Defining Militancy: Radical Protest, the Constitutional Idiom, and Women's Suffrage in Britain, 1908–1909

Abstract

May some definition be given of the word “militant”? (Chelsea delegate Cicely Hamilton)Scholarship on the women's suffrage movement in Britain has reached a curious juncture. No longer content to chronicle the activities or document the contributions of single organizations, historians have begun to analyze the movement's strategies of self-advertisement and to disentangle its racial, imperial, and gendered ideologies. Perhaps the most striking development in recent scholarship on suffrage, however, has been the proliferating discourse on militancy among literary critics, a development with which few historians have engaged. Yet, while militancy has spawned a veritable subfield in literary studies, continually generating new articles and books, these accounts portray the phenomenon in similarly reductive terms. After 1903 the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU), under the leadership of Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst, revitalized a genteel and moribund women's suffrage movement. The WSPU introduced the use of militancy, first interrupting Liberal Party meetings and heckling political speakers, then moving to the use of street theater, such as large-scale demonstrations, and ultimately to the destruction of government and private property, including smashing windows, slashing paintings in public galleries, and setting fire to buildings and pillar-boxes. Once the Liberal government introduced forcible feeding as an antidote to the suffragette hunger strike, militants created a visual activism, dependent upon the exhibition of women's tortured bodies as spectacle. By this account, the activities of the WSPU became exemplary of what critic Barbara Green has called “performative activism” and “visibility politics” in early twentieth-century feminist praxis, creating “almost entirely feminine communities where women celebrated, suffered, spoke with, and wrote for other women,” and that “allowed women to put themselves on display for other women.”