Women

admin / July 6, 2023 / Leave a comment / Andrews Blog

A man, John Lennon, inspired by a woman, observed ‘Woman is the nigger of the world.” Women, like the enslaved, have suffered grievous exploitation by the empowered right-wing white conservative male class from the beginning of social order.

Suffrage, political franchise, or simply franchise, is the right to vote. Suffragettes were mostly women who fought and eventually won women’s suffrage. Before women’s suffrage, all political decisions were made by men. In the UK that included 2% of the population. The richest white men.

Two things won the start of voting rights for some women; in 1918 for the UK; in 1920 for the USA. One is the glorious courage of women activist leaders over past centuries including those willing to choose violence and face brutal punishments rather than remain subjugated by the elderly leaders of the all-racist white-right.

The other is the assistance by liberal men who knew this gender discrimination was as wrong as any birthright-entitlement to more; being in the category of civil rights that should apply equally to all humans. (Except the irredeemably deviant ignorant.)

The notion of women’s rights existing outside of the wider context of civil rights short sells the reality that both genders are equally entitled to civil rights. Women’s suffrage met as much opposition by women as it did support by men.

In 1831 Britain, approximately 2% of the total population could take part in parliamentary elections. The Royals and their aristocracy-class comprised some 2% of the population who controlled 100% of everything by controlling the election of their chosen lawmakers. Women and especially poor women were basically below dogs in the social pyramid pecking order. By some distance.

What changed women’s rights and when and what changes did women’s right to vote herald?

By the early 20th Century in Britain, after 60 years of peaceful protests, handing out pamphlets and making polite requests to government for women’s suffrage; women said ‘enough’. In the U.S. this same movement spread. The era of the suffragettes that ended with women’s suffrage began.

In the UK it took until 1918 and the U.S. until 1920.

More than any other, the spark that lit the suffragette movement was the idealism of one woman. Emmeline Pankhurst, who witnessed the systemic endemic inhumanity of the British elite at that time. Pankhurst began her training as an activist young. She was 21 when she married Richard Pankhurst, 45, a barrister who had advocated women’s suffrage; and other liberal social causes, including freedom of speech and education reform.

One of the most offensive consequences of entitled leadership by the rich and royal was its treatment of the poor. Policies made without allowing the intrusion of any woman’s voice. Or conscience. The 2% democracy.

The distance between the haves and the have not’s for this lengthy chapter of British leadership by rich-white religious-men excluding women from any political voice; is most symbolically represented by the evidence of the workhouse. (Often called the Poorhouse in Scotland.)

At that time Britain’s 2% elite with the power to make laws operated their own drip-down economic policy by a system of workhouses for the ritual humiliation and degradation of those too poor to feed themselves; for reasons mostly related to crippling poverty denying them basic education and life skills. In many cases dumbing-down done willfully by the ruler-elite to keep a servile working class to serve them.

By the 1830s most parishes had at least one workhouse. Whatever benevolent intention the Christian authors of the workhouse may have imagined was very quickly subsumed in cruel and barbaric abuse and exploitation of the poor by the religious-rich. In his 1797 work, The State of the Poor, Sir Frederick Eden, wrote:

The workhouse is an inconvenient building, with small windows, low rooms and dark staircases. It is surrounded by a high wall, that gives it the appearance of a prison, and prevents free circulation of air. There are 8 or 10 beds in each room, chiefly of flocks, and consequently retentive of all scents and very productive of vermin. The passages are in great want of whitewashing. No regular account is kept of births and deaths, but when smallpox, measles or malignant fevers make their appearance in the house, the mortality is very great. Of 131 inmates in the house, 60 are children.

Writing in 1854, Poor Law commissioner George Nicholls viewed many of them as little more than factories. Good commercial opportunities for a slave-trading nation to continue it’s now abolished slave-profiteering business model closer to home:

These workhouses were established, and mainly conducted, with a view to deriving profit from the labour of the inmates, and not as being the safest means of affording relief by at the same time testing the reality of their destitution. The workhouse was in truth at that time a kind of manufactory, carried on at the risk and cost of the poor-rate, employing the worst description of the people, and helping to pauperise the best

The laws enabling this culture were the exclusive work of rich-white religious-monarchist-men happily building manor houses, banks and cities with the lucrative proceeds from nearly 200 years of the Royally sanctioned slave trade. Laws that enabled the exploitation and subjugation of all others not of the same class as themselves by the simple political expedient of the time being ‘Might is right’. Any dissent from the Kings will was crushed with extreme prejudice by the largest of hired goons.

Like slaves, and the poor, women had no rights.

In December 1894 Pankhurst was elected to the position of Poor Law Guardian in Chorlton-on-Medlock. She was appalled by the conditions she witnessed first-hand in the Manchester workhouse:

The first time I went into the place I was horrified to see little girls seven and eight years old on their knees scrubbing the cold stones of the long corridors … bronchitis was epidemic among them most of the time … I found that there were pregnant women in that workhouse, scrubbing floors, doing the hardest kind of work, almost until their babies came into the world … Of course the babies are very badly protected … These poor, unprotected mothers and their babies I am sure were potent factors in my education as a militant.

