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A review by kjcharles
Death in Ten Minutes: Kitty Marion: Activist. Arsonist. Suffragette. by Fern Riddell
A fluently written and extremely angry account of the forgotten life of a suffragette. Not the noble suffering kind, either. Kitty Marion was one of the ones who smashed windows, burned houses, planted nail bombs, sent explosive and corrosive materials through the post, and engaged in a sustained campaign of full terrorist violence that could have had a body count in the hundreds if the dice had fallen differently. And if you like me didn't know the scale of suffragette violent terrorism in the 1910s, that's because, this book shows, the suffragette leaders and historians made a concerted effort to erase it in favour of the Nobly Suffering Women narrative. Terrorists not being quite so endearing.
Riddell answers the question of "where was she radicalised?" very easily. Marion went from an abusive father to seeing her hopes of music hall stardom destroyed by #MeToo agents and producers. She was radicalised by shitty abusive men, a dismissive and treacherous establishment, and a culture that condemned women for existing in any but the approved way, especially sexually.
Marion was also a birth control activist, and Riddell shows clearly how the middle class suffragettes wanted to distance themselves from sex positivity or female sexual agency. They didn't see that without birth control women are in chains; they still bought into the male narrative of what constitutes a Good Woman. (Props here to Annie Besant who fought the vile misogynist abusive Contagious Diseases Act and was pro birth control, and was thus ostracised and rewritten as the match girl lady.) No wonder Kitty Marion set fire to things.
A very angry, important and revelatory read that I wish I'd had in my teens.
Riddell answers the question of "where was she radicalised?" very easily. Marion went from an abusive father to seeing her hopes of music hall stardom destroyed by #MeToo agents and producers. She was radicalised by shitty abusive men, a dismissive and treacherous establishment, and a culture that condemned women for existing in any but the approved way, especially sexually.
Marion was also a birth control activist, and Riddell shows clearly how the middle class suffragettes wanted to distance themselves from sex positivity or female sexual agency. They didn't see that without birth control women are in chains; they still bought into the male narrative of what constitutes a Good Woman. (Props here to Annie Besant who fought the vile misogynist abusive Contagious Diseases Act and was pro birth control, and was thus ostracised and rewritten as the match girl lady.) No wonder Kitty Marion set fire to things.
A very angry, important and revelatory read that I wish I'd had in my teens.