Suffragette Militancy
Suffragette militancy – from the English word militant, meaning “combative” or “actively confrontational” – a militant current within the British women’s suffrage movement.
Suffragette militancy is most closely associated with the feminist and suffrage activist Emmeline Pankhurst and the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), founded in Manchester in 1903. Her daughters Christabel and Sylvia Pankhurst also played prominent roles in the organization during its early history.
Unlike moderate or constitutional suffragists, militant suffragettes believed that conventional campaigning had failed to exert sufficient pressure on the government. The WSPU admitted only women and adopted the motto “Deeds, not words.” Its activists argued that the government would make concessions only under sustained pressure and therefore employed confrontational methods to attract public attention.
They distributed leaflets from the visitors’ gallery of Parliament, interrupted speeches by government ministers with whistles and cries of “Votes for Women!”, chained themselves to railings in public places, and organized unauthorized demonstrations and marches. After imprisonment, many suffragettes used hunger strikes as a form of political protest and were subjected to force-feeding. Marion Wallace-Dunlop became the first suffragette to undertake a hunger strike in prison in 1909.
Militant suffragettes also launched what they described as an “attack on property.” They broke the windows of government buildings, offices, and shops; cut telephone and telegraph wires; damaged golf courses; set fire to postboxes and unoccupied buildings; and carried out other acts of property destruction. During the escalation of the campaign in 1912–1914, some activists used arson and planted explosive devices in private houses, churches, and public buildings.
Despite their calls for a “women’s revolution” and their increasingly militant strategy, WSPU leaders maintained that their campaign was directed primarily against property rather than human life. Emmeline Pankhurst stated:
“The Women’s Social and Political Union has never sought and will never seek recklessly to endanger human life. We leave that to the enemy. Let men do that in war, but not women.”
This principle also applied to members of the organization: they were not required to risk their lives, although they were considered free to sacrifice themselves for the common cause. The suffragettes argued that their increasing militancy had been forced upon them by the authorities. They understood militancy primarily as a form of moral force rather than as an attempt to demonstrate their equality with men through physical violence (Novikova, 1997, p. 9).
The suffragettes contrasted their own “symbolic violence” and “sorrowful anger” with the physical force exercised by the state. Their public image often drew upon contemporary ideals of femininity. By adopting behaviour regarded as unconventional for women while continuing to dress elegantly and conduct themselves as “ladies,” they sought to expose the contradiction between conventional representations of female fragility and women’s political determination. They also appealed to the supposed honour and courage of their opponents while emphasizing their own femininity (Novikova, 1997, p. 10).
The role of militancy in the women’s suffrage movement remains a subject of considerable historical debate. Many contemporaries and later researchers argued that militant actions harmed the suffrage cause by turning public opinion and the government against the extension of political rights to women.
The methods employed by the WSPU, particularly between 1912 and 1914, were undoubtedly extreme. However, suffragette militancy emerged after almost half a century of campaigning for women’s political rights through legal and constitutional means. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the principal conventional methods had already been employed by the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS) without achieving women’s enfranchisement.
The failure to attain the movement’s principal objective through constitutional methods encouraged the most determined section of British suffrage activists to seek more forceful means of influencing the government and public opinion. Militant tactics attracted extensive press attention, brought new supporters to the movement, and increased donations to suffrage organizations. The WSPU did not adopt its most confrontational methods immediately; its militancy developed and escalated gradually in response to political circumstances.
Historical evidence records not only aggressive actions by suffragettes against the government, the police, and property, but also unjustified violence committed against them by police officers and male members of the public attempting to disrupt their demonstrations. A prominent example was Black Friday, 18 November 1910, when a WSPU deputation to Parliament encountered severe police violence.
Such events contributed to growing militancy and intolerance within the WSPU. At the same time, the organization gradually lost some of its democratic features and became increasingly centralized, hierarchical, and dependent upon obedience to its leadership (Shnyrova, 2001, p. 175).
Major figures associated with suffragette militancy included Emmeline Pankhurst, Christabel Pankhurst, Sylvia Pankhurst, Annie Kenney, Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence, Marion Wallace-Dunlop, and Constance Lytton. Charlotte Despard was also an important representative of the broader militant suffrage movement, although she left the WSPU and became a leading figure in the more democratically organized Women’s Freedom League, which generally favoured nonviolent direct action rather than attacks on people or property.
References:
Krykova, I. V. (2009). Sufrazhizm kak politicheskoe napravlenie feminizma [Suffragism as a political movement within feminism]. Analitika kulturologii, 1(13). [in Russian].
Novikova, N. V. (1997). Zhenskii sotsialno-politicheskii soiuz: ideologiia i politika radikalnogo feministicheskogo dvizheniia v Velikobritanii v nachale XX veka [The Women’s Social and Political Union: The ideology and politics of the radical feminist movement in Britain in the early twentieth century]. Yaroslavskii pedagogicheskii vestnik, 2, 5–12. [in Russian].
Shnyrova, O. V. (2001). Fenomen militantstva v istorii sufrazhizma [The phenomenon of militancy in the history of suffragism]. In G. A. Tishkin (Ed.), Rossiiskie zhenshchiny i evropeiskaia kultura: Materialy V konferentsii, posviashchennoi teorii i istorii zhenskogo dvizheniia [Russian women and European culture: Proceedings of the Fifth Conference on the theory and history of the women’s movement] (pp. 172–175). St Petersburg: St Petersburg Philosophical Society. [in Russian].
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