Short History of The Suffragettes

[ChopinBoard]

Listened last week and thought posters here might enjoy.

I knew about it already but it's still shocking to hear of the lengths those brave women went to in order to secure us the vote - and how the authorities responded. It makes me wonder what we will have to do to win back our language and spaces, and how long it will take.

[Short History Of...] The Suffragettes #shortHistoryOf
podcastaddict.com/episode/136424493 via @PodcastAddict

Thank you! Will have a listen.

Thank you Chopin, will have a listen tomorrow

An accessible and accurate overview. Shame about the irrelevant and intrusive adverts.

They were terrorists. And it was WW1 that did as much to secure the vote.

So was nelson mandala. Your point?

Yes, a small number of them were definitely terrorists. They made and planted bombs at empty railway stations and half-built houses.

However, the role of WW1 is something that is hotly debated. One argument is that the govt used women's war work as a "reason" to give us the vote so that it did not look like they were bowing down to (pre-war) terrorism. It could be that they were terrified that at the end of the war militancy would return and the fight would start up all over again. Citing the war helped them save face.

Interpreting history is all about competing theories!

Interesting to see some anti suffragette sentiment, recently.

They made sure not to bomb buildings with people in, though. Which is more than can be said for a lot of terrorists.

The militarists didn’t get women the vote as such- a lot of otherwise sympathetic politicians were worried about showing support for them. Or at least that was what the politicians said- I suspect it had more to do with the fact that both the Liberals and the Torys thought that women would vote for their opposition.

But the suffragettes did politicise a lot of women. And it was a great support network/community for women who were justly furious.

Did they discuss the disquieting political connections that formed between prominent suffragette leaders and the British Union of Fascists in the 1930s? Or does that still get airbrushed away out of embarrassment?

Suffragette leaders like Norah Elam, Mary Richardson, and Mary Ellen all went on to hold positions of high office in the BUF.

Shhhh! They don't like to talk about this here.

How bizarre that a cause fought by women on behalf of all women included women with different political outlooks.

(Mary Sophia Allen not Ellen by the way.)

If you can't appropriate for your own ends, destroy it.

The suffragettes certainly engaged in some actions I would not condone but anyone claiming that their years of campaigning before WWl had no impact on the decision to give women the vote is mistaken.

Does anyone really think that women would have been given the vote in 1918 if they hadn't been campaigning for decades before hand? If I recall correctly there were 27 bills to give women the vote put before parliament and rejected before we eventually got there.

Interesting to see some anti suffragette sentiment, recently.

It seems to have emerged with the realisation that a large group of women as a grassroots political movement are using the Suffragette colours as a sign of feminist solidarity for women's sex-based rights. And that that is being recognised by the media and authorities, etc.

Religion has killed billions, and people still die because of it, yet we accept religion regardless of the negative aspects. There will be negative parts associated with any movement etc because we are not all the same. It does not make the movement a bad thing.

Re the campaigning- there was a parliamentary suffragist campaign that went on for 40 odd years before women’s suffrage, and a militant suffragette campaign that started in the early 1900s. Some of the parliamentary suffrage campaigners were a bit put out by the militant campaign because the politicians they had been trying to convince started using the violence as an excuse not to vote for giving women the vote.

I still think that the actions of the suffragettes were incredibly important. They made the point that women would not simply sit around and wait for men to be benevolent, but were willing to fight heroically for what was rightly theirs.