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Led By Ocasio-Cortez And Tlaib, Will Women Finally Quit Playing “Nice” As Pankhurst Did? Printer friendly page Print This
By Dallas Darling
Submitted by Author
Thursday, Jan 10, 2019

“Women had always fought for men, and for their children. Now they are ready to fight for their own human rights.”
- Suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst

In his book, “No More Mr. Nice Guy,” Robert A. Glover reminds us that “By trying to please everyone, Nice Guys often end up pleasing no one-including themselves.” The same could’ve been written about Nice Gals. For too long, women have been expected to do everything-even protest-with grace and decorum while their male counterparts got rewarded for either behaving badly or going against the rules.

This not only included being punished unfairly when breaking the same unspoken norms and rules that were written into law by a male-dominated society, but which suffragette leader Emmeline Pankhurst realized weren’t helping women. Championing a “Deeds Not Words” campaign, she blended a new and more aggressive kind of approach. It mainly consisted of civil disobedience, militancy, and self-sacrifice.

Taking Off The Gloves
Led by progressives such as Muslim-American Rashida Tlaib, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Pueblo’s Tribe Haaland, the more than 100 women sworn in at the start of last week’s 116th Congress may quit playing nice too. In fact, the gloves-and I mean boxing gloves-may have come off. In reference to Donald Trump, Rep. Tlaib said “impeach the motherf--ker.” She defended her statement by saying it‘s time to speak truth to power.(1)

Wearing a suffragette-white pantsuit, Ocasio-Cortez promised a radical new agenda that included Medicaid for All, a Green New Deal, and a 70 percent tax on the rich. She and Rep. Haaland moreover agreed with Tlaib saying: “History is depending on us to right this ship and foster accountability for rampant law breaking and attacks on democratic norms, including holding the president accountable for high crimes and misdemeanors.”

Known as the crusade to secure all adult women the right to vote, Pankhurst discovered that her peaceful campaign through traditional political channels weren’t going anywhere. She therefore decided “enough was enough.” Sensing that she could never achieve her ends by working within a political system that favored men and which naturally worked against women, she determined to adopt a more direct approach.

Like Pankhurst, the three new progressive congresswomen have adopted a more direct approach. They too have disrupted meetings and staged protests and sit-ins to push their agenda. Their acts of defiance included climate sit-ins at Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s office, where 51 protesters were arrested, and direct action campaigns to secure more rights for Native Americans. They also voted “No!” to confirm Pelosi as House Speaker.(2)

Pankhurst and her daughter, Christable, knew all about being arrested and imprisoned. Their first act of defiance, to be sure, came after disrupting a meeting of the Liberal Party-which evidently wasn’t that liberal after all. After serving a short prison sentence, the two women decided to form a new political party called the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), one that would practice increasingly aggressive tactics.

Hitting Where It Hurts
Called “hitting where it hurts,” the suffragettes of the WSPU began to break windows as a sign of protest, with Pankhurst describing “the broken window pane” as the “most valuable argument in modern politics.” As she put it: “There is something that government cares for more than human life, and that is the security of property, and the enemy.” Will Ocasio-Cortez, Tlaib, and Haaland do the same?

WSPU members moreover took to systematically chaining themselves to the Ladies’ Gallery at the Houses of Parliament. Other campaigns focused on ruinning parliamentary golf courses and using small incendiary devices to destroy letterboxes and their contents. There was some “collateral damage,” but it hardly paled in comparison to the many injustices and institutionalized deaths that thousands of women in England had to endure.

What’s more, the WSPU always practiced civil disobedience rather than terrorism, taking the utmost caution not to put others in harm. The real aim was to commit crimes and to be arrested for doing such in order to bring publicity to the cause of women’s suffrage. Treated as common criminals and not political prisoners, this included becoming champions of hunger strikes once in prison.

Hunger strikes and the “cat and mouse game” (catch and release) were in fact used as another political weapon in the WSPU’s arsenal. Since it was grueling on the women who put themselves through the ordeal, it was an effective means of maintaining publicity even when suffragettes were behind bars. In addition to winning sympathy and respect, it exposed the brutal and injurious tactics of the authorities and male domination.

Some publishers and parts of the public even viewed the authorities heavy-handed “Cat and Mouse Act” (which allowed fasting prisoners to be freed until they had regained sufficient strength to be re-imprisoned for the remainder of their sentences); and the  painful force-feeding of women by holding them down and pushing a tube through their nose and throat, as a kind of rape. The suffragettes had a publican relations triumph.

Fighting In A Trumpian Age
For now, Ocasio-Cortez, Tlaib, and Haaland have vowed to fight the GOP’s “backward policies.” This entails rising to defend the U.S. Constitution and democracy, and ensuring infrastructure investments that help all communities-including those like Detroit and Flint, Michigan. Accordingly, each passing day brings more pain for the people most directly hurt by the Trump Administration, days we simply cannot get back.

They’re moreover willing to do the work and fight on multiple fronts. Whether this means the same kind of tactics as Pankhurst and the WSPU remains to be seen. Either way, they’ve broken the Nice Gal Syndrome. Refusing to play by the rules that oppressors try to impose, they’ve adopted more aggressive actions that have exposed a society which is still governed by three standards. The third being social mores of the Trumpian Age.

As for Pankhurst and the WSPU, both had a profound influence internationally and on the suffrage movement in the U.S. She not only lectured on several occasions there, but several of its leaders spent time campaigning with her in Britain. Perhaps the most important was Alice Paul and Lucy Burns, both of whom were repeatedly arrested for their civil disobedience and eventually interned in insane asylums.

They and the National Woman’s Party were also the first to ever picket the White House. Though arrested and jailed for obstructing traffic, both renewed national attention over women’s suffrage. Others were exposed to harsh conditions in workhouses and prisons-including beatings. Public opinion turned in their favor. After being blocked in 1918 and 1919, the Nineteenth Amendment was passed in 1920 granting women the right to vote.

Perhaps the greatest achievement of those women mentioned above and their political organizations was to jolt the patriarchal powers-that-be out of their complacency, forcing them not merely to take the suffrage movement seriously but to recognize that they were fighting a losing battle. A losing battle that only came about because women were willing to practice of civil disobedience, militancy, and self sacrifice-literally.

Unfinished Fight-And Revolution
Given Tlaib, Ocasio-Cortez, and Haaland’s no more Ms. Nice Gal, another losing battle may be the refusal of the 1972 Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution, which proposed banning discrimination based on sex. Indeed, equal rights means equal rights for all-not special privileges for just men. It’s the indispensable element in a democratic society and well worth fighting for. Especially since it continues on to this very minute.



Dallas Darling is the author of Politics 501: An A-Z Reading on Conscientious Political Thought and Action, Some Nations Above God: 52 Weekly Reflections On Modern-Day Imperialism, Militarism, And Consumerism in the Context of John’s Apocalyptic Vision, and The Other Side Of Christianity: Reflections on Faith, Politics, Spirituality, History, and Peace. He is a correspondent for www.WN.com. You can read more of Dallas’ writings at www.beverlydarling.com and  www.WN.com/dallasdarling.


(1) www.washingtonexaminer.com. “Freshman Congresswoman Defends Calling Trump’s ‘Motherf--ker’: ‘I will Always Speak Truth to Power,’” by Katelyn Caralle. January 04, 2019.
(2) www.thehill.com. “Ocasio-Cortez Joins Climate Change Sit-In at Pelosi’s Office,” by Miranda Green. November 13, 2018.



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