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Remembering
Women’s Activism
Sharon
Crozier-De Rosa and Vera Mackie
Remembering
the Modern World Series Abingdon
and New York: Routledge, 2019 Paperback.
xv + 253 p. ISBN 978-1138794894. £34.99
Reviewed by Pat Thane Birkbeck College,
London
Women
throughout the world have been active campaigners on very many issues for over
a century and many of these campaigns continue. Some past activists are
remembered and memorialised in diverse ways. Others are not. This book is an
innovative exploration of this memorialisation, or lack of it, and what shapes
it. It is potentially a vast subject and a short book can only open it up with examples
of four very different forms of activism –
suffragism, nationalism, industrial relations and challenges to wartime sexual
abuse – in the English-speaking world (Australia
where the authors are based, the UK, Ireland and the USA) and in parts of East
Asia (China, Japan, S.Korea, Taiwan). As the
authors describe, the UK suffrage campaign was itself divided and divided
others at the time, divisions revived at the centenary commemorations in 2018
of women partially gaining the vote – mainly
middle-class women aged over 30, not actually a ‘small section of British and
Irish women’ as the authors state, but two-thirds of adult females, though of
course not enough. Widely remembered was the militant Women’s Social and
Political Union (WSPU), led by Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughters, known as the
‘suffragettes’. They aroused antagonism at the time and since for their ‘unwomanly’
noisy demonstrations and violence – against property, breaking windows, setting
fire to buildings and post-boxes, but not against people, as commentators,
including the authors, do not always point out. Rather they suffered physical
violence from the police and prison authorities when punished for their
militancy. The
National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS) established by Millicent
Garrett Fawcett in 1897, initiated suffragism. It marched, boycotted the 1911 national
census, lobbied politicians, campaigned in elections and opposed the war, but
calmly, never violent. Both contributed indispensably to the campaign,
attracting different supporters and opponents. WSPU supported the war, gave up
campaigning and Pankhurst moved to the right. Fawcett revived the campaign in
1916 when the government prepared to extend the male franchise, then fought on
after the war for the equal franchise (achieved 1928) while successfully encouraging
women to use their votes and promote equality legislation, arguably doing more
than WSPU to promote women’s rights. Yet the militants have long been more
widely memorialised, positively and negatively, as the book describes, including
in film, museums and statues. A statue to Pankhurst was erected near Parliament
in 1930, two years after her death. Fawcett had to wait until 2018 for a statue,
also near parliament, following a feminist campaign. Only from the 1980s have museums
in London and Manchester displayed suffrage artefacts, mainly of the militants
who left more dramatic objects behind – a belt
and padlock used to chain themselves to railings outside parliament, prison
relics – than the respectable constitutionalists. Pankhurst’s
former home in Manchester in 1987 became the only museum solely dedicated to
the women’s movement. Fawcett
founded a library in 1926, the Fawcett Library, to house the mass of documents
produced by NUWSS and the many organisations it inspired after 1918 – less
vivid than the militant artefacts but invaluable for historians in what has become
an indispensable library of women’s history now housed at the LSE, sadly
without Fawcett’s name. But her name lives on in the Fawcett Society, adopted
in the 1950s by a feminist organisation founded in the 1920s, still the premier
UK organisation campaigning for gender equality. But she is less widely
remembered than Pankhurst. The British
suffrage story suggests that noisy and dramatic activism is more often
remembered – negatively and positively –
than calm effectiveness. The book reinforces this perception by exploring Australian
suffragism, which outpaced its colonial ruler, the UK, to join the first
countries in the world to grant votes to women. In 1908 voting became universal
among adult (white) women. Aboriginal men and women had to wait until 1962 to
vote, ignored by suffragists as by others. New Zealand enfranchised all adult
women, including Maori, in 1893 but is not discussed here. Australian suffragism
was not militant and its story has been subsumed in museums and memorials in wider
commemoration of Australia’s progress to independent, democratic nationhood.
