Revolting Women: Harriet Beecher Stowe
This post is part of a series on the theme of women and protest. The full series is collected under the tag “Revolting Women”. Welcome back to guest blogger Libby from TreasuryIslands.
Women have played their part in revolution since time immemorial. The Trung Sisters rebelled against Han-Dynasty rule in China, 40AD; Boudicca led the Iceni tribe in uprising against occupying Roman forces in 60AD; Queen Margaret of Anjou fought for the crown, successfully, at the battle of Tewkesbury in 1471; Lorenza Avemanay led the Ecuadorian revolt against the Spanish in 1803. Women have proven themselves to be worthy opponents on the battlefield and in the halls of power. Harriet Beecher Stowe, though, did none of these things: she wasn’t possessed of great oratory skills, or handy with a sword, and she didn’t lead a great army, nor overthrow an oppressor. She wrote a book.
One of thirteen children, Stowe grew up in a deeply Christian family. Her father and seven brothers were all ministers, and when she married in 1836, she chose as her husband a scholar and theologian who was much respected by his peers. From the beginning of their marriage the Stowes were ardent critics of slavery. Their first home became a part of the Underground Railroad, temporarily housing numerous runaway slaves on their journey to asylum in Canada. Stowe began to write articles addressing the problem of slavery and making a name for herself as an abolitionist who didn’t run with the pack.
This might have been the extent of Stowe’s abolitionist activities had it not been for the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850.
Is it true that they have been passing a law forbidding people to give meat and drink to those poor colored folks that come along? I heard they were talking of some such law, but I didn’t think any Christian legislature would pass it!
– Uncle Tom’s Cabin, ch. 9
The act underlined the illegality of harbouring fugitive slaves and ensured that anyone who did not aid in the capture of fugitive slaves was criminalised too. For Stowe, this was entirely at odds with the teachings of Christianity. The law may punish those who work against the slave trade, but Christian law was above that; “Love worketh no ill to his neighbour,” said the Bible, “therefore love is the fulfilling of the law” (Romans 13:10). Stowe’s abolitionist philosophy is one of the natural rights of individuals – it is the philosophy of Hobbes, of Locke and of the founding fathers and a philosophy written into the Declaration of Independence: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights. That among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
It was clear to Stowe that slavery denied huge numbers of people these rights. She wrote in a letter to Lord Denman in 1853,
[A]s a woman, as a mother I was oppressed and broken-hearted, with the sorrows and injustice I saw, because as a Christian I felt the dishonor to Christianity — because as a lover of my country I trembled at the coming day of wrath. It is no merit in the sorrowful that they weep, or
to the oppressed and smothering that they gasp and struggle, not to me, that I must speak for the oppressed — who cannot speak for themselves.
As a woman, Stowe could not effect change by voting or being elected to public office. But she could write. When Gamaliel Bailey, editor of abolitionist newspaper the National Era, offered Stowe $100 to pen a special antislavery piece, she already had a story in mind. Uncle Tom’s Cabin was published serially in the National Era beginning in May 1851. When she began writing, Stowe could not have anticipated the impact it would have.
Reading the book today, the text of Uncle Tom’s Cabin contains troubling racist stereotyping in itself – I re-read it in its entirity recently and blogged the experience in more depth here on my own blog; this post forms a sort of companion piece.
Uncle Tom’s Cabin centres around the lives of a group of slaves working on an Kentucky plantation. The book opens with a discussion between owners Shelby and Haley over the sale of two slaves. Though Shelby’s wife is not happy, the sale nevertheless goes ahead.
The slaves in question are the eponymous Uncle Tom, a good man and devout Christian, and young Harry, the only surviving son of house slave Eliza. The narrative follows them as they leave Kentucky, Tom on a ship bound for Ohio, and Eliza and her son as escapees pursued by professional slave catchers. Throughout their journeys Tom and Eliza witness the cruelties and indignities of slavery: Eliza is refused help for fear of repercussions; Tom witnesses a suicide and hears of slave babies bred to be sold. When he is sold to a particularly cruel master Tom finds violence not only from owners, but among the slaves themselves, an indignity that suggests that those who are oppressed by the system lose both self-respect and any perspective of right or wrong.
While revealing the brutalities visited upon slaves from inhumane masters, the novel also relentlessly mocks the hypocrisies of so-called ‘benign’ slave holders, represented by Shelby, who, though they are not violent and cruel themselves, support those slave holders who are less kindly and keep the system running. Slaves were, in Uncle Tom’s Cabin and in life, under constant physical and psychological assault.
Stowe made sure, too, to implicate the world at large in the horrors of the slave trade. She directs the story to her readers, referring to ‘us’ and things ‘we’ think. Readers were therefore in cahoots with Stowe from the very beginning, so when she asks of her readers, ‘But sir, who makes the Trader?’ (ch. 12) readers would be bound into guilt, and with good reason. Not just in America but elsewhere too, households profited from the exploitation of slaves; they bought sugar, they milled cotton. Stowe could not have used better means to galvanise support among white American moderates.
The novel was released as a two volume book in 1852. The original print run of 5000 was woefully inadequate: in the first year, 300,000 copies were sold in the US, more than 1 million in the UK. Opinion was divided. According to Richard Yarborough, quoted in this paper by RS Levin, freed slaves viewed the novel as “a godsend destined to mobilize white sentiment against slavery just when resistance to the southern forces was urgently needed”, while for abolitionists it was a vindication. Readers south of the Mason-Dixon Line were more likely to find the novel sensationalist and unjust – slavery was a much bigger part of their way of life.
