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A review by coops456
Death in Ten Minutes: Kitty Marion: Activist. Arsonist. Suffragette. by Fern Riddell
4.0
Bloody hell. If, like me, your view of suffragettes was heavily influenced by Mrs Banks in Mary Poppins:
then you too may have imagined lots of middle-class Edwardian ladies having meetings, marches, and a bit of window-breaking leading to imprisonment and force-feeding. You would be wrong.
It's astounding how the life-threatening violence of the campaign has been sanitised by history - even the early accounts written by the suffragettes themselves are shown here to have deliberately left out the worst of the violence. The descriptions of force-feeding and its after-effects are equally shocking in their brutality.
Women like Kitty Marion were terrorists. Following the abandonment of the Franchise Bill in 1913, the WSPU escalated its campaign further, with Emmeline Pankhurst wanting "to make England and every department of English life insecure and unsafe".
In May 1913 alone there were 52 incidents including 29 bombings and 15 arson attacks, on churches, trains and stations, courts and post offices. Radicalised by years of abuse both in her personal life and in her stage profession, Kitty Marion was at the forefront of this extremism, travelling the country and teaching others how to firebomb successfully.
Given the amount of research that Dr Riddell has clearly done, this is an extremely readable work. Her final chapter draws clear parallels between the experiences of Kitty Marion and the modern-day #MeToo campaign. Plus ça change :-(
Our daughters' daughters will adore us
And they'll sing in grateful chorus
Well done
Sister Suffragette
then you too may have imagined lots of middle-class Edwardian ladies having meetings, marches, and a bit of window-breaking leading to imprisonment and force-feeding. You would be wrong.
It's astounding how the life-threatening violence of the campaign has been sanitised by history - even the early accounts written by the suffragettes themselves are shown here to have deliberately left out the worst of the violence. The descriptions of force-feeding and its after-effects are equally shocking in their brutality.
Women like Kitty Marion were terrorists. Following the abandonment of the Franchise Bill in 1913, the WSPU escalated its campaign further, with Emmeline Pankhurst wanting "to make England and every department of English life insecure and unsafe".
In May 1913 alone there were 52 incidents including 29 bombings and 15 arson attacks, on churches, trains and stations, courts and post offices. Radicalised by years of abuse both in her personal life and in her stage profession, Kitty Marion was at the forefront of this extremism, travelling the country and teaching others how to firebomb successfully.
Given the amount of research that Dr Riddell has clearly done, this is an extremely readable work. Her final chapter draws clear parallels between the experiences of Kitty Marion and the modern-day #MeToo campaign. Plus ça change :-(