The Suffragettes Movement

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Recommended: Struggles of the women's suffrage movement

The suffragette movement was founded to represent a stepping stone for modernistic ideas, but by the end of the 1900s, militancy was in important manners self-defeating. Antifeminist and anti-suffragist arguments were typically based on women’s intellectual inferiority and poor emotional discipline. Those statements became much more difficult to refute in court, since the suffragettes were emphasizing on irrational, often dangerous behavior with prevailing acts of violence and destructions. When imprisoned for their law-breaking activities, many WSPU members went on hunger strikes and were subjects to prison force-feeding via throat-insertion of tubes. This disturbing procedure provoked a new campaign against forcible feeding and temporary …show more content…

The constitutional societies felt obliged to reject "militants" their membership and even issued strongly-advocated protests against the use of violence for political publicity. This difference caused a great split in the suffrage movement. The UNSSW considered that the WSPU were wrong and that "direct action," as referred to the violent approaches, had always reacted unfavorably on those who employed it. When the constitutional societies began to express freely their views on these points, the suffragettes naturally responded by attempting to break up their gatherings, shouting down their speakers and inciting chaos. As opposition to the militant campaign increased, the WSPU’s emphasis on the oppression of all women as a sex increased. It led to increasing distrust of all men, countering the attitudes of the rest of the suffrage movement from the NUWSS, who could also criticise male domination over women but felt that class had to come into consideration as well. In 1913, a publication of Christabel Pankhurst disclosed the real reason for the opposition of votes for women – the fear that women’s suffrage would result in a rigid code of sexual morals. With the widespread use of the motto ‘Votes for Women and Chastity for Men’, women’s suffrage became a conservative moral

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