Following the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin support for the abolition movement grew. Minstrel shows and stage plays based on the book – ‘Tom Shows’ as they came to be known – became popular, bringing Stowe’s message to a wider audience, and transcending barriers of class and literacy. Inevitably, some Tom Shows took on a pro-slavery stance, but this does not seem to have diluted the effect of the work on the populace. The now famous author began speaking tours, even visiting the UK in her attempt to bring abolitionism to a wider and wider audience.
The abolitionist movement continued to grow. When Abraham Lincoln won his Presidency in 1860 it was on a platform of antislavery, so when eleven pro-slavery states seceded to form the Confederacy in 1861 war seemed suddenly inevitable. Of course, slavery was not the sole cause of the American Civil War; there was a significant difference in culture, economy and industry between Northern and Southern states and disagreements over federal rule versus state autonomy too. Despite these factors, when the fighting began it became clear: this was a battle between pro- and anti-slavery states. When Stowe visited Lincoln in 1862 he is reputed to have said to her, “So, you are the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war.”
Slavery was finally abolished in the United States in 1865 with the Thirteenth Amendment, which put an end to all involuntary servitude save for those convicted of a crime and freed 40,000 or so slaves that had not been granted their freedom in previous state-by-state laws.
In later years images from Margaret Mitchell’s adapted Gone With the Wind (1936) would supersede those of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in the popular imagination as the picture of the antebellum South. No doubt both have some degree of accuracy, but it is Uncle Tom’s Cabin that changed the opinion of a nation.
- Libby earned her feminist stripes interning for the Fawcett Society where she was horrified by most of the stories she heard. An accidental activist, she is a regular contributor to BCN, the UK’s only 100% bisexual publication. Her latest project, TreasuryIslands, is the home of her other passion – children’s literature. Libby is very proud of her bad reputation.
Women in Black: A Revolting Women Found Feminism
This edition of Found Feminism is also part of a series on the theme of women and protest. The full series is collected under the tag “Revolting Women”.
They meet every Wednesday at 6pm and stand around the statue of legendary badass and feminist hero Edith Cavell, wearing black and holding signs. They don’t speak. They have an awesome homemade banner with some very cool patchwork stitching on it. We at BadRep Towers are very fond of both banners and patchwork.
Women in Black patchwork banner of EPIC-NESS!
They are the Women in Black. Not to be confused with their male counterparts – the Women in Black are probably not our ‘best, last and only line of defence’ against extra-terrestrial invasion, although I wouldn’t put it past them.
So, who are they and why is it a Found Feminism? Well, they’re an international network that offer a specific form of peaceful protest model – wear black, hold signs, don’t chant – and link up all the people (men AND women) in the world who do this or who want to do it.
Women in Black officially started off in the late 80s in Israel with women protesting against the occupation of Palestine, but they acknowledge their roots in much earlier female-led non-violent movements such as Black Sash and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom.
Women in Black are therefore part of a much wider story about the long-term involvement of women, and feminists, in the peace movement, in anti-war demonstrations and in alternative (including non-violent) forms of protest and revolution.
At a time of shouty, flash-in-the-pan protests and unpredictable acts of anger, a regular, silent protest is interesting in and of itself. It’s a reminder of the other ways to influence and change the world, as well as recognising the value of solidarity across borders. Something Edith herself would have probably approved of.
Patriotism is not enough. I must have no hatred or bitterness towards anyone.
– Edith Cavell
Revolting Women: Dora Thewlis, Teenage Working Class Suffragette
This post is part of a series on the theme of women and protest. The full series is collected under the tag “Revolting Women”. Following on from Steve’s post yesterday about martial arts and the upper echelons of the suffragette movement, welcome back to guest blogger Libby from TreasuryIslands, in the first of two guest posts.
Monday 8th March, 1907. The Ladies’ Gallery of the House of Commons is closed as a precaution as the Dickinson bill receives its second reading. The bill, which would see the enfranchisement of around a million propertied women in the UK, is talked out. In protest, the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) decide to march on Westminster.
Twelve days later, several hundred women gather to make their discontent known. Among them are local WSPU groups from Yorkshire and Lancashire, a ‘clog and shawl brigade’ of workers from cotton and worsted mills. The House of Commons is defended by more than 500 police.
Seventy-five women are arrested. The following day a photograph appears on the front page of the Daily Mirror of a young woman, flanked by a pair of police officers. Her skirts and shawl in disarray, her hair wild. She appears to be shouting. Her name is Dora Thewlis, a weaver in a Huddersfield mill. She is just sixteen years old.
When she appears in front of the magistrate, one Mr Horace Smith, he is aghast:
The child cannot be a delegate or anything else. She doesn’t know what she’s doing. You ought to be at school. It is really a shocking thing that you should be brought up to London to be turned loose […]. Where is your Mother?
Later:
Here is a young girl of seventeen [in fact she is 16] enticed from her home in Yorkshire and let loose in the streets of London to come into collision with the police. It is disgraceful for everybody concerned.
