What is suffragette white? The colour has a 110-year history as a protest tool

A silent protest parade in New York City against the East St. Louis riots in 1917.
Library of Congress

Michelle Staff, Australian National University“Suffragette white” is proving to be a popular fashion choice for women who want to make a statement. Most recently, former Australia Post CEO Christine Holgate donned a white jacket in her appearance before a Senate inquiry into her controversial departure from the organisation.

Her sartorial choice formed part of the “Wear White 2 Unite” campaign, which encouraged people to sport the colour in support of Holgate and call for an end to workplace bullying.

In doing this, Holgate, like Brittany Higgins last month at the Canberra March4Justice, is building on a trend in which women are wearing white clothing — and often referencing suffrage history — to draw attention to gender inequity today.

Deeds not words

The term “suffragette” is sometimes mistakenly used to refer to all those who campaigned for women’s voting rights. But it was actually a label applied to a specific group of women — initially in a derogatory sense.

The women’s suffrage movement in Britain took off during the 1860s. By the turn of the 20th century, women still did not have the vote.

Emmeline Pankhurst, Christabel Pankhurst, Mabel Tuke and Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence, 17th June 1911, marching at the head of the Prisoners’ Pageant at the Coronation Procession.
Digital image copyright Museum of London

This led Emmeline Pankhurst to establish the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) in 1903. Her group of primarily white women believed militancy was the only way they could achieve change, living by the motto “deeds not words”.

The British press mockingly labelled these women “suffragettes”, adding the diminutive suffix “-ette” in an attempt to de-legitimise them. But Pankhurst’s group was not deterred. It reclaimed the term, eliminating the element of ridicule and rebranding it as “a name of highest honour”.

One of the WSPU teams that drew the carriage of released prisoners away from Holloway in 1908.
Library of the London School of Economics and Political Science

Her group’s dramatic actions – from disrupting meetings to damaging public property – cemented their place in the history of women’s suffrage.

Purity, dignity and hope

Early 20th century suffrage campaigns relied heavily on spectacle and pageantry, using striking visual imagery and mass gatherings to garner the attention of the press and the wider public.

Many suffrage organisations adopted colours to symbolise their agenda. In Britain, the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies used red and white in their banners, later adding green. The WSPU chose white, purple and green: white for purity, purple for dignity and green for hope.

An original Women’s Social and Political Union postcard album, with the circular purple, white and green WSPU motif printed on the front.
Library of the London School of Economics and Political Science

Suffragette white was first donned en masse in June 1908 on Women’s Sunday, the first “monster meeting” hosted by the WSPU in London’s Hyde Park. The 30,000 participants were encouraged to wear white, accessorised with touches of purple and green.

Ahead of the march, Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence’s newspaper Votes for Women explained:

the effect will be a magnificent moving colour scheme never before seen in London’s streets.

White fabric was relatively affordable, which meant women of different backgrounds could participate. The colour’s association with purity also helped those involved present themselves as respectable, dignified women.

The Suffragette Coronation Procession through central London, 17 June, 1911.
Digital image copyright Museum of London

Suffragette white became a mainstay of the WSPU’s demonstrations. In 1911, women who had been imprisoned for militancy were among those who marched in white in the Women’s Coronation Procession.

The Australian suffragist Vida Goldstein, wearing a white dress, famously headed the Australian contingent.

Goldstein later brought the WSPU’s colours to Australia in her campaigns for a parliamentary seat.

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Read more:
Friday essay: Sex, power and anger — a history of feminist protests in Australia

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Two years later in 1913, members of the WSPU wore white in a funeral procession for their colleague Emily Wilding Davison, who died under the hooves of the King’s horse at the Epsom Derby.

American suffragists soon picked up this tactic, influenced by the British suffragettes as well as by the temperance movement’s use of white ribbons.

Cities like Washington D.C. witnessed similar scenes of women in white dresses marching through the streets, making striking material for photographers. Contemporary black women — who were excluded from the suffrage movement in many ways — used the colour in their protests against racial violence, too.

Fifty years after Black American women wore white in protest marches, white suits became a calling card of Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm.
Library of Congress

Feminist solidarity

The modern trend towards white has had particular traction in the US.

In 2019, Donald Trump faced a sea of suffragette white at his State of the Union address. Last year, Kamala Harris wore a white pantsuit to deliver her remarks as vice president-elect.

Closer to home, at the March4Justice rally in Canberra, Brittany Higgins made a surprise appearance in a white outfit, standing in contrast to the funereal black worn by attendees.

By wearing white, these women — either consciously or not — are building connections with their feminist forebears across the Anglosphere. At times this can flatten the complex history of women’s suffrage. It is important to remember it was primarily white, middle-class women who led these suffrage movements, often to the exclusion of women of colour and others.

In drawing on their feminist genealogy, women today need to acknowledge the limitations of feminisms past and present — and not simply celebrate and reproduce the attitudes of over a hundred years ago.

At the same time, wearing suffragette white is a powerful and highly symbolic gesture that reminds us just how long women have been fighting.

