Britain, Anarchist Federation ORGANISE! #84 - What the
Suffragettes did for us (hint: it was more than the vote)
(a-infos-en@ainfos.ca)
Nearly all children in the UK are told at some point, by some well-meaning adult: “You
must eat all the food on your plate, because there are children starving in Africa.”
Around half of us are subjected to a second, similarly inane cliché. This one goes: “When
you grow up, you must vote in every election, because women died to get you the vote.”
---- The connection, you might have noticed, is that they’re both wrong-headed appeals to
a sense of moral duty towards somebody who will be entirely unaffected by the action we’re
told we must take. They’re also massive over-simplifications of complex issues. They
concern problems that are created by a vast, tangled network of systems of power, and
promote solutions that look, on the surface, like a personal response to those systems,
but which don’t question or disrupt them in any way.
Most of us are soon able to point out that starving
children in specific regions within Africa or anywhere
else are unlikely to know or care whether we finished
our second scoop of over-salted instant mashed
potato, though they might appreciate fairer
global economic systems governing food
production and distribution1. It took me a lot
longer to untangle the second fallacy. It was a
lot longer before it occurred to me to try. In fact,
there are several fallacies underlying this one,
and it’s worth going through them in detail.
Fallacy no. 1: The Suffragettes could
have cared less whether or not I vote.
Similar to the starving children in Africa, the
suffragettes didn’t know me and had pressing
problems of their own. What they wanted was
not that every woman in perpetuity should be
guilt-tripped into participating in any political
system that used the ballot box to legitimise
itself, but that wherever men were balloted,
women would be too. As far as that goes, they
got what they wanted, and those future women’s
decisions on how to use that enfranchisement
weren’t a major concern. In fact, the whole point
was that they trusted future women to make
their own decisions. Sylvia Pankhurst, for one,
lived to reject parliamentary democracy as
an out of date machine and refused to cast a
vote or stand for election herself. I daresay that
should she be haunting polling stations on May
7th, she would be far more appalled by the cuts
to essential women’s services that every option
on the ballot would continue to implement, than
at women who spoiled their ballots or stayed
away. I like to think she’ll give me an approving
nod as I substitute my ballot paper for a sheet
of folded bog roll, but honestly, if I believed in an
afterlife I’d be sure that Sylvia Pankhurst, of all
people, would be doing something better with
it than haunting polling booths. She’s probably
swanning round Europe with the spectre of
communism.
Fallacy no. 2: The vote was the sole legacy of
the suffragettes, and using it the only way to
respect their memory.
Here’s the thing: the suffragettes never intended it to
stop with the vote. They weren’t satisfied, and they
didn’t intend us to be. We respect their memory by
continuing their work, not by being content with it.
We also need to remember that “suffragettes” was
a blanket term for a diverse women’s movement.
The vote might have been the only demand of the
more privileged groups, especially those in the US
who refused membership to black, working class
and fallen women and were happy for the vote to be
extended only to a married and propertied respectable
few, but who’d want to honour their memory? For
the Women’s Social and Political Union in the UK, at
least at the beginning, there was a lot more to it than
the vote itself.
It was about women’s solidarity,
women’s ability to work together
and stand up and fight together,
to write and speak from their own
experience to each other and to
the world, not just on the vote
but sexual, social and vocational
freedoms, including fair pay and
reproductive rights.
Being denied the vote was an infantilisation, an
insult to women as intelligent, rational human
beings, regardless of how much use the vote itself
would or wouldn’t be. Using the vote was almost
beside the point compared to what it would mean
for women to have the vote, to not be designated
as mere extensions of their husbands but decision-
making adults in their own right.
Getting the vote was a victory largely because
of what women achieved through the process of
fighting for it. The speeches, the publications, the
meetings, the direct actions, the smashed windows,
the battles with police, the martial arts training in
preparation for those battles, the imprisonments, the
hunger strikes, the resistance to force-feeding and
refusal to give in: these did more to raise the status
and confidence of women, the possibilities and
opportunities for women as public, professional and
political people, than the vote itself ever has, and a
shed load more than a woman Prime Minister and all
the other careerists who’ve cynically used women’s
struggles to promote themselves while throwing
working class women under the bus.
Fallacy no. 3: Gratitude for the end of their
disenfranchisement should put a particular
obligation on women to involve themselves
in the system that kept them disenfranchised.
“Do you see what mummy gave you? Now, say thank
you very nicely, and stop complaining.” Because,
frankly, fuck that condescending, paternalistic shit
right there. Working class men also fought for the
right to vote, but do they get that cooed at them
every time they suggest that there are more effective
means of change than the ballot box? This attitude
turns women’s votes into an issue of conformity
rather than conscience, in direct opposition to who
the suffragettes were and what they fought for.
The partial information we get fed at school paints the suffragettes as a peaceful
campaigning lobby, who were awarded the vote because they made their case well and proved
their economic worth while the men were being fed into the slaughter of the first world
war. The truth is, the suffragettes achieved their aims because they were a radical,
inspirational and effective direct action movement.
They achieved incredible things for themselves and for future generations of women, and
yes, they deserve our respect and our gratitude. But more than that, they deserve our
study and our effort to comprehend the full enormity and complexity of their struggle.
They deserve better than to be reduced to a single-issue soundbyte, their courage and
militancy twisted into a liberal message of support for the system many of them never
stopped fighting when their leaders were co-opted. They deserve so much better than to be
used manipulatively, as bogeywomen to shame us into a tokenistic legitimisation of the
very systems they opposed.
So this polling day, whether you vote
or organise or both, consider honouring
the suffragettes’ memory by not using
them as a stick to beat women with
when they treat their vote exactly as
the suffragettes fought to allow them
to: as their own, to use or not, on their
own terms.
1 Well, eventually. Most of us start by suggesting a parcel of leftovers.