Like the prosecutor who, during the Chatterley trial, asked “Is it a book you would wish your wife or servants to read?”, Smith reveals by his indignation just how out of touch the establishment is with the lives of working people. Says Jill Liddington in her book Rebel Girls:
First, men like Horace Smith had not the remotest understanding of child labour, let alone the half-time system widespread in the north. His pontification is tragically revealing about the dimensions of inequality. Second, Smith saw ‘young girls’ and ‘London streets’ as having only one possible reading: moral looseness and semi-prostitution. The word ‘entice’ says it all: Dora had been ‘enticed’ down onto the London streets, in her turn to ‘entice’ innocent young men. […] It remained unthinkable for respectable women to demand citizenship by taking to the streets.
Dora Thewlis was borne of an environment hostile towards working women; an environment that relied heavily upon the textile industry, but one in which trade unionism was heavily resisted by factory managers and owners and in which the Yorkshire Warp Twisters had fought two strikes,
successfully, to prevent women entering their profession. As an active member of the Independent Labour Party (ILP), who (according to her mother) had since the age of seven, ‘been a diligent reader of the newspapers, [able to] hold her own in debate on politics (Liddington, p 112), Thewlis was well aware of the inequity of society.
For the mill workers of Yorkshire and Lancashire, the failures of capitalism were apparent in the hierarchies of the factories. Mill workers were encouraged by their physical environment to isolate themselves by specialism so that ordinary labourers were looked down upon by spinners and sorters, who in turn were sniffed at by the overseers. This segregation, inevitably, extended outside the factory walls, and for workers of different grades to socialise together was unusual. Outside of large factories small firms too held a paternalistic sway over the lives of their workers, fighting constantly to keep down costs and able to ruin the reputation of any worker that refused to toe the line. The ILP sought a number of economic reforms, summarised by Robert Haggard in this book as “an eight hour working day; the abolition of overtime and piecework; the prohibition of the employment of children; public provision for the sick, the disabled, the aged, widows and orphans [and] free, non-sectarian primary, secondary and university education”, as well as a fair minimum wage. The party was evangelical in its belief that the world could be a better place for everyone through socialism.
Ardently supporting the ILP, it was not surprising that Dora Thewlis would embrace suffrage with the same fervour, and she joined the Huddersfield branch of the WSPU as a founding member in December 1906.
So it was that Thewlis found herself arrested and remanded to Holloway. Once in prison, Thewlis was bathed, given a prison number and uniform and separated from her comrades. Inside the once belligerent, combative Thewlis grew lonely and wan, convinced she had been forgotten. Though she remained in Holloway only six days, Thelwis became a cause célèbre. Christened the ‘Baby Suffragette’ by the Daily Mirror, she was dogged by reporters at both ends of her journey back to Huddersfield. Portentously, no members of the local WSPU came to meet her.
Following her return home Thewlis regained a little of her spirit. “Don’t call me the ‘Baby Suffragette'”, she told one reporter, “I am not a baby really. In May next year I shall be eighteen years of age. Surely for a girl that is a good age?”. The sobriquet belittled Thewlis, just as Horace
Smith had, opening her up to ridicule both in the press and from her fellow suffragists. There was a feeling of alienation among the Huddersfield suffragists who felt attention had been drawn away from their cause by disputes over Thewlis’ age and Mr Smith’s comments about “enticement”.
By August of 1907 the image of young Thewlis being arrested had been turned into a picture postcard, and, though Dora herself had remained largely quiet on the matter, relations between the Thewlis women and the WSPU had become strained. It’s difficult to know exactly what caused the tension, though Dora’s mother Eliza, who tended to claim a greater role than she ought in the branch dealings, undoubtedly did not help the situation. A letter was dispatched to the Thewlis home asking Eliza Thewlis to work agreeably or resign from the branch.
All Thewlis and her cohorts wanted was to be granted the right to vote. The had to abide by the law of the land, they argued, so why could they not have a hand in creating it? It is worth noting that, despite the WSPU’s significant working class membership, they did not fight for universal suffrage, but the right for women to vote on the same terms as men. It was, in the words of one nameless critic, “not votes for women, but votes for ladies”; only a meagre few would meet the property qualification required by law. Dora Thewlis, with her socialist zeal and youthful indignation, would not be one of those women.
The WSPU, with their motto of “Deeds Not Words” was founded in 1903, in the wake of perceived inertia in the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS). They became increasingly militant, with a policy of breaking the windows of government buildings introduced in 1908, with
the first hunger strikes taking place the following year. In 1912 they began attacking the contents of post boxes, and the campaign of violence and arson escalated. The following year Emily Davison became a martyr to the cause, dying following head injuries sustained in what is likely to have been an attempt to grab the bridle of the King’s horse at the Derby.
It is frequently argued that such militancy did more to harm the suffragist cause than to progress it, and that the constitutional actions of Millicent Fawcett’s NUWSS and the Women’s Freedom League did more to earn the enfranchisement of Women.
The Qualification of Women Act was passed in 1918, allowing female householders (or wives of householders), women with an annual household rent of at least £5, and female graduates of British universities to vote if they were over the age of 30. Thewlis, who had emigrated to Australia (where women had been granted the vote in 1901) before the outbreak of war, never saw the enfranchisement she fought for. She never returned to Britain, and died in 1976.
- Libby earned her feminist stripes interning for the Fawcett Society where she was horrified by most of the stories she heard. An accidental activist, she is a regular contributor to BCN, the UK’s only 100% bisexual publication. Her latest project, TreasuryIslands, is the home of her other passion – children’s literature. Libby is very proud of her bad reputation.
Revolting Women: The Ju-Jutsuffragettes
This post is part of a series on the theme of women and protest. The full series is collected under the tag “Revolting Women”.