In 1903 Emmeline Pankhurst became leader of The Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU). Its motto was “deeds not words”. The time for compliant protest was over. The time for bombing began. Rich-white religious men with their royal affiliations, their members clubs and Lordly titles had created a model of self interest for rich-white entitled males the like of which the world had never seen before. The British Empire – with its slave trade – its concentration-camp genocide, it’s colonial partition incompetence costing a million Indian lives, and perhaps worst of all; its awful abuse of the poorest UK citizens.

Between 1912-1914 the suffragettes were the largest threat to domestic peace in the country, carrying out hundreds of attacks countrywide. Causing as much destruction and disruption as possible to everyday life.

Pankhurst said the WSPU’s aim was “to make England and every department of English life insecure and unsafe” by creating a “reign of terror”. Only acts of political violence could bring the dominant domineering men to the negotiating table.

By the end of 1912, 240 suffragette’s had been sent to prison for militant suffragette activities. Direct action, domestic terrorism, took the form of bombing MPs’ houses, placing explosives in post boxes and carrying out arson attacks on public places, such as trains and churches. Targeting sporting venues including royal favorites Wimbledon and Ascot.

On 9 June, 1913, Hurst Park racecourse, my daily walk for some 29 years when I lived in Surrey, was burned down by suffragette Kitty Marion. There would be no more horse racing in East Molesey again.

The day before Kitty Marions suffragette arson, on 8 June, 1913, Emily Davison stepped out in front of the King’s horse at the Epsom Derby. The horse ran over her. Cause of death was blunt trauma by horse. As a sacrificial protest this was especially meaningful when considering the role of the royals in the British value culture of the time. The sport of Kings had real value to royals, and especially the Queen’s; those royal Aunty Tom’s in the women’s-rights cause.

Royalty then, as now, underpinned the social hierarchy, placing white men of high birth at the top beneath the royal family. With women firmly at the bottom of the pile. The unpaid labor force who gave labor unpaid even by equal status as a parent. The unpaid slavery of mothers in Britain.

When Emily Davison died that day, Queen Mary was watching with the King in the grandstand at Epsom. She described Davison in her journal as a “horrid woman”. Fancy spoiling the Kings horses’ chance of winning the Derby. At least in God’s justice that simply awful woman got her comeuppance.

Emily Davison’s funeral drew 55,000 attendees along the streets and at the funeral. No Royal was in that number.

Establishment right-wing racist favorite at that time, Winston Churchill, home secretary from between 1910 and 1911, described the suffragettes as “a band of silly, neurotic, hysterical women”.

But even as class-warrior Gavrilo Princip cleaned his 1911 Browning 9mm in readiness for his two bullet visit to Archduke Franz Ferdinand on the 28th of June, 1914, the British women kept on bombing. Fighting with force that matched that of their masters. The old white-religious men of high standing, establishing and implementing their “Laws made for and by the rich.” The suffragette message remained clear: No peace until women get the vote.

Inevitably and as expected, Pankhurst was arrested and brutally treated with cruel and unusual punishments. For the first time in February 1908 after she tried to enter Parliament to deliver a protest resolution to Prime Minister H. H. Asquith. She was charged with obstruction and sentenced to six weeks in prison. After her release Pankhurst spoke out against the conditions of her confinement, including vermin, meagre food, and the “civilised torture of solitary confinement and absolute silence”.

Pankhurst saw imprisonment as a means to publicise the urgency of women’s suffrage; in June 1909 she struck a police officer twice in the face to ensure she would be arrested.

Pankhurst was arrested seven times before women’s suffrage was approved. During her trial on 21 October 1908 she told the court: “We are here not because we are law-breakers; we are here in our efforts to become law-makers.”

During their time in prison many suffragettes went on hunger strike. Both men and woman suffragettes. The prison warders, often assisted by women prison officers without basic awareness of their gender loyalty, in all certainty not on equal wages with the men wardens, would physically restrain the suffragettes. They used steel gags to force the mouth open – breaking teeth if necessary. They placed a funnel down the victims throat and like a foie gras goose, force fed them. I read that Pankhurst’s reaction was to achieve mind over matter skills in projectile vomiting once the force feeding was complete. An indomitable, unbreakable spirit.

Her strength came at a high price in personal terms. After her husband died income was limited. Her work progressed through a time of sorrow, loneliness and constant work for the cause of suffrage. In 1907 she sold her home in Manchester and began an itinerant lifestyle. She stayed with friends and in hotels, carrying her few possessions in suitcases as she spoke and marched for women’s suffrage. Although she was energized by the struggle–and found joy in giving energy to others – her constant traveling meant separation from her children. That led to estrangements.

