Suffragette reminds us why it's a lie that feminists need men's approval
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Version 0 of 1. The new film Suffragette, released in Australia on Boxing Day, begins with female activists smashing London shop windows and bombing the partially completed home of the chancellor of the exchequer. It dramatises the militant actions of feminists from 1905 until the outbreak of the first world war, as they sought the right for British women to vote. Related: 'Wayward suffragette' Adela Pankhurst and her remarkable Australian life Edwardian women appear genteel in photographs, but the tactics of the suffragettes transgressed feminine expectations of the era. Suffragettes disrupted debate in parliament and struggled with police in violent marches. One famously slashed a painting of a naked woman in the National Gallery and another even came at Winston Churchill on a train platform with a riding whip. With England more than a decade behind New Zealand, which had granted women’s suffrage in 1893, it was clear that polite and reasoned requests for women’s political rights had not worked. Emmeline Pankhurst, leader of the suffrage movement, explained that unruly activism was essential: If the general public were pleased with what we are doing, that would be a proof that our warfare is ineffective. We don’t intend that you should be pleased. Despite the sustained campaign, full suffrage for women was not achieved until 1928. More than a century on from the British suffrage campaign, the message that being pleasing is not the optimal route to political and social change remains just as pertinent. Increasingly men are informing feminists that they would be more successful if they made their politics more palatable. The UN’s HeforShe campaign, launched by the unthreatening Emma Watson, is often heralded as a positive way to involve men in work toward gender equality. Both the idea that feminism needs to be appealing to men and that men should be central to its progress are anti-feminist ideas in themselves. Regardless of their approach, feminists have always been characterised unfavourably for their social goals, looks, and refusal to defer to men. Mocking cartoons of suffragettes showed them beating men to the ground with umbrellas or standing over their husbands and forcing them to clean the house. These caricatures took issue with the way that women’s demands for the vote seemed to be upending the natural order in which men were physically dominant and women were best suited to domestic work. Others lampooned the unattractiveness of suffragettes: they were drawn as old, dowdy and either lacking in teeth or suffering from pronounced overbites. Though the goals of feminists have evolved with increasing rights for women, the ideas at the core of anti-feminist debate remain consistent. Conforming to “pleasing” behaviour for women means they must stay inside the accepted bounds of femininity that are bundled with the very inequalities that feminists wish to transform. Earlier in December, Saudi Arabian women obtained the right to vote and stand in municipal elections. There are many brave Saudi women challenging repressive and discriminatory laws. However, the country is a prime example of how slow change is when conformity to a male-controlled set of expectations is strictly enforced and the potential for equal rights depends solely on the benevolence of the group who holds power. Related: A man lost his job for harassing a woman online? Good | Van Badham Though 17 women were elected to positions on one of 284 local councils, women comprised fewer than 10% of the total number of voters. The complex reasons for this disparity included far fewer voter registration centres for women (these are sex-segregated) and difficulty in supplying proof of residence for registration, as men usually own family homes and pay bills. Female candidates for election were impaired by the prohibition on women driving cars and bans placed on campaigning to members of the opposite sex. The women of Saudi Arabia are required to be “pleasing” in their activism, given that they must obtain permission from men to hold a job, travel or get married. Radical tactics, like those of the British suffragettes, would be impossible, and measured methods have already transformed women’s literacy and participation in higher education. Within a western context, where the ability to vote is now around a century old in a number of countries, it is regressive to be told that feminist views must be marketable to men and that men must be at the forefront of feminism. The gender “war” that Pankhurst described now includes a far greater number of supportive male allies. Nevertheless, men should never be in command of the battle, nor should women need their “enemy” to welcome the loss of power that will accompany their defeat. |