My choice of subject for our Revolting Women series was decided the moment I saw the picture below, an event which caused me to loudly shout “GET IN!” and do an air-punch with great abandon.
The lady in this image is Mrs Edith Margaret Garrud (1872-1971), and she appears to have a policeman in an armlock.
It turns out that it’s only an actor playing the hapless bobby, because Edith is the person responsible for teaching the Suffragettes jujutsu.
Before we ask how a middle-aged woman in a respectable hat was able to learn the (then barely discovered) Japanese martial art, let’s look at why she’d bother:
We have not yet made ourselves a match for the police, and we have got to do it. The police know jiu-jitsu. I advise you to learn jiu-jitsu. Women should practise it as well as men.
We have got to have [military] drilling in the East End. If there is any man who has been in the Army or who knows anything about drilling, will he please communicate with me, and we will start drilling.
You should all go out with your sticks [Indian clubs which were popular for exercise at the time, and easily hidden in clothing]. What is the use of demonstrating for freedom and going unarmed? Don’t come to meetings without sticks in future, men and women alike. It is worth while really striking. It is no use pretending. We have got to fight.
– Sylvia Pankhurst, quoted in the New York Times on Aug 12th 1913, shortly before she was arrested.
With the recent practice of police using “kettling” to contain students during anti-cuts protests, and any (very predictable) resulting violence against police by the protesters subsequently being loudly criticised in newspapers, it’s refreshing to see the sentiments above. ‘Well, we have to learn jujutsu too, or the police might be able to stop us. And obviously we can’t have THAT. This is a protest! Get someone who can make it happen and have him report to me immediately. Next?’ While the actions may cause debate today, the sheer ‘nothing will stop us’ attitude is amazing.
But Sylvia is not the focus of this post, much as we love her here on BadRep. It’s Edith who is less well known but also truly remarkable. She taught PE at a school and married William, also a PE instructor, when she was 21 and he 22. They moved to London and met the intriguing Edward William Barton-Wright, who in 1899 started to teach them both jujutsu.
I have to pause again and talk about Barton-Wright, because England produces a unique brand of truly bonkers things and he was definitely responsible for one of them which is of great importance to this narrative.
Stances from Bartitsu, and in the centre E.W. Barton-Wright and his terrifying moustache. (Image = Public Domain from Wikipedia)
Sherlock Holmes, as well as being a boxer, was written in a later story as knowing the gentleman’s martial art of “Baritsu”. This was a mis-spelling of Barton’s invention, “Bartitsu” (Barton-jujitsu). Asian martial arts weren’t very widely known in the West before 1900, and he was one of the first instructors in Europe. It was a time when… well, when men had moustaches and hats like those in the accompanying image. Barton-Wright had learned Shinden Fudo Ryu jujutsu and judo, and developed a new system for English people of ‘class and bearing’ to use with dignity (and often a walking stick or umbrella).
It was his academy that Edith and her husband attended, and they both went on to become students of Sadakazu Uyenishi who taught there. When Uyenishi left his own dojo a few years later, they took over as teachers of that club in Soho. (Their daughter, Isabel, also assisted them in running the dojo from 1911 onwards, at the age of fifteen.)
Edith was almost certainly the first female jujutsu instructor in Europe. She and her husband continued teaching until 1925 – but from 1908 she alone ran some classes which were only open to suffragettes.
And if you thought that Sylvia was a straight-talker in the quotes above, Edith didn’t hold back either. There is far, far too much awesomeness going on to fit it all into this post, so I strongly recommend you read the pages on the other end of these links:
In her article “Damsel Vs Desperado” for Health and Strength magazine in 1910, Edith said that jujutsu was not just for protesters to use against police (as the newspapers were gleefully retelling) but that
Woman is exposed to many perils nowadays, because so many who call themselves ‘men’ are not worthy of that exalted title.
She then goes on to write a short story (with illustrations!) about a woman being attacked while “returning home along a lonely country road.” It contains lines such as:
Believing that he has had enough by now and that she has shown him what she can do, she gives him a severe twinge that makes him fairly squeal, and throws him off as a “thing” beneath contempt.
It was this magazine which came up with the title “Ju-jutsuffragettes”, one which Edith seemed to quite like, and in 1911 they printed another article describing a short sketch also written by her, in which a wife defends herself against her violently drunk husband. The headline proudly announced
“Ju-Jutsu as a Husband-Tamer: A Suffragette Play with a Moral“(!) The photos are brilliant (I am all too familiar with the wrist-lock in no.4, ouch) and the short script contains some comedy:
“I’ll learn this ‘ere jucy jujubes, Liz, for I could do for you if I was sober,” he says.
“No,” answers Liz; “you’re a good husband to me then, and wouldn’t want to, but when you’re drunk I’ll always be a match for you.”
The reminder that domestic violence was (and is) widespread enough to make the play relevant to the audience is chilling, however.
What makes Edith of particular importance to the protest movement she was part of is not just that she was a suffragette, or taught others to take on police during protests, but that she trained the 30 women known as “The Bodyguard”. This group was set up to prevent the frequent arrest of top suffragette protesters (the police would release those who were on hunger strike and then quickly re-arrest them). As well as pitched hand-to-hand fighting between ladies and Her Majesty’s constabulary, the Bodyguard used disguises, decoys and all sorts of other tricks to get the known leaders away after a protest. For many years, she was their chief trainer.
