The Suffragettes – Part Two – By any means necessary

Origin Story

Podmasters

Society & Culture, News, News Commentary, History

4.8 • 655 Ratings

🗓️ 30 October 2024

⏱️ 73 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This week we finish the story of the suffragettes. We pick up the narrative in 1912, when parliament’s failure to deliver women’s suffrage triggered a new phase of violent escalation. No suffragette was more extreme than Emily Wilding Davison, whose death at the hooves of the King’s horse turned a liability into a martyr. Meanwhile, the whole country was convulsed by arson and bomb plots and the Pankhursts’ autocratic leadership was alienating some of their closest allies, including members of their own family. It took the First World War to stop the “reign of terror” and ultimately give women the vote. Was violence morally justified when peaceful solutions failed? Did it hasten suffrage or threaten to derail it? What might have happened if the war had not intervened? What do the strange and divergent afterlives of the suffragettes tell us about the movement? And what can modern activists like Just Stop Oil learn from the suffragettes? Behind the sanitised, sentimentalised version of the story lies a thorny tale of the validity and efficacy of violence in a just cause, taking Edwardian Britain to the edge of chaos. Origin Story will be live at the Tabernacle in London on the 7th of November for a special post-US election show. Tickets here. Get the Origin Story books on Fascism, Centrism and Conspiracy Theory Get exclusive extras like supporter-only Q&A editions when you back Origin Story on Patreon. Reading List Diane Atkinson – Rise Up Women!: The Remarkable Lives of the Suffragettes (2018) Helen Lewis – Difficult Women: A History of Feminism in 11 Fights (2020) Joyce Marlow (editor) – Suffragettes: The Fight for Votes for Women (2015) Glenda Norquay (editor) – Voices and Votes: A Literary Anthology of the Women’s Suffrage Campaign (1995) Christabel Pankhurst – Pressing Problems of the Coming Age (1924) Christabel Pankhurst – Unshackled: The Story of How We Won the Vote (1959) Sylvia Pankhurst – The Suffragette: The History of the Women’s Militant Suffrage Movement 1905-10 (1911) Sylvia Pankhurst – The Suffragette Movement: An Intimate Account of Persons and Ideals (1931) Mary R. Richardson – Laugh a Defiance (1953) Fern Riddell – ‘Sanitising the Suffragettes’ (2018) Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Produced by Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to origin story. In each episode, we take a word, idea or figure from history,
0:13.7	explain its origins and talk about how it influences political discourse today. I'm Doreen
0:18.4	Linsky, author of the Ministry of Truth, and Everything Must Go, and three new origin story books. And I am Ian Dunn, and I'm economist for the
0:24.8	I newspaper, and I have also written those origin story books, but as I insist on telling you,
0:29.5	just the good bits. Last week, I hope you listened to Suffragettes Part 1, where we tell
0:35.0	the story of the Women's Social and Political Union, formed in 1903, known as the suffragettes part one, where we tell the story of the women's social and political union,
0:44.3	formed in 1903, known as the suffragettes, how it kind of builds up, and it's sort of militant,
0:50.0	but largely nonviolent, and it's still sort of hoping that with enough public pressure and these big rallies and so forth, that it can get a suffrage bill passed, But because of the obduracy of politicians, particularly Prime Minister Herbert Asquith,
0:58.7	this does not happen.
1:00.2	The militancy mounts becomes a bit more violent.
1:03.8	Then there's a two-year ceasefire where they're trying to again get the bill passed.
1:09.9	That fails and now shit gets real.
1:15.1	One person, I think more than any other, represents the manner in which shit got real.
1:21.8	And her name is Emily Davidson.
1:24.1	If it wasn't for her, and very specifically, I think, the manner in which she dies, our view of this campaign, I think, would be very, very different indeed. This is, it might not be the most important moment, but it's certainly the most famous moment in what takes place.
1:46.9	She joins the Shufferjettes in November 1906.
1:49.0	She's 34 years old at the time.
1:52.1	She's the governess of four children for a Liberal MP,
1:54.4	but 18 months by the time she's joined.
1:57.7	She quits that job, and she's now, you know, a full-time,
1:59.1	I mean, especially given he's a Liberal MP,
2:02.0	they really do detest the Liber and suffragettes. She's now a full-time campaigner.
	...

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