed for their wit, intelligence and talent they are judged by their 'tits' and 'bed-ability'. I wonder if Emily Wilding Davison had been alive today she would be in GQ in her knickers under the title ' Suffrage-tits!'? I think she would have told them to f*** off.