I ordered a copy of a charming book by Tony Wolf called “Edith Garrud: The suffragette who knew Jujutsu“. It’s one of the most fully-researched works on the woman and her deeds, but is written for children, leading to sentences such as ‘The Police, of course, didn’t like the idea of the Suffragettes’ new Bodyguard society one little bit.’ It also provides some amazing quotes and stories: during one public demonstration, a reporter from the Daily Mirror was invited to attack the 4’11” Edith on stage. After trying several attacks and being roundly thrown or wristlocked each time, he wrote of his experiences in an article for the newspaper:
I rose convinced of the efficiency of Jujutsu, and, aching in every limb, crawled painfully away, pitying the constable whose ill-fortune it should be to lay hands on Mrs. Garrud.
Again and again in her story we see parallels to the student and anti-cuts protests earlier this year. The suffragettes knew that property damage meant headlines, but there were generally strict boundaries – no people were to be hurt, and no factory or other workplace was to be damaged where people’s jobs would be affected. One incident Edith was involved in was a gathering of women on Oxford Street, who, when Edith blew a whistle, pulled hammers and rocks from under their clothes and threw them through shop windows. This was seen as a logical, necessary and entirely justified action which had a place in protest, not just empty vandalism, and she defends it eloquently. Newspapers and blogs are still having that debate today.
She presented a suffragette petition to Lloyd George, who started to argue with her. Edith replied “Now then, you are dealing with a fellow countrywoman from the Welsh Valleys. Be sensible, man!” (She was born in Bath but grew up in Wales). They then had entirely civil conversations on more than one occasion, although never agreed on ideals.
Edith depicted in the July 1910 edition of Punch magazine.
In an interview for Woman magazine when she was 94, she said that self-discipline had been the key to jujutsu and protest – discipline of the body, but much more of the mind. Even at that age she presented as someone with unbending levels of determination. Reading about women’s voices in protest then and now, the difference comes over as a directness in attitude: of being entirely sure that your cause is just and that you must therefore do everything to help protest succeed. The conversation in those circles would be “So the police are using kettling and ‘pre-emptive arrests’ to suppress dissent. How do we make sure those techniques never work on us again?”
Edith Garrud died in 1971 at the age of 99. She was instrumental in teaching the suffragettes the skills they used to evade capture and speak in public for longer. She also broke new ground in being a woman who taught martial arts only recently discovered in Europe to women. This year, Edith will be honoured with a permanent memorial by Islington council – an ‘Islington People’s Plaque’ – because she won a public vote to be one of the five people or places thus celebrated.
Revolting Women: Greenham Common
This post is part of a series on the theme of women and protest. The full series is collected under the tag “Revolting Women”. Welcome back to Hannah Eiseman-Renyard…
Greenham Common was, by all accounts, something epic: a peaceful campaign of sustained, cooperative occupation by women against the bomb – and it worked. From 1981 to 2000 the camp, based around RAF Greenham Common military base in Berkshire, protested the presence of the (American) nuclear weapons held there – and eventually the weapons were removed.
Sidenote: on one occasion I went there in utero. How awesomecool is my momma?
Greenham Common had been an RAF base since 1941, and an American airbase since 1968. When the US moved 96 cruise missiles there in 1980, the protest began – forming properly in 1981. For years women, and their children too, lived in a makeshift camp in all weathers. Much like the Mothers of the Disappeared protest in South America, Greenham Common used the concept of maternal authority to lend weight to their campaign. The women of Greenham Common were not protesting just for themselves, but for everyone – for their children’s future, and for everyone else’s. They hammered this home with slogans like ‘when I grow up I want to be alive’ – and children’s clothes and children’s art were often part of the decorations tied along the fences.
Some children lived in the camp, too. I’m afraid this is where my statistics gets a bit fuzzy because over 19 years, and through different seasons, it probably changed more than a bit.
My mother reports the place was often a carnival:
…there were the usual collections of street performers and puppet shows to cheer us on… people on decorated bikes, that kind of thing … there was a lot of weaving things in the perimeter fence – rainbows, kid art, … the whole perimeter fence was very gorgeous. There were a lot of spiderwebs in the art. Spiderwebs were a big theme – I suppose the theme of weaving something, surrounding something.
Punks, too. Or Arachnes. Either way, I approve.
The women who lived there endured arrests, freezing and muddy conditions and the most rudimentary of provisions. Make no mistake – these were badass women. Muddy women, tired women, cold women, but strong, capable, mind-blowingly determined women, and women who were not afraid to use bolt cutters.
Nuclear weapons, they rightly argued, are not in anyone’s interest, and should not be anywhere. The protest was closely allied with CND, and it garnered respect and support from people of all walks of life. This Guardian video shows the mix and gives slightly more of an idea of what the protests were like than my second-generation verbal squeezing can do.
Over the ten main years of the protest many people came and went, but the backbone of it all were the base camps. There were nine of these, each based around a different set of gates to the base. Each base gained its own flavour and focus, with the Violet Gate formed of religious groups, the Blue Gate being much more new age, and the Green Gate being entirely women-only as a rule.
Personally I’m dubious about sticking a gender divide in an otherwise very uniting protest – but there were many places where men were welcome, too, and this simply was, from the start, a women’s movement. It was founded and organised by women’s groups (which in the 80s especially were fucking rad) – and women’s groups and unions around the country organised coaches to and from the big demos.