She described in her autobiography the trauma caused by force-feeding during the strike: “Holloway became a place of horror and torment. Sickening scenes of violence took place almost every hour of the day, as the doctors (men who were white, right and royalist) went from cell to cell performing their hideous office.”

Pankhurst’s life was a never ending struggle. Then WW1 broke out and that changed the dynamic. The suffragettes abandoned domestic terrorism and instead supported the war against Germany. Tactically they worked to serve the war effort at home while shaming men reluctant to fight, to go fight.

Finally in 1918 the Representation of the People Act was passed. Women over the age of 30 who met a property qualification could now vote.

Historians differ about whether Emmeline Pankhurst’s militancy helped or hurt the movement. But I do not share those doubts. If it is true that “Power only comes from being taken” then it took Pankhurst’s brand of fighting fire with flame to prevail.

After the war, for a period she lived in Canada. In many of her public lectures across Canada she promoted eugenic feminist notions of “race betterment” and often gave speeches together with Emily Murphy, a prominent proponent of compulsory sterilization for the “feeble-minded.”

Later Pankhurst became a Conservative MP.

Meanwhile across the Atlantic, several women inspired the suffrage movement in America.

One of the best known is Elizabeth Cady Stanton. A tall mother of seven whose methods brought change in equal measure to the criticism she faced from her own peers. One landmark came in 1848 when Stanton read her “Declaration of Sentiments,” a rewriting of the Declaration of Independence that proclaimed; “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal.”

Some 72 years later, and after a good few women’s skulls had been bashed in by white policemen, The 19th amendment granted some women the right to vote. Passed by Congress June 4, 1919, and ratified on August 18, 1920.

But that 19th amendment was stalled and would not have passed but for one vote. As irony would have it, that deciding vote was by a good Tennessee boy who listened to his mother.

By the summer of 1920, 35 states had ratified the measure, bringing it one vote short of the required 36. In Tennessee, it had stalled in the House of Representatives, prompting thousands of pro-and anti-suffrage activists to descend upon Nashville. If young senator Harry Burn and his colleagues voted in its favor, the 19th Amendment would pass the final hurdle on its way to adoption.

After weeks of intense lobbying and debate within the Tennessee legislature, a motion to table the amendment was defeated with a 48-48 tie. The speaker called the measure to a ratification vote. That morning, Harry Burn, who until that time had fallen squarely in the anti-suffrage camp, received a note from his mother, Phoebe Ensminger Burn. In it, she had written “Hurrah, and vote for suffrage! Don’t keep them in doubt. I notice some of the speeches against. They were bitter. I have been watching to see how you stood, but have not noticed anything yet.” She ended the missive with a rousing endorsement of the great suffragist leader Carrie Chapman Catt, imploring her son to “be a good boy and help Mrs. Catt put the ‘rat’ in ratification.”

Imagine if Harry Burn from Tennessee had not listened to his mother that day in 1920.

Many men were instrumental in women’s suffrage. Placing the right thing to do over the white-male bond of solidarity. The Subjection of Women is an essay by English philosopher, political economist and civil servant John Stuart Mill published in 1869. At the time of its publication by a male author, the essay’s argument for equality between the sexes was an affront to European conventional norms regarding the status of men and women.

Mill believed the moral and intellectual advancement of humankind would result in greater happiness for everybody. He asserted that the higher pleasures of the intellect yielded far greater happiness than the lower pleasure of the senses. He conceived of human beings as morally and intellectually capable of being educated and civilised. Mill believed everyone should have the right to vote, with the only exceptions being barbarians and uneducated people.

Other men suffered real hardship to win women’s rights. Wealthy heir with a social conscience, Hugh Franklin was jailed for his contribution to the Suffragette cause. Franklin knew Churchill’s views. On a train returning from a political meeting in Bradford, Yorkshire, Hugh saw Churchill and set on him with a dog whip, shouting “Take this, you cur, for the treatment of the suffragists!”

The attack was widely reported, even reaching the headlines of The Times. Hugh was imprisoned for six weeks and fired from his job. In March 1911, he was sentenced for another month for throwing rocks at Churchill’s house. Hugh took part in the hunger strikes that were then being waged by the suffragettes, and was force fed repeatedly during his imprisonment. The force feeding turned him into an activist for penal reform.

Suffragette Hugh’s final militant act was setting fire to a railway carriage at Harrow on 25 October 1912. He was sentenced to six months in prison in February 1913. He was force fed 114 times. The ordeal left him so weak that he was released as soon as the Prisoners (Temporary Discharge for Ill Health) Act 1913 came into force, making him the first person to be let out under the act. This Penal reform being one unexpected positive to come out of the Suffragette attacks.

The history of religious white-men making all the big decisions for humanity seldom deviates from a trail of tears for every one else.

Before the 19th Amendment in 1920, there was much pushback from the anti-suffragette movement in the USA. Demonstrating how ridiculous-gaslighting is nothing new from the American right, consider this list of SPECIAL PRIVILEGES New York Women secured under MALE SUFFRAGE, proving that Woman is not discriminated against by any New York Law.