Like the suffragettes, protesters are castigated for taking direct action. But how else will we wake up to the climate emergency?
Few people today would claim not to sympathise with the suffragettes – but this wasn’t true at the time. When parliament debated women’s struggle for the vote in 1914, Lord Robert Cecil – later a recipient of the Nobel peace prize, who was in fact supportive of women’s suffrage – declared that “suffragist outrages” were a “very serious evil” with the aim of “anarchy”. There was only one solution “to prevent them from committing crimes”, he said: “deportation”. When Reginald McKenna, then home secretary in HH Asquith’s Liberal government, offered four options to deal with them – letting them die (“That is, I should say, at the present moment the most popular, judging by the number of letters I have received”); deportation; treating them as “lunatics”; or giving them the franchise – his fellow parliamentarians laughed uproariously at each.
The suffragettes, it should be said, did not sit around singing kumbaya, and were far more militant than contemporary protest movements in Britain. They committed arson, including the burning of several private homes – with five resulting deaths –and smashed up art galleries and museums. They attempted to destroy Glasgow’s aqueduct and attacked churches. Targets for bombing included the extremely busy street outside the Bank of England, although the device was defused, while a train driver was nearly killed by another bomb. Damned at the time as terrorists and anarchists, the militants are today seen sympathetically by history. As the cheerful “soldiers in petticoats” in Disney’s Mary Poppins predicted: “Our daughters’ daughters will adore us, and they’ll sing in grateful chorus: ‘Well done, Sister Suffragette!”