The campaign gained huge amounts of media attention in 1983 when around 70,000 protestors formed a human chain around the base, stopping movement in and out of it. (My mom was there!) With around 100 women being arrested for breaking in. (My mom didn’t do that bit.) The scale and success of the Greenham Common protest was widely credited with prompting similar actions elsewhere in Britain and Europe.
The base camp protestors were evicted on numerous occasions, but always returned before nightfall to set up camp again.
So – how did it all come to a close? In 1991 the weapons were removed – but many protestors stayed a further nine badass years until the final perimeter fences were removed and the Common was returned back to public land. Partly this was to make sure the land was returned, but partly, it seems, because a real community had formed and people were reluctant to leave it.
Above and beyond the call of duty – with rainbows and mud and sisterhood. I think I’m in love.
Further resources:
- There’s a great picture gallery over here titled ‘The Life and Times of CND’.
- Your Greenham – video footage and more, and Greenham WPC.
- The Women’s Library has lots of images and information.
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- Hannah Eiseman-Renyard runs the Whippersnapper Press, a web-publishing site for short, innovative and funny creative writing. She is twenty-five and lives in North London with her three grandchildren and thirty cats. Her turn-ons include moss, handicrafts and Bohemian clichés.
This post is part of a series on the theme of women and protest. The full series is collected under the tag “Revolting Women”.
Argentina, during the period from 1976-1983, was not a good place to look even remotely like a dissident. The era, known as the ‘Dirty War’, saw widespread violence carried out by Jorge Rafael Videla’s military junta against those it perceived as enemies of the state – students, journalists, trade unionists and Peronist guerillas (see the Night of the Pencils, Ezeiza Massacre, Margarita Belén Massacre and Luis Mendia’s death flights for examples). Assaults, assassinations and kidnappings were rife, and somewhere between 9,000 and 30,000 people were forcibly disappeared, leaving no official trace of their fates.
This set the stage for the formation of a group known as the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, named for the plaza in central Buenos Aires where they first gathered. The Mothers are one of the more interesting protest movements of the late 20th century, and also a bunch of remarkable badasses.
Formed in 1977, the Mothers set out to pressure the government into admitting the fates of their disappeared children, the Desaparecidos. On the 30th of April that year sixteen women gathered outside the presidential palace to stage a demonstration, demanding to know what had happened to theirs sons and daughters. Consider that this was right in the middle of the Dirty War, when state-sponsored death squads were meting out harsh discipline pretty much with impunity. How staggeringly brave and determined do you have to be, at a time like that, to march up to the presidential palace and demand answers? This isn’t a movement that formed years later, in safety under a civilian government – they stood up to the military junta right from the start, despite the risks.
A poster of the missing
In a time when the government sought to isolate individuals, to separate and control people through application of terror, the Mothers gave a unified voice. They acted publicly, sharing their stories, gathering others to their cause. It was by no means a safe or easy course of action (fully one quarter of the founding Mothers were also disappeared before the junta left power in 1983), but they managed to grow a movement that is still going.
The ongoing work of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo has not gone on unnoticed. It has earned them international awards from bodies such as UNESCO and the European Parliament. It has also been met with harassment and repression. Three of the organization’s founding members have joined the ranks of the disappeared since its work began.
Since the fall of the junta and the return to civilian government, the pressure exerted by the Mothers has resulted in several hundred of the missing being identified, or their remains found. Many younger children turned out to have been given to adoptive loyalist families, and the Mothers have acted as intermediaries to help these children come to terms with their pasts and interact with both their adoptive and birth families.
Beyond just finding the missing, many of the Mothers have seen it as their duty to carry on the dreams of their children, to live for the causes that got them taken in the first place. To this end the group has grown to encompass other political causes, including the founding of a university, libraries and bookshops, and the provision of healthcare subsidies.
What makes the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo particularly interesting is the boundary-crossing nature of their protest. A lot of activist movements and protest campaigns become unfortunately mired in divisions, locking out valuable voices (see the refusal by key female American activists to accept the black suffrage movement in the early 20th century, or the frequent erasure of trans* and non-white issues among a lot of modern groups). The Mothers, by contrast, brought together several spheres of Argentinean culture.
One of the early demonstrations by the Mothers, outside the Presidential Palace.
Active in the central business areas of Buenos Aires, and by all accounts an urban movement, they nevertheless counted many rural Argentinians amongst their number. Age divides were crossed too, with a Grandmothers division of the group who continued the work of their kidnapped children, and looked after the offspring of disappeared Mothers.
Following the return to civilian government in 1983, and the Trial of the Juntas in ’85, the Mothers went international. Argentina hadn’t been the only South American country to disappear dissidents during that time (see: Operation Condor), and the Mothers sought to bring international pressure down on countries that still hadn’t come clean about their activities, particularly the Pinochet regime in Chile.
“One of the most beautiful things that came out of my work with the Grandmothers was learning that there was so much interest and solidarity from people in other parts of the world. It was an extraordinarily positive experience. We have had support from the women’s movement, from the CHA [Comité Homosexual Argentino], and from the transsexual groups.”
– Nélida de Navajas, quoted in Rita Arditti’s Searching for Life
The Mothers are still active today, still working for answers about the fates of the thousands who remain unaccounted for, and still promoting the ideals and social changes their children were kidnapped for. They still march through the Plaza de Mayo every Thursday, in addition to a larger annual March of Resistance.
