Mainstream
Victorian Women
&
their dissenters!
OK, BACK TO MIDDLE CLASS
(VICTORIAN) MORALITY
MIDDLE CLASS
OBSESSIONS
Respectability
Possessions
Female Sexuality
“Manners”
…and Motherhood
Virginal Purity
or
Loving Mother
“Separate Spheres”
Mainstream View
The Princes
Man for the field and woman
for the hearth:
Man for the sword and for
the needle she:
Man with the head and
woman with the heart:
Man to command and
woman to obey;
All else confusion.
Alfred Lord Tennyson
Mainstream View
Ladies in general [are] very unsatisfactory
mental food: they seem to have no particular
thoughts or ideas, and though for a time it is
flattering to one’s vanity to think one may
teach them something, it palls after a while.
Of course at a certain age, when you have a
house and so on, you get a wife as part of its
furniture, and find her a very comfortable
institution;
but I doubt greatly whether there were ever
many men who had thought worth recounting,
who told these thoughts to their wives at first,
or who expected them to appreciate them.
L.Creighton,
letter to R.T. Raikas 1864
Cult of
Domesticity
Mainstream View
A house should be made as cheerful and
light as possible, that the husband may look
forward with delight to his return at night,
after a hard day’s work. It is the paradise of
marriage that the man shall work for
woman; that he alone shall support her,
take pleasure in enduring fatigue for her
sake, and spare her the hardship of labor,
and rude contact with the world.
Our Social Customs 1891
The Underbelly.
The Backlash to Victorian Sensibilities.
The Hipster Position on all this nonsense.
… In Scary “Chiller” Font
In a Liberal-Democracy, is it ever
“acceptable” to engage in violence to
achieve a political end?
Does the “political end” sought influence your opinion?
Does the target of the Violence influence your opinion?
against the Government?
against fellow citizens?
against property?
Emmeline
Pankhurst
1858- 1928
WSPU
Famous Suffragist
BACK TO
ENGLAND
United Kingdom
of Great Britain
and Ireland (1801)
1800s: Growth of the Franchise / Suffrage
Gradual Extensions
1832: Middle Class
1867: Working Class
1884: Agrarian workers
WOMEN???
Emmeline
Pankhurst
1858- 1928
WSPU
EARLY
TACTICS?
1st Efforts: Create Media Attention. Protests.
1905 Protested House of Commons
"We are here not because we are
law-breakers; we are here in our effort
to become law-makers”
'Will the Liberal Government
give votes to women?'
( during speeches by liberal MPs )
Christabelle arrested / fined / refused to pay /
prison
Emmeline Pankhurst
“You have to make more
noise than anybody else,
you have to make yourself
more obtrusive than
anybody else, you have to
fill all the papers more
than anybody else, in fact
you have to be there all the
time and see that they do
not snow you under, if you
are really going to get
your reform realized.”
OK, 2nd Try = larger protests
500,000 in Hyde Park
2 members went to 10 Downing Street
threw rocks in windows
(not uncommon in Brit history)
A group (with Emmeline) march to Commons.
Forced entrance.
Fight with cops
Emmeline arrested
+ 23 others
(3 months in prison)
OK, We’ll Starve
ourselves to death in
prison!
3rd Time’s a charm: Hunger Strikes in prison 1909
Government Response: Force feedings
Government’s 1st Response = Forced Feedings
Government’s 2nd Response:
4th Tactic: Blowin’ Stuff Up!
“The Argument of
the Broken Pane of Glass
is the most valuable
in modern politics.”
There is something that
governments care (far) more for
than human life, and that is the
security of property, and so it is
through property that we shall
strike the enemy . . .
1913: Blow stuff up
(property, not people)
Burned down
2 MP’s houses,
and other property
1000 arrested
The militancy of men, through
all the centuries, has drenched
the world with blood, and for
these deeds of horror and
destruction men have been
rewarded with monuments,
with great songs and epics.
The militancy of women has
harmed no human life save
the lives of those who fought
the battle of righteousness.
Time alone will reveal what
reward will be allotted to
women.
It always seems to me
when the anti-suffrage
members of the
Government criticize
militancy in women
that it is very like
beasts of prey
reproaching the gentler
animals who turn in
desperate resistance
when at the point of
death . . .
Millicent Fawcett
UWSS
Liberal & Pacifist
Opposed WWI
Fawcett
or
Pankhurst
Representation
of the People
Act (1918)
* Women 30+ got the vote.
*
*
All men gained suffrage.
– Property qualifications were
completely eliminated!
Reform Act of 1928
– Women over 21 years of age gained
the right to vote at last!
Emmeline Pankhurst
* POST-SUFFRAGE WORK
* 1917: Women’s Party
* Emmeline +Christabel:
- Equal pay for equal work.
– Equal marriage & divorce laws.
– Equality of rights & opportunities
in public service.
– A national system of maternity benefits.
In a Liberal-Democracy, is it ever
“acceptable” to engage in violence to
achieve a political end?
Does the “political end” that is sought influence your opinion?
Does the target of the Violence influence your opinion?
against the Government?
against fellow citizens?
against property?