In fact, responding to the recent London riots, current Home Secretary Theresa May said

We must never forget that the only cause of a crime is a criminal.

Given that she’s in charge of our systems to punish people and deter them from crime, she really ought to have a knowledge of the obvious pressures which make people commit it. In other words, that quote is the opposite of her job, and kinda shows she’s unfit for the post. (Also: it’s grammatically rubbish. A cause acts on a person; it can be anything except the person. Pick one! Just not the person.) Either way it’s not doing great things for the image of women in politics.

There are more women in governments globally than ever before, but whether politically left or right very few of them are behaving any differently to the men. That’s often understandable, since women at the very top are usually under double the scrutiny for any appearance of being “weak” or unsuitable.

One person I totally missed out from my previous post (which was particularly unforgivable given her kickass achievements) was Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir, the Prime Minister of Iceland. She is certainly overseeing a country that is doing things very differently, and in terms of democracy also Doing It Very Right. When you see the massive extent of what’s actually going on, you’ll be amazed (bear with me, there’s some politics coming up but pretty soon we get to the flying-shark-pirate-feminist adventures! I’m not kidding, this is epic.)

The World works a certain way when countries get into debt. The International Monetary Fund turns up, tells them to privatise everything and allow foreign investors to buy it all cheap, and refuses to give out any money for loans if they don’t. (I’m simplifying here, but… wait, no I’m not.) Everyone who is still rich agrees that this is the way to go. If you try something different, you will suffer the wrath of many governments, banks and newspapers.

Iceland said no. In fact, as this excellent article points out, they had a revolution and threw out their government, which is pretty much the gold standard for saying no.

Weeks of protests and riots forced them to hold elections, and the new Government decided not to put the entire population into debt for decades by bailing out the banks. They held a referendum and 93% of the people thought they’d rather have Interpol arrest the bankers responsible instead, please. Oh, and they’re having a new Constitution, written by the public.

To write the new constitution, the people of Iceland elected twenty-five citizens from among 522 adults not belonging to any political party but recommended by at least thirty citizens. This document was not the work of a handful of politicians, but was written on the internet. The constituents’ meetings are streamed on-line, and citizens can send their comments and suggestions, witnessing the document as it takes shape.

Did you know any of this? Did you know there’s a country in Europe who threw out their government through the power of protest, elected a left-wing coalition who then asked the public what they wanted, started writing new rules with complete visibility to anyone on the net, and stood up to the banks and IMF? Because I didn’t see the headlines.

As well as being the first openly-gay head of Government in recent times (and one of the first people in Iceland to fully marry her same-sex partner instead of a civil union), Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir is presiding as Prime Minister over one of the gutsiest, brass-badass, openly-defiant movements in the world. A referendum? Putting decisions in the hands of the public? None of that is ever allowed on choices which actually matter. As a friend of mine put it when she read the article: “Iceland, you rockstar “.

Feminists keep waiting for a woman in power to act in a way which differentiates her from the men. Other than being physically seen in the front row (which DOES make a difference), there’s not a lot of point getting a woman in office if she’s then invisible among the grey old guys. I’m not saying that women will govern differently just because they’re women (what? With feelings, while wearing pink? What exactly is supposed to be automatically different?) but Iceland’s Prime Minister is restoring democracy by definition – she’s giving the votes back to the people. Her government is one of the very few even considering going up against the demands of the US, UK, Europe, Asia… everybody. Whether she’s left- or right-wing doesn’t decide if she’s politically great, it’s listening to the views of her country and standing fast against furious demands from Big Money that makes her really quite awesome.

At the moment she is at the front of a government which is trying the first truly different moves in years, and finally we can see a female politician who will be famous for being liberal, fair, in touch with the public and a titanium-plated Badass in the face of pressure. By getting the people to write the new Constitution, she is directly giving a voice to the women of her country. Equal voting rights is crucial, but if that vote only affected things once every four years, and none of the parties offered what 93% of the population want, then the actual power of it would be somewhat lessened. Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir’s government is handing votes back to ordinary women and men and that’s amazing. The views of the whole population will be represented, with public debates via internet along the way.

Is increased democracy feminist? Do the majority of the public hold prejudices, and will their opinions harm women? Or by including more women, do you ensure they won’t vote against their own interests? Is it at least better than a rich, white, male elite doing all the decision-making?