For further reading:
- Searching For Life by Rita Arditti
- Circle of Love Over Death by Matilde Mellibovsky
- Revolutionizing Motherhood by Marguerite Bovard
(Note: This post is primarily concerned with the Founding Line branch of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo. The Association faction, who split off in 1986, are more radical in their politics. They also do some very good work, but have publicly expressed some views that are difficult to endorse.)
Revolting Women: The Matchgirls’ Strike (or: Working Class Teenagers Kick Corporate Ass)
This post is part of a series on the theme of women and protest. The full series is collected under the tag “Revolting Women”.
One of the 19th century’s best-loved stereotypes is that shivering waif, the Match Girl. Standing in the snow in a tattered shawl and starving to death in a picturesque way, she is well known to all of us thanks in large part to Hans Christian Anderson.1 In Victorian Britain her colleagues worked only slightly less prettily making the matches in factories under horrific working conditions. Many of them were girls too, teenagers and children who started work well before the age of 10.
But is there another side to this charming picture of honest suffering? I’m not saying for a moment that life wasn’t hellish for the matchgirls, and the rest of the Victorian working classes. But I welcome any attempt to dig a little deeper than the hand-wringing waifporn of many contemporary accounts to uncover the experiences and agency of actual persons.
One famous event which lends these pathetic characters another dimension and a bit of agency is the Bow Bryant & May match factory strike of 1888. The broadly accepted chain of events is this…
Annie Besant
Outspoken socialist, women’s rights campaigner and general lefty do-gooder Annie Besant heard a lecture by Clementina Black about the terrible working conditions in Bryant & May factories. She discovered that the women worked 14 hours a day for less than five shillings a week, and didn’t often receive this thanks to a system of fines for offences including talking, dropping matches or going to the toilet without permission.
The Bryant & May Factory on Fairfield Rd, Bow in the 1920s
Besant also learnt that the women’s health had been damaged by the phosphorous used to make the matches, which caused yellowing of the skin, hair loss and ‘phossy jaw’, a jolly name for a particularly gruesome kind of facial bone cancer.
Appalled, Besant went to the gates of the factory in Bow the next day and interviewed some of the women as they were leaving. Having the stories confirmed, she wrote an article for her newspaper The Link with the incendiary title ‘White Slavery In London‘.
In response to the bad PR, Bryant & May cleverly attempted to force their workers to sign a statement that they were happy with their working conditions. When a group of women refused to sign, the organisers of the group were sacked, and the rest of the workforce reacted: 1,400 of the women at Bryant & May went on strike.
Cue national uproar. Besant gathered support for her campaign from a number of prominent figures who all seem to have had their own newspapers, and they used them to call for a boycott of Bryant & May matches. The women at the company formed a Matchgirls’ Union and Besant agreed to become its leader. After three weeks the company announced that it would re-employ the dismissed women and bring an end to the fines system. The sacked women returned in triumph.
Matchwomen
According to this version of events, Annie Besant encouraged and led the factory workers to strike for better conditions. Certainly the identities of the girls and women involved in the strike have been obscured by her fame.
The Matchgirls Strike Committee, and Annie Besant. I don't know who is who I'm afraid (except Besant, standing, centre)
But a new book by Louise Raw claims that the impetus and leadership for the strike came from the women themselves, and Annie Besant got most of the credit because she was already notorious. And because she was middle class – there were doubts in many circles that the matchwomen themselves could have organised their way out of a paper bag without the help of a learned socialist.
This Times Higher Ed review of <Striking a Light: The Truth About the Match Girls Strike and the Women Behind It explains that the matchwomen “have not been hidden from history but hidden by history” because the standard account of events very early on became the go-to example of women’s industrial action, even to the point of cliché, so historians have avoided revising it. Until now:
In a careful reconstruction of events, Raw exposes inaccuracies in the standard accounts which, while petty, suggest a lazy acceptance of a chronology that fits the conventional story. Not only was Besant not the first mover, and she was probably neither sympathetic to strike action nor optimistic about its outcome, preferring instead a boycott of Bryant and May… Raw’s revised account has the match women themselves deciding to strike, generating leaders and possessing a solidarity usually denied to unskilled workers of this era, especially female ones.
BBC History magazine recorded an interview with Raw, which is available as a podcast. If you’re at all interested I recommend it. In the interview she names the five ‘ringleaders’ identified by Bryant & May – Kate Slater, Alice Barnes, Jane Wakely, Eliza Martin, Mary Driscoll – and describes newspaper accounts about their charisma, inspiring speeches and popularity with the other factory workers. Rather wonderfully, Raw was able to find out more about these women after three of their grandchildren approached her at her talks at the Museum in Docklands and the Ragged School Museum. Local history events FTW!
The Matchgirls’ Strike is a landmark in the history of women and protest, but also in labour history. It famously inspired the Dockers’ Strike: the organisers sought advice from the Matchgirls Union and continually referenced them in their speeches.
BUT WAIT! Where is the pop culture link?
- Well, I reckon the story about the ‘troublemaker’ Eva Smith who leads a factory strike in An Inspector Calls may well have been inspired by the matchgirls. Here’s a YouTube clip of the relevant bit.
- Secondly, in the course of my researches I discovered that there is a MUSICAL version of the matchgirl’s story, called, er, The Matchgirls. It looks appalling. Here’s one of the songs from it.
- Then I found out that lovely East London history music project Songs From The Howing Sea have done a song about the strike! Listen here.