The suffragists’ part in this national story stresses their challenge to the colonial
power, exemplified by memorabilia of the British militants who were inspired by
the Australian example, which risk overshadowing more sedate memories of the more
successful Australian movement as they overshadow Fawcett’s campaign. American
suffragism was, in some states, more militant than in Australia though less
than in UK, with marches and demonstrations but only occasional damage. It
varied in intensity and methods, achievements and memorialisation, from state
to state. From 1869-1918 women gained the vote in 15 states and territories but
not the federal vote until 1920. Initially suffragism was closely linked with
anti-slavery activism – women
wanted to vote to abolish slavery – but after
1920, especially in southern states, Afro-American women, like men, were
excluded from voting by various means until the civil rights movement of the
1960s. The women’s movement became exclusively white, while women of colour
campaigned for racial and voting equality and kept their distance from
commemorations of (white) women’s enfranchisement. Monuments and museums across
states commemorate local suffragists, often stressing connections to
anti-slavery but not the racially different outcomes or the activism of
Afro-American women. If women’s
suffragism is not always fairly memorialised, their role in nationalist movements
is even less so. The authors explore this in the contrasting contexts of early
20th-century Ireland and China. Nationalism has generally been male-dominated,
with male activists mainly memorialised following independence. In Ireland they
focus on Constance Markievicz, from an elite Anglo-Irish family, briefly
married to a Polish count, an active socialist and flamboyant revolutionary
nationalist. She was a leader of the violent 1916 Dublin Rising, for which she
was imprisoned in London, spared execution because she was female, then stood
for the UK parliament in 1918 and was the first woman to be elected. Like all
Irish nationalists she refused to take her seat, but joined the first Irish
parliament on her release in 1919 and became the first female minister in a
European government. She was the first leader of the Dublin Rising to have a
statue in Dublin, in 1932, when her political supporters were in government. Generally
her reputation has been divided between critics, mainly but not exclusively
male, of violent ‘mad Markiewicz’, and mainly female supporters who have created
statues and commemoration of her achievements in museums, including her
restored childhood home. Catholic-influenced nationalists had conventional
perceptions of women’s roles – as
mothers above all – and dismissed militant
women even among their supporters. Many men in the divided Irish movement
especially denigrated Markiewicz because she opposed the division of Ireland in
1922 between the independent South and the North which remained in the UK. This
was remembered from 1968 when republican conflict erupted in the North,
starting thirty years of ‘Troubles’, most vividly in the murals painted in the
sectarian enclaves of Belfast and Derry, including images of Markiewicz,
celebrated as an inspiration by republican women. Like other women activists her
memory was reinterpreted by successive political regimes. The Chinese
revolutionary nationalist, Qiu Jin, campaigned for women’s freedom, including
from foot-binding, and to overthrow the Qing dynasty, for which she was
executed in 1907, age 31. She was memorialised as a revolutionary martyr after
the overthrow of the Qing in 1911, including an elaborate monument built by Sun
Yat-sen’s Republican government. Her memory was then sidelined by the Communist
regime, as no part of their history, but sustained in Republican Taiwan and
revived in China after Mao’s death in 1976, as part of China’s revolutionary
heritage and for standing up for women as feminism emerged. Her home was renovated
as a museum and a grand statue erected. Like Markiewicz her memory was
appropriated as and when it suited the needs of regimes and campaigns. Next the
book recalls campaigners for improved conditions for women factory workers. In
the US a terrible fire in The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in Greenwich Village
in 1911 killed 123 women and 23 men, who were locked into a building with
inadequate fire escapes among other features of an appalling work environment. Images
of workers leaping to their deaths from high windows galvanised an existing
women’s campaign for unionisation and decent work conditions which, through the
inter-war years, achieved legislation bringing real improvement. Prominent
throughout was Frances Perkins-Gilman, motivated by the Triangle fire, the
first woman in a US Cabinet as Secretary of Labour in 1933, remembered as the
‘Woman Behind the New Deal’. She and the Triangle fire have been memorialised by
trade unionists and feminists, intermittently but increasingly over time,
mainly locally to commemorate New York activism. The former Triangle Building
was designated a National Historic landmark in 1991, as was Perkins-Gilman’s
