It’s also frustrating to see the media treatment of women’s suffrage. Poor Emily Wilding Davison – I’ve seen so many commemorative pieces, trying to drum up feminist fervour in today’s women, “what would Davison think if she knew we were wearing high-heeled shoes and women were so poorly represented in video games!” – well it’s ridiculous, she wouldn’t give one half of a fuck, it’s just appending a prestigious name to the writer’s pet cause. And, prestigious in terms of suffering-capital, really, a middle-class woman died gorily. I mean you take the raised-eyebrow sassy tone of so much bourgeois feminism since The Female Eunuch pretty much, and you apply it to a woman getting trampled by a horse for the vote, it’s pretty horrifyingly callous.

The only thing from the time I can compare it to is, there’s an article by an ex-suffragist feminist from 1913 straight after it happened, and Emmeline Pankhurst was on hunger strike at the time, and this lady’s basically suggesting Pankhurst should take a leaf from Davison’s book, cause that was a brave, beautiful act executed with total agency. And this is someone who reaaallly hated the Pankhursts, she’d been in the WSPU and had a bad experience. We treat these women like they were all sassy and cool and 100% rational at all times, like they were Lisa Simpson or Hermione Granger or something, truth is, Rowbotham is totally right, they were acting from desperation.

I can’t think of much more misogynist than writing “why can’t today’s women take a leaf from the suffragettes’ book? they were totally together, cool and collected”. We should be mourning them, lamenting that they had to do this, if anything.

Then there’s this constant need to look back to “when feminism was founded”. Like, this group of middle-class women in ye olden days went “well there’s this problem and that, we’re the property of our men, we can’t divorce, basically our livelihood depends on our value as capital, we can’t vote… piffle, this is ridiculous I say, any intelligent woman can see this! I know! Let’s make feminism!”. Then this endless fight between various schools of feminism over whose precursors the original feminists really are. You get this really insidious effect where today’s media figures with their articles on unrealistic beauty standards which somehow manage to drop in a few celeb and big brand names claim that they’re carrying on the legacy of the original feminists, and that the original feminists were in fact the high-profile middle-class ones, who mostly weren’t really feminist, a lot of them continued to embrace the Victorian ideal of womanhood, they just wanted the vote for women as well, in fact one of their arguments was that women wouldn’t cease to embody that ideal even if they had the vote. There’s actually some interesting theological work on Christabel Pankhurst, but she was pretty conservative, as was Emmeline in her later days after her husband died, as was Millicent Fawcett who, apparently, on reading a copy of The Freewoman (a journal of the time that explored the possibilities of homosexuality and questioned the traditional nuclear family) apparently ripped it up and declared it evil. These are only convenient “precursors” if you ignore most of what they did or stood for – which is not fair to them, really.

The thing is with the big names in feminist history, they’re the women who are given “stories”. You have to be middle-class for this, because you have to be a “protagonist” with “agency” and so on. All working-class campaigners have ever had is their lives and their struggles and the things they did. Without the narrative, they probably just look like what they were – women struggling in a desperate situation. The feminist movement wasn’t founded by some Feminist Mount Rushmore of Great Women. It happened.

Oh and great reading list, by the way. I’ve been looking for the name of the author of that Sylvia Pankhurst book for ages.

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