Woud you really have liked the Suffragettes?

Get a grip Trisha Be grateful woman.

I do sometimes despair of women today who would still be the overworked underpaid drudges of men if it was for women like my gran and great gran.
Goodness, I would never have thought that that description would apply to trisher!

From the OP I thought trisher was inviting comment rather than expressing an opinion one way or another.

ps I am sure trisher can speak for herself and doesn't need me to comment, but I did find it quite funny.

Very informative Radicalnan and totally agree with you Saggi.
I would have been supportive of them but I am not sure if I could have been violent as I am quite a pacifist but I think they had to do whatever they could to get heard.
Even now women are still fighting to be heard. I wear a purple sash (colour of suffrage) and have been on demonstrations for the WASPI cause, but because we are “nice” women we are getting nowhere

Maybe I don't say it well .... Look at Radicalnan post. Like your name too. I do sometimes despair of women today who would still be the overworked underpaid drudges of men if it was for women like my gran and great gran.

Get a grip Trisha.... It was years and years and years of getting nowhere with the women's movement.... violence was a last straw and justified. Have you read of the violence done to these women in prison. What's a few burnt post boxes compared to the violence that was allowed inside of prisons AND the violence done by men-on-women in homes around our country(. But give it a 'cosy' name like 'domestic' and you get away with it.!!! My great-grandmother was a member of the women's movement and my grandmother was a suffragette. We as women owe them everything we have. Men would never give up anything willingly! Be grateful woman.

Paddyann, how would you feel if a thug in a balaclava attacked a policemen who was standing there helping or protecting you? As for Scottish independence, you should have insisted on giving the vote to the English as well in the referendum; you'd probably have your wish and be out of the union by now!
mayeliza54, the answer should be c) but, in my opinion, the situation you describe is usually the other way round.

Jalima I wonder if it was because it was a new country and land was given out to voters, therefore there was an advantage to having the vote and of course not such an establishment in control there? I will have to look it all up.

In some places being settled, land was given to people 'over 21' and those younger than that,used to write 21 in their shoes, so they could swear on the bible that they were over 21 and qualify.

We were fortunate here that women did make a stand, although I think young women now are oblivious of what went before to make that campaign essential.

Well said Radicanan! ???

I’m with Maryeliza54, when all reasonable negotiation has been exhausted, and the matter is one of oppression, aggressive revolution is necessary. There have been many examples around the world. Not only would I have liked them, I would have been part of it, there, blowing up Post Boxes etc with the best of them!

I don't think I would have 'liked' them, but without their actions we women would not now have the vote. Sadly they resorted to violence and vandalism. I have never had to 'suffer' for a belief, but I suspect life was much different in their day.

What I am fed up with is female 'celebrities' telling us all that we should be fighting for equality, most of whom have no idea how us 'ordinary' women live our lives, and how many of us are really content.

It was a crusade. People on a crusade can be single-minded to an annoying extent! Perhaps they have to be :-)

New Zealand women received the suffrage first in 1893 and I don't think they resorted to violence there.
It's interesting that it must have been a British Governor, Lord Glasgow, who signed the new Electoral Act on 19th September 1893.

Was it that New Zealand men were more forward thinking than those left behind in the Old Country - or were the New Zealand women more persuasive in their arguments without resorting to violence?

I've just had a look at my post to see whether I'd suggested that suffragettes rampaged through the streets slitting people's throats and eating babies, as maryeliza seems to suggest. I stand by my comment about my difficulty when protest involves hurting people. I'd include my objection to 'hurting people' to the hideous treatment meted out the the suffragettes.

I think I would have disliked some of their methods but asking politely didn't get anything changed, did it?
I suspect that many people who agitate for change may seem unreasonable in their ways.
I remember my grandma 'sniffing' in a disapproving way when they were mentioned, as did my late MIL - as though they didn't approve or think that women should be equal.

Whether I would have liked the suffragettes or not depends, I should think on how old I was supposed to have been at the time.

I imagine that as a teenaged girl I would have found them exciting, but even in my teens I didn't approve of violence - the troubles in N. Ireland were all over the news when I was in my teens and I never liked the violence there whoever was committing it.

At my present age, I imagine I might have understood the non-violent suffragettes, as I like to think I would have understood the WW1 conscientious objectors, but ...

... the likelihood is that I would have understood and sympathised with neither, as all the men in my family went to war and none of the women in my family approved of the suffragettes, although they were strongly in support of women ambulance drivers at the front and army nurses, women postal workers and so on during the war. None of them abstained from using the vote when they finally got it.