home in 2004, and memories of victims of the fire and activists who prevented more
such tragedies have been sustained by plaques, exhibitions, and an annual
ceremony in Washington Square – memories
revived by the bodies falling from high windows in downtown New York on
September 11, 2001. Internationally,
textile manufacture had a key role in early industrialisation, sustained
especially by low-paid women working in poor conditions. The first silk mill in
Japan opened in 1872. By 1881 female silk-spinners were striking about
conditions and wages, then in growing numbers and (incomplete) effectiveness
throughout industry between the wars. This workers’ movement was suppressed by
the militaristic nationalist regime of the 1930s and 40s but revived after the
war. There has been growing though not universal recognition and commemoration,
at least by historians, of the importance of women in the early development of
industry and of the labour movement in Japan. Exploited female labour producing
low-cost garments is now central to highly profitable global trading, based mainly
in Asian countries such as Bangladesh. The book describes how this came to
international notice in 2013 when the Rana Plaza Building in Dhaka, Bangladesh (formerly
Dacca, Bengal), housing five garment factories with over 3000 workers in
terrible conditions, collapsed killing up to 1400 workers. In New York and
elsewhere the disaster awoke memories of the past and support, with some
success, for improved trade union rights in Bangladesh which had previously struggled
to emerge. And it created pressures in richer countries for firms and consumers
to boycott cheap garments created by exploited women and often children. Finally
the authors discuss memories of sexual violence in wartime. This has a long
history but publicity and protest about it emerged strongly only with the
feminism of the 1970s, part of the wider challenge to sexual violence, aroused
by the Vietnam war but looking back to previous wars. In Australia women
protested at the annual ANZAC day war memorial services and there were similar
movements in US and UK against the glorification of war and for remembering its
shameful side. Then protests against war museums, such as the Imperial War
Museum in London, which ignored this aspect of war. Museums have since,
gradually, introduced documents and artefacts commemorating violence against women. There has
been a similar, gradual, opening up of issues of Japanese sexual violence in
World War 2 in China, Korea and elsewhere, which included brothels housing
hundreds of thousands of so-called ‘comfort women’. This was widely known after
the war but victims often suffered hostility and discrimination when they
returned home and they retreated into silence. Again it was only made public by
feminists in the 1970s. Books began to describe it, though victims rarely spoke
up until the 1990s, persuaded by feminist campaigns for redress. Regular
demonstrations began in Korea, which still continue. A museum was opened in
Seoul and a statue erected opposite the Japanese Embassy in 2011, followed by
the War and Women’s Human Rights Museum in 2012. The statue was later
replicated in California, which has a substantial Asian community, despite
objections by Japanese deniers, though similar denials successfully opposed
similar commemorations in Australia and Germany. Gradually the Japanese
government acknowledged responsibility, again driven by women activists,
including initiators of a Women’s Museum opened in Tokyo in 2005. In 2015 the
Japanese Prime Minister apologised to the Korean women, few of whom were
grateful. In China
commemoration was slow, not a priority under Mao. In Nanjing (formerly Nanking),
the site of an atrocious Japanese massacre in 1937, a memorial museum in a
former military brothel, with a statue commemorating the women, opened in 2015.
Also the museum of the massacre opened in Nanjing around the same time, including
photographs of rape victims along with statues, including of Iris Chang who
campaigned to keep the memory of the massacre alive. In 2016 the ‘Grandmothers’
Museum’ opened in Taipei, Taiwan (formerly Taipeh, Formosa), following a
campaign by victims’ supporters, with the respectful name commonly given to
survivors in East Asia, displaying photographs, documents and artefacts
designed to remind visitors of the atrocities. The final
chapter is titled not ‘Conclusion’ but ‘Marching On’, since memorialisation of
past activism continues, world-wide, often in the form of commemorative marches
which also signal the concerns of contemporary activists, too little changed over
the past century, including racism, workers’ rights, unequal pay, sexual
violence, political marginalisation. The clearest examples are the huge annual
marches against Donald Trump, which began internationally in 2017 modelled on a
big feminist march in 1913. This book demonstrates above all how remembering
past activists keeps contemporary activism alive and visible and how the
memories, positive and negative, are shaped by contemporary preoccupations.
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