- I am being flippant here but in fact the story reduces me to a crying mess of sentimentality and socialist idealism. There’s also a good recent Disney / Pixar animation. For a horrible moment I thought they were going to happy-end it a la The Little Mermaid and The Hunchback of Notre Dame but they let her die. [↩]
Revolting Women: an introductory overview
Last winter’s wave of student and youth protests held many points of interest, but one of the most amusing was the Daily Mail‘s pearl-clutching front page on what it chose to call Rage of the Girl Rioters, in which it claimed that ‘rioting girls’ had become ‘the disturbing new face of violent protest’. While the article betrayed predictable anxieties about social protest in general, the visible presence of female agency was an ingredient that occasioned a particularly salacious shock.
Comemmorative dollar for the Little Rock Nine, six of whom were women
Often women’s involvement in protest has drawn on their gendered role within families and communities. Women played a significant part, for instance, in the riots over food supply, quality and price which swept Europe during its transition to a capitalist market economy from the 16th century to the 19th. Historians like Temma Kaplan, E P Thompson and Natalie Zemon Davis (and, er, me) have seen female participation in these protests as an extension of their role in the sexual division of labour, including food procurement and preparation, which lent legitimacy and authority to their involvement. The prominence of women in local networks of communication, and their presence in social centres like market squares as part of their daily routine, also allowed them to collectively mobilise and organise – the equivalent, under agrarian capitalism, of creating a Facebook Events page.
There is, however, a myriad of other movements and moments in which women have taken part as workers, students, trade union organisers, family members, and consumers, as well as on grounds of class, race, sexuality, and political principle. There’s even a Wikipedia list of female rebel leaders dating from the 9th century BC to this year’s uprising in Ivory Coast, which, even though this series is concerned less with individuals and more with women’s mass participation in protest, is still pretty cool.
Just as their presence is still being obscured in reports of current events in the Middle East, so women have historically been absent from many popular and academic accounts of protest. The advent of feminist-influenced social history from the mid-20th century sought to correct masculine bias within traditional narratives of labour history or liberal teleologies, both of which had marginalised or misrepresented the involvement of women. Conversely, strictly purist or doctrinaire feminist narratives of history have also tended to ignore popular movements which did not advance a specifically feminist programme, regardless of how heavily women may have been involved. Both of these approaches resulted in the omission, until recently, of women from the histories of protest movements like Chartism in which they played a significant part.
The place and properness of women in protest has long been a bone of contention, with discourse surrounding their involvement portraying them as hysterical, unwomanly, deviant, or deranged. Sheila Rowbotham, in her historical study of women and protest, notes that:
It is at the point where the revolution starts to move women out of their passivity into the conscious and active role of militants that the mockery, the caricatures, the laughter with strong sexual undertones begin.
The vicious alarmism and mockery drawn by female involvement in politics, with which suffragists and civil rights agitators found themselves contending, is already evident in several cartoons on female Jacobins and campaigners for constitutional reform. Political cartoons of the 18th and 19th century were rarely noted for their subtlety, and caricaturists tended to focus upon the disorderly nature of political females, as well as imputing to them an ‘unwomanly’ loose or aggressive sexuality. Cruikshanks depicted ‘The Female Reformers of Blackburn’ as vulgarly outspoken and blowsily dressed, distastefully dominating their political platform, and J L Marks’ ‘Much Wanted: A Reform Among Females!!!’ gives its female protagonists suggestively brandished rolled-up papers, poles clutched between their knees, and – oh yes – hands clasped in their laps to form a gaping dark hole, setting out their desire to usurp male power as well as their own wantonness. As, perhaps, does the presence of all those upthrust pikes, swords and cannons in depictions of the women’s march to Versailles. And of course Cath Elliot’s recent piece on online harassment, by which politically uppity women are impugned as frigid, or sluts, or lesbians, provides a piquant reminder of this glorious tradition.
Women in protest don’t merely have attacks from the right to worry about. Their involvement does not take place in a vacuum – women protest not only as women but for multiple reasons of sectional interest, and the gender identification of protestors has historically generated conflict and tension with identities based on race, class, sexuality, and ideology. To take just one example, the involvement of women in 20th century industrial conflict, acting in support of or solidarity with male industrial workers, has been criticised by some feminists who view such conflict as manifestations of an unhelpfully macho patriarchal culture from which women should separate themselves.
Nor can it be assumed that female involvement in social protest will naturally result in an outcome which is cognisant of, sympathetic to, or even comfortable for women. After the Women’s March to Versailles, women as revolutionaries became a potent symbol of the power of the French Revolution, and the young Republic was eventually personified in the figure of Marianne. But, as Joan Landes has argued, Marianne’s visual prominence did not mean that women obtained significant political, social, or economic advantages during the French Revolution; the new Republic’s politics was one of laws and texts in which Marianne’s image bore no concrete significance. Similar tensions are apparent in the complex relationship of Iranian women with the after-effects of the 1979 revolution, and the contention that the presence of women in the current ‘Arab spring’ uprisings, when acknowledged at all, is being appropriated and used symbolically.
In addition to the examples given in links above, this series will look in greater detail at case-studies of women’s involvement in social, political, and economic protest, their motivations and methods, their successes and setbacks. It’s been a long, hot summer of discontent and it shouldn’t be any surprise to see women as well as men taking their place in the sun.
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- Rhian Jones also blogs at Velvet Coalmine.