By establishing a sense of feminist solidarity across time and space, this move can also generate inspiration and energy and attract media attention. Women of colour’s choice to wear white can be read as a way of asserting their place within a movement from which they have historically been (and continue to be) excluded — and honouring women of colour who have come before them.

Like the suffragettes of the early 20th century, women today are showing the power of visual spectacle to grab the public’s attention. Whether this will, in turn, lead to real change remains to be seen.

Michelle Staff, PhD Candidate, Australian National University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Militant suffragettes: morally justified, or just terrorists?

Janna Thompson, La Trobe University

Between 1912 and 1914, a group of British suffragettes called the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) launched a campaign of militant action. Lead by Emmeline Pankhurst, they avoided harming people but committed various crimes to draw attention to their demands and put pressure on the government. Suffragette (2015), now in cinemas, shows this part of British women’s struggle for the vote.

Was the militancy of these suffragettes justified? The film portrays the frustration women experienced when their peaceful protests and participation in parliamentary enquiries failed to get the desired results. Faced by a government that seemed bent on denying suffrage to women indefinitely, the WSPU decided that more radical forms of protest were necessary.

Militant suffragettes destroyed contents of letterboxes and smashed the windows of thousands of shops and offices. They cut telephone wires, burned down the houses of politicians and prominent members of society, set cricket pavilions alight and carved slogans into golf courses. They slashed paintings in art galleries, destroyed exhibitions at the British Museum and planted bombs in St Paul’s Cathedral, Westminster Abbey and near the Bank of England.

Emily Davison threw herself in front of King George’s horse and died four days later from a fractured skull.
Hulton Archives, via Wikimedia Commons.

The film features the most famous act of the militant suffragettes – Emily Davison’s disruption of the Derby at Epsom by throwing herself under the King’s horse.

It is estimated that their campaign of destruction caused between £1 billion and £2 billion worth of damage to property in 1913-1914.

The suffragettes aimed their violence against property, not people. Nevertheless, their actions satisfy common definitions of “terrorism”. The Australian Criminal Code, for example, defines a terrorist act as an action done with the intention of coercing and intimidating a government that causes serious damage to people or property.

Pankhurst, a canny political operator, knew that their cause had to be kept in the news if it were to succeed:

You have to make yourself more obtrusive than anybody else, fill all the papers more than anybody else if you are really going to get your reform realised.

The militant acts of the suffragettes filled the papers but many supporters of the suffrage movement thought they were counter-productive. Public support for women’s suffrage declined even though many people deplored the way suffragettes were treated in prison.

The prominent politician Lloyd George, generally a supporter of votes for women, thought that the actions of the militants were ruinous to their cause. Some members of parliament declared that the militant acts proved that women were unstable, hysterical and not to be trusted with the vote.

When World War I began the WSPU suspended its militant activities and joined the war effort. In 1918 the British parliament recognised the contribution of women to the war effort by giving the vote to women older than 30 who also owned some property. Ten years later all women in Britain gained the vote.

Historians are divided about whether militancy helped the cause of women’s suffrage. Some believe the achievement owes more to the non-militant wing of the suffragette movement led by Millicent Fawcett. But the official justification for giving women the vote does not exclude the likelihood that many parliamentarians were moved by the fear that suffragette militancy might resume.

Even if militancy was a factor in bringing about reform, moral question marks hang over the actions of the WSPU.

Policeman leads an arrested National Woman’s Party protestor away from a woman’s suffrage bonfire demonstration at the White House in 1918.
Everett Historical.

The moral acceptability of the campaign depended on the fact that they avoided actions that could cause harm to people. Except for Emily Davison, who chose her manner of death, no one was killed. The destruction of property caused loss of money and inconvenience, but no serious harm to the public. Suffragettes attacked cricket pavilions and letterboxes, not hospitals or military installations.

But arson and bombs have the potential to hurt innocent people. A police inspector points this out in Suffragette. He asks the women suspected of burning down a country property, “What if a servant girl had unexpectedly returned to the house?”.

Whatever good the suffragettes thought they were accomplishing has to be weighed against the risk that they posed to members of the public.

There is another reason to be critical of the actions of the militant suffragettes. The aim of the movement was to allow women to play a role in the government of their country. There is a tension between this aim and the violent law-breaking activities of the WSPU. Those who want to participate in making laws ought to distinguish themselves from revolutionaries who want to destroy a government or force it to serve their will.

Civil disobedience has a role to play in a democracy. The Selma freedom march led by Martin Luther King Jr. defied the law and the political authorities of the segregationist South. But King and his followers thought it was important to show respect for democracy and the rule of law by demonstrating peacefully.

The parliamentarians who declared the militant actions of the suffragettes showed that these women were unfit to have a vote were, of course, serving their own political purposes and pandering to the prejudices of many of their constituents. Nevertheless, they had a point.

Janna Thompson, Professor of Philosophy, La Trobe University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Article: The Suffragettes

The link below is to an article looking at the history of the Suffragette movement.

For more visit:
http://www.neatorama.com/2013/01/14/You-Go-Girls-The-Suffragettes/