Women's Suffrage in The United Kingdom - Suffrage As A Sex War

Suffrage As A Sex War

The campaign for suffrage was closely tied to what many referred to as a sex war between men and women. With the feminist movement, and suffrage in particular, women were rebelling against historical male sexual tyranny and their historical objectification in British society. No longer willing to be defined solely by their biology, women craved to rid British society of the separate sphere ideology, which led to their powerlessness in both spheres. Women devoted themselves to the Cause of acquiring the right to vote on issues of importance to their country, despite direct individual repercussions – societal contempt and ridicule and mistreatment (at time sexually) at the hands of men that sought to contain them. In doing so, the suffragettes simultaneously sought to free themselves of their culturally imposed sexual identity.

The militant actions of the suffragettes were direct responses to a real sex war. The suffrage movement campaigned against the forced conscription of women to a sexual identity through the withholding of her education and her right to vote. As Kent discusses, the Contagious Disease Acts "crystallized for women their status as sexual objects" (9) and illustrated the double standard and male vice embedded in Victorian society (8–9). It sought to accomplish this task by providing women opportunities which would establish them as individuals: in education and employment; in the rights to own property or obtain a divorce; in the right to vote. However, before acquiring these rights, the suffragettes would have to engage in an epic sex war, one which was often fought on the individual women's body. As the militant suffragette, Emily Wilding Davison, depicts, suffragettes willingly sacrificed their bodies and their reputations for the Cause in order to achieve the "Pearl of Freedom for her sex".

As Elizabeth Robbins, an influential suffragette and writer, depicts in her novel The Convert, responses to their protests were met with sexual humiliation at the hands of both men and the police. This sentiment of sexual-antagonism pervaded much of the suffragette struggle. Men, when threatened with female power (militancy) and the potential for female liberation, took to sexual humiliation as a tool against the movement. The suffragettes of that time period, were seemingly made aware of this element upon recruitment, despite it being noticeably absent from contemporary historical accounts of the period. Robbins explains that this was how the movement got many wives and mothers to join the Cause: older women felt the need to protect the younger generation against that sort of treatment. This was particularly meaningful given the time period in which it occurred. Patriarchal society used the tools of sex-antagonism and sex-humiliation as a means of containment for the spread of the Suffrage movement, even during the early years of the new century.

Hunger striking and force-feeding, particularly, were undertaken by individual people and served as points of battle carried out on the individual body. Starting in the summer of 1909, Suffragettes employed the hunger-strike as a method of protest while they served time in British prisons against the government that imprisoned and mistreated them. Hunger striking, as Jane Marcus points out, was a way for the British woman to refuse her role of mother and nurturer of the country. Authorities responded to their protest with force-feeding, an invasive and painful procedure performed within the confines of their cells. The resistance of the suffragettes to this procedure caused such encounters to be extremely violent and painful in nature – prisoners were held down while their mouths were pried open and instrumentation for force-feeding was shoved into their throats by male doctors. Looking to the firsthand accounts of the force-feedings, as evident in June Purvis' work, The Prison Experiences of the Suffragettes, one can easily start to see where this form of response took on a quality of rape. This element of forced sexuality was exacerbated in the incidents when these forcible feedings were conducted through the rectum or vagina of the prisoners. So great was the trauma of such an experience, that several women were permanently scarred – mentally and/or physically.