In this case I’m not saying that Iceland’s policies being lefty is for the best, or that their referendum result is the correct one. After all, it might involve the UK not getting all its money back (although an article she wrote in April suggests we’ll see at least 90%). Whether the decisions are good or bad, there is a powerful, articulate woman right at the top of an incredibly exciting political force right now.

I’d just like to ask if we can have Prime Minister Sigurðardóttir over here on an exchange program for a bit please? We’ll lend Iceland Theresa May in return, it’ll be fine.

STOP PRESS: EDIT!

Since the article which brought this to our attention did the rounds online, it’s become clear that several key parts in it aren’t totally… well… accurate. At all.

Some of it is small in terms of the story: Iceland isn’t a member of the EU yet, it’s applying to join. And it didn’t go completely bankrupt, merely under lots and lots of debt.

The part about the new constitution being visible and people being able to send comments in as it goes – that one’s real, and that’s a major factor for us being excited. And regardless of whether Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir was instrumental in bringing any of these changes about, or was initially for or against them, our point is that she’s being seen by the world as the PM at the head of a government which is taking huge steps. If she wasn’t in favour of all the changes, she still retains double BadAss points for defending them so stongly as the official policy now.

Many thanks to commenter latentexistence and others who have helped point out where the inaccuracies lie: we stand by our cheering of the Prime Minister, but warn our readers to take the linked article with a metric ton of salt.

One of the best and oddest moments in the Disney canon is the appearance, halfway through Mary Poppins, of an all-singing all-dancing campaign for civil liberties. ‘Sister Suffragette’ isn’t without its problems – the song is half-pisstake, half-pastiche, and the film makes Mrs Banks’ dizzy preoccupation with Votes for Women another instance of parental neglect – but come on, it’s a subversively fluffy aside that puts a smile on the face, and it’s sometimes the first encounter with that fabulous creature, a suffragette, that people remember having.

The campaign for women’s suffrage in this country is such a great story that I’m surprised it’s never been the subject of its own Disney film. Apart from its narrative of struggle towards a goal undeniably justified in modern eyes, it’s got a whole array of glamorous heroines in petticoats and picture-hats and, eventually – after the false dawn of the 1918 Representation of the People Act which only included women property-owners aged over thirty – a happy ending. In particular, the Suffragette taste for militantly iconoclastic protest would lend itself to iconic on-screen moments: women chained to the Downing Street railings, smashing windows, occupying civic buildings, enduring imprisonment and force-feeding and, not least, Emily Wilding Davison’s much-disputed martyrdom at the social event of the season, which actually was captured on film at the time.

Contrary to the Pathé News intertitle, Davison was not killed by her collision with George V’s horse at the 1913 Epsom Derby, but died four days later of the injuries sustained. She was forty. When people say women died for your right to vote, a fair proportion of them will be thinking of her.

Davison’s intentions on the day of the Derby are lost to history. Some historians believe her to have been intent on martyrdom, pointing to a previous incident during her imprisonment in Strangeways where she threw herself off a balcony. On the other hand, the fact that she had purchased a return train ticket – and also a ticket to a suffragette dance later that day – suggests that she intended to return having only interrupted or disrupted the race – possibly by attaching a suffragette flag to the King’s horse. This would have been one more instance of Davison’s dedication to gaining attention for her chosen cause through publicity stunt and spectacle.

Davison was born at Blackheath on 11th October, 1872. Sylvia Pankhurst recalled her as ‘tall and slender… Her illusive, whimsical green eyes and thin, half-smiling mouth, bore often the mocking expression of the Mona Lisa’. She performed well at school, and defying many of the social orthodoxies imposed by Victorian society, won a place at Royal Holloway College, funding her own education through teaching work. In 1895 she studied for a term at Oxford, gaining First Class Honours in Modern Languages – despite, Oxford degrees being closed to women, having no opportunity to graduate. Having resumed her teaching career, Davison joined the Women’s Social and Political Union in 1906, quickly becoming its head steward as well as an active member of the socialist Workers’ Educational Association and the Central Labour College.

Davison was one of around a thousand women imprisoned for political activities between 1903 and the outbreak of WWI. In March 1909, she was arrested for disturbance while attempting to hand a petition to the Liberal Prime Minister Herbert Asquith, and sentenced to one month in prison. Four months later, she attempted to gain access to a hall where the Chancellor of the Exchequer, David Lloyd George, was giving a speech, and was imprisoned for two months. Later in the same year, she and two other women were arrested for throwing stones at Lloyd George’s car, and sentenced to a month’s hard labour at Strangeways prison. The stones were wrapped in paper bearing Emily’s favourite saying: Rebellion against tyrants is obedience to God.

