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What methods did the suffragettes use, and how effective were these in gaining the vote for women?
to other forms of political action to get their voice heard. It is for this action that the suffragettes are renowned. People however, do not realise that they attempted to gain the vote peacefully before feeling that they had to turn to more militant methods to obtain what they so desperately wanted, the vote for women.
The suffragettes once again began using the same methods as the suffragists, such as tax evasion, and census resistance. These were no more than mild forms of disobedience. The WSPU supported the boycott of the 1911 census and many suffragettes evaded taxes. Even though this was a step up from their previous tactics, they were not getting women any closer to the vote, so, the suffragettes looked towards methods of increased militancy for various reasons.
From 1908 onwards the suffragettes intensified political pressure and promoted new confrontational methods to force MPs to give women the vote. The reason for this change has been subject to wide debate. Some have viewed it as humorous or sought explanations within a psychological framework of madness and abnormality. Militancy for some anti-suffragists was seen as a reflection of the instability of women, and that of fanatical and hysterical women more particularly. To these people, the turn to violence was proof that women should not be allowed to vote. Some saw militancy as the sign of ‘individual psychological imbalance’ whereas others viewed it as an expression of a malaise affecting women more broadly. Recent historians suggest that militancy was the result of rational response to male intransigence. Brian Harrison claims that “militancy was a temporary tactical necessity born of the failure of legal an peaceful methods”. However Harrison also criticised the suffragettes comparing them to schoolgirls breaking the rules when the headmistress is away rather than them being revolutionary’s. As you would expect, radical feminist historians view suffragette violence quite differently. Their stance is that violent behaviour challenged male supremacy, and the WSPU was not only heroic, but was the precursor of modern feminism. The suffragettes offered a number of strategic reasons for their behaviour.
The suffragettes firstly argued that militancy was adopted in response to the failure of years of peaceful campaigning to which politicians failed to give recognition to, or even appear to notice. The second reason was that militancy was a reaction to the 1906 Liberal Government which, by excluding women from public meetings and refusing to meet suffrage deputations, had denied suffragettes the main forms of agitation open to the disenfranchised. Thirdly, militancy was seen as a retaliatory measure against a Government who force fed and imprisoned those who participated in direct action. The suffragettes felt that if the Government were to threat women directly, it should too feel intimidated. The fourth reason was that the suffragettes believed themselves to be continuing a tradition [next page]