Thank you for your very informative & impassioned post Radicalnan. It is easy to forget how fortunate we are in this day & age & how much we owe those very brave ladies.

Most of us would have seen that “ look” when we say to our men, “ we need to talk” .... “or we need to chat.... “you can see it, it says “oh god, whats she going on about now” ... and we know that many males have selective deafness. There have been many threads on here re husbands not listening or acknowledging our feelings. And ....that is in this day and age when we are all meant to be so much more enlightened !! So back in those days, maybe they had to take drastic measures for anyone to listen ??

Why were suffragettes always portrayed as middle or upper class. Did the less well off not have feelings or was it due to ignorance
I don't know why because working class women were also involved. Perhaps one reason is that middle or upper class women had more time to be able to organise demonstrations as they would have had help (from working class women) in the home.

But working class women were involved, but do not get so much publicity for whatever reason, and, unless they were householders (probably not) did not get the vote at first anyway.

www.newstatesman.com/politics/feminism/2018/02/suffragettes-women-100-years-working-class

I studied Women's History at Sussex Uni. The Suffragist movement was so much more than votes for women and I feel that people ignore the many reasons that women were fighting so hard to have some control over their lives.

In those times women owned nothing, could own nothing if married, had no rights to their own children and were subjected to arbitary medical examinations due to the contagious diseases acts. If your husband left you, he could take the children, you may never see them agin and every penny you ever earned still belonged to him.

Women had been campigning for 100 years against all this injustice.

Laws get changed in parliament, in the end the vote was necessary to give some political clout.

I remember reading the debates in parliament about the age of sexual consent whch many thought should be 13, not the 16 we eventually got, remarks like 'who would marry a woman as old as 16' were common, 'might as well have sex with the servants, as take a wife that old'.

Men thought of women as nothing but a resource.

Suffragettes were subjected to appalling violence by the authorities, sexually abused, beaten, force fed so their throat were torn, many lost their children.

If petitions and debates and reasoning were going to work why didn't they? Disproportionate power ratios that' why. the first world war helped of course, the sudden lack of young men made governments look again at women as a work force. That violence once re moved was instrumental in the struggle too.

The first charity shops were founded by the suffragettes too. It wasn't all middle class women, the working classes had the most to gain.

It is something we teach badly and honour poorly, we needed that representation to change the brutal ways in which women were treated. If violence committed by the women involved help bring that about we should respect them for their courge and determination. Violence was not their first choice.

Why were suffragettes always portrayed as middle or upper class. Did the less well off not have feelings or was it due to ignorance

Women had "asked nicely" for the Vote for many, many years - and were ignored or told they were being silly and unladylike.

The only course of action left was to get millitant.

Wonderful women!

My grandmother lived in Tooting, London, with her husband and 3 small boys. They had a tough life with a horse and cart, deliverying for companies. When searching the family history I could not find them at all on the 1911 census and was told that women of all classes refused to be counted. Life was tough but it seems she still had the energy to be involved in the events of the era. I am proud of her even though I am not sure what part she played, because she stood up and was counted. Now my dd and I always vote, without question.
It seems to me that we cannot judge how women got the vote but must be grateful that they saw their world in the so called 'Democratic' society as unfair and did something about it. The problem I see is that in dealing with men sometimes violence is the only language they understand. We only have to look around the world today see what the
reaction of male leaders do with their people try to get justice and want change.

It is interestig that even 100 years later it is still a debatable subject. I think it also ties in to what was and still is expected of women. There is evidence that after the vote was granted there was an attempt to whitewash the history of the suffragettes by a small group and make them more acceptable. Certainly Kitty Marion, was left out of early accounts. Why? Well she was an actress, of German birth, an arsonist, setting fire to houses all over the country and set bombs. She then went to America where she became an advocate for birth control and was pro-abortion. She wrote an autobiography but it has never been published and she is missed out of many of the early suffrage accounts. In spite of the fact that she was force-fed over 200 times. She simply wasn't an acceptable woman. And perhaps there are still rules about what is acceptable in a woman's behaviour.

Why on earth is S.A. brought into any discussion on violence

Whether white on black, black on white, white on white or black on black, I cannot condone violence. Many people have differing ideas on what is right but violence is not the way to go about bringing change.

Iam there are plenty of direct actions like throwing stones, chaining yourself to railings that hurt no one but got much needed publicity. Anyone would think that the suffragettes rampaged the streets slitting people’s throats and eating babies. Some things were potentially dangerous but did they actually kill or maim anyone? Whereas they were anally force fed, raped and tortured in prison.