The Intellectual History of Unimplemented Protest Tactics

115 years ago, in the summer of 1909, Marion Wallace Dunlop became the first suffragette to undertake a hunger strike in a British prison. While the hunger strike has become one of the most widely recognised acts associated with the suffragette movement as a whole, Wallace Dunlop reportedly initiated her strike as a lone operative. Consequently, although she was involved with various women’s suffrage campaigns and actions from 1900 onwards, Wallace Dunlop has been best remembered for her ninety-one hour fast in Holloway in July 1909.

The criminal offence for which Wallace Dunlop had been imprisoned was to have graffitied an extract from the 1689 Bill of Rights onto a wall of St Stephen’s Hall in the Palace of Westminster. Her stencil read: ‘It is the right of the subject to petition the King, and all commitments and prosecutions for such petitioning are illegal.’ In the monograph The Militant Suffrage Movement – which explores suffragette militancy as a political idea – historian Laura Mayhall asks: what happens if this offence ‘becomes the object of scrutiny’, rather than the subsequent hunger strike for which Wallace Dunlop has been remembered? Mayhall argues that Wallace Dunlop’s graffiti and the claim on which it was predicated (‘that the subject has the right to petition the king for alleviation of grievances’) links the women’s suffrage movement ‘to a long tradition of radical protest’ and draws attention to the ‘use of the constitutional idiom’ by suffragettes. Mayhall therefore employs an intellectual history framework to complicate the argument – still persistent within popular memory of women’s suffrage – that militant suffragettes stood in uncomplicated opposition to non-militant, ‘constitutional’ suffragists.

Marion Wallace Dunlop.

The militant suffragettes famously adopted the motto ‘deeds not words,’ but intellectual histories of strikes, protests and activism encourage us to view ‘words’ and ‘deeds’ as interconnected concepts, rather than oppositional ones. Over the last two decades, a number of interventions have contributed to this subdiscipline, including, as well as Mayhall’s The Militant Suffrage Movement (2003), works such as Pure Fire: Self-Defense as Activism in the Civil Rights Era by Christopher B. Strain (2005); Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women, edited by Mia Bay, Farah J. Griffin, Martha S. Jones, and Barbara D. Savage (2015); and Feminisms: A Global History by Lucy Delap (2020). Collectively, such works reconstruct the careful political and theoretical calculations that lay behind certain acts of protest, explore the creativity, innovation and humour encoded in political spectacle, resurrect the thoughts of historical subjects primarily remembered for their actions and, ultimately, challenge our preconceptions about who counts as a ‘thinker’ within the intellectual-history canon.

As will be familiar to many historians researching social movements, the archives of protest groups often contain proposed deeds which were never actually enacted. Minutes of meetings, oral history interviews and letters written into political magazines record countless hours of apparently ‘wasted’ thinking, as potential political manoeuvres and innovations were dreamt up, debated and then disregarded.

But what happens if we forefront unimplemented tactics? Can centring tactics which merely made it to the drawing boards of activist movements prove illuminating for intellectual historians?

As I explore in my research, in the first two decades of the twentieth century, members of the women’s suffrage movement extensively discussed what might happen if they went on strike from sex, marriage and motherhood as a protest tactic to win the vote. While this form of direct action was never implemented on a significant scale, thousands of activists in Britain, the US, France, Germany and Japan reportedly engaged with debates about the strikes. Such tactical disagreements ultimately enabled activists to participate in broader reflective discussions about the role of the state, definitions of citizenship, gender and class relations, and economic principles.

One illustrative example is provided by ‘housewife’ and suffragette foot-soldier Coralie Boord, who attempted to influence the uptake of sex, marriage and birth striking within Emmeline Pankhurst’s Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU). Although little information about Boord has survived, we know that she was a repeat contributor to the feminist periodical The Freewoman, expressing varying positions on a range of issues. In January 1912, she wrote:

When militancy was resumed by the W.S.P.U. a few weeks ago I … [sent] a cheque for the use of the W.S.P.U., and I ventured to suggest that the time had come when … every member of the W.S.P.U., and other Feminists who were engaged to be married, should refuse to marry, and every married member should refuse to “live with” or bear children to her husband until the Franchise was won.

The header of The Freewoman, the feminist periodical to which Coralie Boord frequently contributed.

These tactics were never adopted as WSPU policy. As Boord wrote indignantly, her ‘money was gratefully acknowledged’ and yet her ‘suggestion was not even referred to’ and the existing tactic of ‘window-breaking methods began again’. However, despite this lack of implementation, Boord’s advocacy of sex, marriage and birth strikes led her to explore multiple avenues of feminist thought. She interrogated the notion of a gendered idea, referring to sex strikes as ‘women’s weapons’. Boord implied that the actions with the most militant feminist potential would be those which did not have roots in a broader tradition of male-dominated radicalism. She attributed militant power to sex, marriage and birth strikes precisely because they would implicate ‘quiet home’ lives, spaces that were not typically politicized. Boord asked: ‘One wonders when Feminists will learn to be feminine’ and use ‘women’s forces?’ Her basis for describing these tactics as simultaneously forceful and feminine was that, in refusing to become wives or mothers, women would be causing a kind of social disruption not previously imagined by male activists. She critiqued existing militant tactics as an example of suffragettes ‘copying men’s ideas’. Boord therefore conversely suggested that window-breakers were weak and meek due to their supposed lack of originality and tactical ingenuity.

Boord’s impassioned, but ultimately unsuccessful, attempt to instigate a sex, marriage and birth strike brings us into contact with the wider area of intellectual histories of failure. Proposed campaigns and political tactics which were suggested but never carried out necessarily remain within the realm of ideas. By employing an intellectual history framework in which these suggestions are taken seriously as an academic subject matter, despite their lack of implementation, we can reconnect with the fraught debates, reflective discussions and hours of thinking which often lay behind ‘failed’ political programmes. As Judith A. Byfield concludes in her intellectual history analysis of women’s tax resistance in post-WWII Nigeria, ‘Failure, like success, is still the outcome of struggle’.

Tania Shew is the Isaiah Berlin Junior Research Fellow in the History of Ideas at Wolfson College, Oxford. She specialises in nineteenth- and twentieth-century feminist thought in Britain and the US.