Amongst other things, the Suffragettes attempted to bury 200 postal workers under the rubble of the biggest sorting office in London, attempted to flood a town by blowing up a canal embankment, left many bombs on commuter trains (now they have a TfL line named after them lol), attempted to kill the Prime Minister by burning down the packed theatre he was in, tried again by burning down his house, attacked MPs for being Jewish, and succeeded in murdering sailors in an attack on a naval dockyard.
And then much of the top echelons of the Suffragettes went on to be key members in British fascism, including one who became Mussolini’s pen-pal, another who became the registered owner of the bank account for the BUF, and another who was actually too anti-Semitic for Oswald Moseley, and denied the Holocaust happened because “there’s so many of them still around”.
The Suffragettes are always a bad example because they utterly failed in their stated aims (the height of their campaign of destruction ended up one of the years with the lowest insurance payouts in British history), went on to say and do horrific things, and there is a question as to how much of it was true commitment to a cause and how much it was people who got off on the violence.
SubArcticTundra@lemmy.ml 9 hours ago
The Suffragettes are certainly a good counter-example. I didn’t mean that people haven’t been protesting, just that I can’t remember any recent protests where the government gave in and made concessions.
ohulancutash@feddit.uk 6 hours ago
The government didn’t make concessions to the Suffragettes either. The WSPU was a total failure.
ewo@lemmy.sdf.org 3 hours ago
? They got the women’s vote
ohulancutash@feddit.uk 2 hours ago
The Suffragists were a group of men and women including MPs who worked within the political system of peaceful negotiation and consensus-building over many years, and had made some gains.
The Suffragettes were a paramilitary organisation tightly controlled by Emmeline Pankhurst, and rejected the involvement of men (and working-class women).
The cause of women’s suffrage was advanced by the Suffragists, but once the Suffragettes started burning, bombing and racially harassing Jewish MPs, those gains were fatally undermined, and public opinion turned against women’s suffrage.
The cause was only revisited after WWI, based on the actions of women on the home front and the new demographic realities. It had little to do with the suffragettes who were still poorly received on either side.
It was a rewriting of history by a couple of propaganda books in the 1930s (largely ex-suffragettes trying to whitewash their crimes) that eventually led to the modern confusion between suffragettes and suffragists.