Her Own Hero by Rouse Wendy L.;

Author:Rouse, Wendy L.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HIS000000 History / General
Publisher: New York University Press

American Suffragists

Some American suffragists drew inspiration from British suffragettes who had consciously trained to use their bodies as physical sites of political struggles. There was a clear exchange of ideas and tactics as prominent suffrage leaders crisscrossed the Atlantic. Sylvia Pankhurst met Zelie Emerson while speaking in Chicago. Emerson—an upper-class reformer from Michigan who worked at Chicago’s Hull House—was inspired by Pankhurst’s words and traveled with her back to London. While in England, Emerson had multiple violent confrontations with the police. Her skull was fractured by police truncheons on two separate occasions in 1914, and she was arrested multiple times for breaking windows. Imprisoned at Holloway, Emerson protested through hunger, thirst, and sleep strikes. She testified at one of her trials that after having had her skull fractured by the police, she decided to carry a “Saturday night club,” a rope dipped in tar and weighted with lead, to defend herself. When fellow American suffragette Lillian Scott Troy was imprisoned in 1913, Emerson organized a march of more than 1,000 people to Holloway to show support for her.53 That same year, Emerson helped establish Sylvia Pankhurst’s East End People’s Army, whose purpose, Emerson told the Chicago Examiner, was “to protect militants from the brutality of the police, who during the last month were ordered by the authorities to make no arrests, but to inflict as many bodily injuries as possible.” Emerson reported that all members of the People’s Army would be drilled “in the use of clubs, fists, and jiu-jitsu.”54 American women such as Emerson and Scott Troy directly experienced police brutality and antisuffragist violence in England and through these experiences became believers in militant tactics and self-defense training.

The vast majority of American suffrage organizations, however, sought to distance themselves from the militant tactics of the English suffragettes. Yet American women turned out in large numbers to hear the Pankhursts speak on their multiple visits to the United States and drew inspiration from both their deeds and their words. The leaders of national American suffrage organizations did not go so far as to emulate the militant zeal of their English sisters by organizing a bodyguard of trained jiu-jitsu experts. Still, some individuals and a few organizations advocated self-defense training for suffragists. Other suffrage leaders and women’s rights advocates voiced their support for the concept of training suffragists in self-defense if only to prepare them physically and empower them psychologically for the battle ahead. For example, Sofia Loebinger, a leader of a militant suffragist group in New York, expressed admiration for the actions of the English suffragettes who practiced jiu-jitsu: “Strong situations need strong women, and I am heartily in favor of the movement.” She admitted that although it might not assist them directly in achieving the right to vote, “boxing would be a good thing for women if only to teach them to concentrate their minds on one thing at a time. The ballot, for instance.”55 She hoped that self-defense courses modeled after the English Women’s Development Society would emerge in the United States.

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