While inside Strangeways, Davison went on hunger-strike. The prison authorities, in line with government policy, responded by force-feeding her and, when she barricaded herself inside her cell to avoid this, came close to causing her death by flooding the cell with ice-cold water. This treatment appalled the public and was discussed in Parliament, with Labour leader James Keir Hardie advocating her release. Undaunted, Davison spent the next few years in and out of prison for setting fire to London post boxes, attacking a vicar she mistook for Lloyd George, and planting a bomb which severely damaged Lloyd George’s house in Surrey.

The Davison family monument in Morpeth, Northumberland. You might *just* see Deeds Not Words if you click to enlarge. Nearest Creative Commons shot we could locate... Photo from Flickr, shared under Creative Commons, taken by Daniel Weir (user danielweiresq).

The public response to Davison’s death at the Epsom Derby was not immediately sympathetic: more information was printed about the health of the King’s horse and jockey (the latter making a full recovery and the former ‘suffering bruised shins’) than about the suffragettes’ cause, and the Daily Herald went on to print a cartoon in dubious taste showing ‘Miss Davison’ as a skeleton holding a Votes For Women placard. Posterity has been scarcely kinder, dismissing Davison as a mentally ill fanatic and proto-terrorist whose actions horrified both supporters and opponents of her cause, and which enabled the persistence of old arguments founded on the idea that women’s intrinsically irrational nature made them unsuited to political discourse and decision-making. Populist historian George Dangerfield’s depiction of the suffragettes as a frivolous frilly edge to the fall of Liberal England was a cue picked up by succeeding historians, who viewed the majority of women involved as playing at politics, succumbing to a fashionably edgy craze, indulging their innate feminine tendency to hysteria, and even masochistically courting the treatment they received from police and prison authorities. Not until the advent of women’s history in the 1970s were they treated more seriously and their struggle linked to that for wider suffrage in earlier decades: the first Woman’s Suffrage Bill was presented to Parliament in 1832, as part of the general struggle for reform and extension of the franchise to non-property-holding and working men. (It’s worth pointing out that the King’s jockey at the 1913 Derby, Herbert Jones, was not entitled to the vote either.)

The census sit-in commemorative plaque at the House of Commons, with the three suffragette colours shown as stripes on the corner of Emily's portrait

Davison is buried at Morpeth Church with the WSPU motto ‘Deeds Not Words’ engraved on her headstone. Memorials to her are hard to find – like the suffragette monument tucked away in Victoria – but one is in the House of Commons crypt, placed there by the Labour MP Tony Benn. It commemorates the night of the 1911 census when Davison hid in a cupboard in the Palace of Westminster overnight so that on the census form she could legitimately give ‘the House of Commons’ as her place of residence that night. (Ironically enough, other suffragettes were spending the night evading the census in protest at their exclusion from the franchise.) The census documents from 2nd April 1911 state that Davison was found ‘hiding in the crypt’ in the Houses of Parliament. Whatever the suffragettes’ brand of protest represents today – a reckless eye for spectacle, a disregard for personal safety and security in pursuit of political goals, and a willingness to draw attention to oneself, all of which are valid weapons in the arsenal of political activists – escapades like that of Emily Davison on census night are the kind of minor gems that make the historical record sparkle.

Some links to suffragettes on the page, stage and screen – feel free to add your own in comments:

• Publications by suffrage historian Jill Liddington.
• Two IMDB searches bring up some hilarious-to-horrifying-sounding works from the time of the movement itself.
• Contemporary news reports on the suffrage movement.
• Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s 2008 play Her Naked Skin, the first to be performed on the National Theatre’s Olivier stage by a living female playwright.
• Shoulder to Shoulder, a BBC series from 1974.

And of course Mrs Banks.

(I could say something on how the temporary alliance of Mrs Banks and her domestics with the chimney-sweeps at the end of ‘Step in Time’, and their consequent disruption of the bourgeois patriarchal hegemony of the Banks household through dance, is a commendable representation of a socialist-feminist popular front, but that’s a whole other post.)

Rhian Jones also blogs at Velvet Coalmine