Do you know about Black Friday? No, not that one. The day that radicalized suffragettes | Opinion

Just days before Black Friday 2023, I learned about the Black Friday of 1910 — the one that has nothing to do with great sales and American consumerism, but, instead, is a historic day that marks a key moment in the struggle for the rights of women everywhere.

On Nov. 18, 1910, to be exact, 300 women suffragettes marched to London’s Houses of Parliament to protest British Prime Minister Herbert Henry Asquith’s decision not to sign legislation that would have granted voting rights to some property-owning women.

What ensued was a horrific display of violence against women perpetrated by cops in uniform, plain clothed police officers and male bystanders. The day was a turning point for British suffragettes — it marked the start of British suffragette militancy and was dubbed “Black Friday” decades before the colloquial term became associated with the start of the holiday shopping season one day after Thanksgiving.

Opinion

I had never heard about this Black Friday — nor any violence directed toward suffragettes on this scale — until this past Monday, while listening to one of my favorite podcasts, “Criminal.” The episode, titled “Fine Art and Meat Cleavers,” is about the events that lead up to and followed Black Friday.

But it’s not just this event in British history I’d never previously learned of. It’s the very idea of “suffragette militancy” that seemed, just days ago, to be an absolute foreign concept. The version of suffragette history I learned in school and books — of Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Sojourner Truth; the Seneca Falls Convention; the scatterbrained but well-meaning Mrs. Banks in “Mary Poppins” — depicts the movement as civil, respectful.

Learning about the Black Friday of 1910 changed my perspective on suffragettes. They weren’t just early feminists, but genuine, certified badasses.

‘Rather genteel’ British demonstrations

By the early 1900s, the movement had become unafraid of violence. Whereas decades earlier, in the 1860s, British suffragettes were “rather genteel” in their approach, says Diane Atkinson, author of “Rise Up Women!: The Remarkable Lives of the Suffragettes,” on the latest “Criminal” episode, by 1908 many women were wearing cardboard corsets to protect themselves at demonstrations that left them bloodied and bruised.

It was at this time that British suffragette and political activist Emmeline Pankhurst reconsidered the group’s strategy.

“There is something that governments care about far more for than human life, and that is the security of property,” she said. “And so it is through property that we will strike the enemy.”

Before the events of Nov. 18, 1910, British suffragettes had suffered — literally — for their cause. When political events turned too violent (whether from men who opposed the movement or police), suffragettes would purposefully try to be arrested, sometimes by slapping or agitating cops, so as to be escorted away from the violent scene. But they often didn’t fare any better in prison.

In London’s women’s prison, suffragettes were forced to work. Some made shirts for inmates at London’s men’s prison, sewing the message “Votes for Women’‘ into shirt tails. Yet, some imprisoned suffragettes elected to go on a hunger strike. The government, fearing they would die, opted to force feed the hunger strikers by shoving tubes through their throats or noses “so violently that injuries were common,” said “Criminal” host Phoebe Judge said. “Some women suffered from the effects of force feeding long after they were released.”

Suffragettes had shown they were willing to go to great lengths and make huge sacrifices (including the loss of husbands, inheritance, families and jobs) for their cause. So, in November 1910, when British politicians killed a bill that would grant voting rights to some property-owning women, the government had prepared for the hundreds of women who showed up to demonstrate in front of the Houses of Parliament by sending hundreds of uniformed and plain clothes cops.

“There were more policemen in plain clothes who were there as agent provocateur – they were disguised, they were there to cause trouble, … pretending to be supporters of women’s suffrage,” Atkinson said. “So a horrible riot breaks out. And Nov. 18, 1910 becomes known as Black Friday because of the physical and sexual violence that takes place.”

For six hours, suffragettes were attacked. Punched and kicked. Groped. There were approximately 39 instances of sexual violence, with women dragged into side streets and brutalized.

“One woman later described seeing an officer in plain clothes who kicked a woman while others laughed and jeered at her,” Judge says. “One woman was dragged out of her wheelchair and beaten. Reports described how the police forced suffragettes into the middle of the crowd.”

Winston Churchill, British Home Secretary at that time, decided that no formal government investigation would take place into the events of Black Friday and characterized the events that took place as “a misunderstanding.” For this, four women later attempted to throw potatoes at him.

‘Go underground,’ ‘wage a guerrilla war’

After Black Friday, British suffragettes adopted a new, militant strategy.

“We need to think of another way of protesting,” said British political activist and suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst at the time. “We need to go underground, and we need to wage a guerrilla war on this government.”

This strategy was not only popular among existing suffragettes, it appealed to more women than ever before. Soon enough, the militant suffragette movement had spread “like wildfire ... across the country,” Atkinson said.

Women across Britain, oftentimes working independently of each other, deployed tactics like placing phosphorus bombs in mailboxes; cutting the telephone wires between London and Glasgow; and burning down buildings.

And, my personal favorite act of political protest: using acid to burn the message “no vote, no golf!” onto golf course lawns.

As the movement became more radical, it inspired the American suffrage movement. What developed was a transatlantic suffrage coalition, wherein women across the pond communicated via telegram.

American suffragette Alice Paul, radicalized by the British movement, formed the National Women’s Party, the organization of which marked the same shift from polite political advocacy to more aggressive measures here in the U.S. just had occurred in Britain.

“(The NWP) opted for confrontation and direct action instead of questionnaires and lobbying,” according to the Encyclopedia Britannica. “Consequently, the NWP became the first group to picket the White House and frequently conducted marches and acts of civil disobedience.”

The militant tactics of British and American suffragettes helped secure voting rights for women (in Britain, those rights were secured via Parliamentary acts passed in 1918 and 1928, and in the U.S. we earned that right through the 19th amendment, ratified in 1920) — a significantly important detail that was somehow absent from my own suffragette history knowledge until this past Monday.

At a time when parents, politicians and educators are scrutinizing American history curriculum, we ought to reassess why certain narratives of political violence — from the Black Panther Party to the suffragettes — are barely mentioned or altogether absent from instruction. And, while women’s bodily autonomy, rights and freedoms are being stripped away from us, it’s important we remind ourselves of the fury and determination of those who came before us.

“Women, once convinced that they are doing what is right, that their rebellion is just, will go on,” Pankhurst said. “No matter what the difficulties, no matter what the dangers, so long as there is a woman alive to hold up the flag of rebellion.”