Last night we went to a lecture by Prof. Sara Pedersen of Robert Gordon University. It was in the Central Library, Aberdeen and on The Scottish Suffragettes. It was a brilliant, enthralling piece of historical storytelling. I learned so much about a subject I thought I knew something about.
It included the incident in November 1912 when Emily Wilding Davison, the militant Suffragette activist, mistook the minister of Crown Terrace Baptist Church for Cabinet Minister Lloyd-George at the Joint Aberdeen Station, and proceeded to assault him. You can see how she made the mistake. Here is the photo of Rev Forbes Jackson, from the official church history of Crown Terrace. And a photo of Lloyd George at around 1912. It's the moustache, I think!
Amongst the fascinating questions raised in my mind after the lecture, and still thinking about it, was the nature and status of Suffragette activism as defined and understood by the Governments of the day, by the Suffragettes themselves, and by disenfranchised women and the wider public. The militant tactics of the later movement leading up to the First World War, included arson, explosives, vandalism and deliberate criminality leading to jail as an awareness-raising form of publicity. Some of those acts which endangered life and threatened public safety could be defined in today's terms as terrorism.
The treatment of the women in jail, especially those who went on hunger strike included various forms of force feeding and eventually the Cat and Mouse Act. This Act was intended to stop the hunger strike tactic by releasing those on hunger strike, on licence, but returning them to jail when they were well enough, then sending home, then returning, until the full sentence was spent. This absolved the Government and judiciary of the accusation of torture. The impact on the overall health of the women themselves was however a different kind of persecution in the name of prosecution, a less invasive form of torture.
Terrorism and torture; protesters and status quo; seekers of power and holders of power. Much of the above I knew and had considered before. But listening to an expert, using archives and contemporary photographs, telling the narrative with dramatic force and and a leading scholar's familiarity with the material, gave me a quite unsettling and persuasive perspective on how hard it is to change the levers that drive social changes and lead to a more just society. Were these women enemies of the State, or its conscience? Did the tactics they used further or hinder their cause, precipitate or delay a resolution? Does the status quo ever relinquish its comfort zones of power without being challenged by alternative expressions of power?
Then there's the coming together in a historic process of the right people, with the right gifts, at the right time. Or does an issue of social justice bring forth the most effective people, with the most useful gifts and skills, and thus create a time when change can begin to be thought, desired, worked towards and become a movement? The leaders and movers of those women were above all organisers, activists, publicists, and representing more than half the population, had huge potential power if it could be organised.
The Pankhurst dynasty, the co-ordination of action on a national scale, the splits within the movement itself, the ironies of who supported the Suffragettes, who opposed them, and who eventually won the vote and who were the first women elected - not your dyed in the wool Suffragettes. One hundred years on from the first enfranchisement of women (only of women over 30 and holders of property) there are miles of this journey yet to be travelled towards genuine equality for men and women. The continuing question of who is entitled to vote now provokes discussion with pressure beginning to come for a lowering of the voting age from 18 to 16.
What the Suffragettes achieved, and whether they chose the right tactics, the checks and balances between Governments, the status quo, and those who desire change, all of this can be argued by scholars of social and cultural history. I found the story of their lives inspiring, the collisions and conflicts instructive as examples of social change through deliberate actions challenging the status quo and institutional power. The after-life of a good lecture is that it goes on educating by prompting questions, undermining longstanding assumptions, shedding light into previously unnoticed corners, keeping us alert to human courage and foolishness, to new visions and freedoms, and helping us towards some of the wisdom required to go on living in human communities where each person has the chance to flourish.
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