The Suffragettes Analysis

The crucial difference between the suffragists from the NUWSS and the WSPU was the scale and employment of gender-breaking methods. The public sphere is where masculinities are historically constructed. This configuration of man’s power and control was challenged when the British women’s suffrage movement, which traditionally followed conformist attitudes of campaigning -such as petitions to the government, quiet pressing of prominent public figures and occasional discreet public meetings- that did not threaten the normative social order, created an alternative to the dominant political notion of women’s submission to men and their regulations and laws through the appropriation of public spaces. The constitutionalists concentrated their efforts …show more content…
However, this obscure/imperceptible hold on the lives of women touched a responsive cord in many of them. In her autobiography, Lady Constance Lytton put into words the feeling of oppression and the unequal legal/social position of British women which drove her to join a group that met her need of change, “the Suffragettes” . She attributes her dramatic process of metanoia to an inedible scene she witnessed while wandering through the town of Littlehampton, when she came upon a crowd of people forming a ring round a sheep, which has escaped while she was taken to the slaughterhouse. The sheep was “old and misshapen” and a vision of how the life of the sheep might have been came to her mind, “vigorous and independent” if she would have been allowed to live in the mountains, where she could have developed “all its forces rightly”. What really happened was that the sheep was afraid and run about clumsily and “became a source of amusement to the onlookers, who laughed and jeered at it”. When she was finally caught, one of “two gaolers … resenting its struggles, gave it a great cuff in the face” (12-13). This moment of epiphany led her into writing: …show more content…
Furthermore, this passage is also a metaphor of Lytton’s contemporary society as much as hers “biased vision” towards women intended to make them “lift the scales of ignorance” (Lytton 11) from their eyes and see what was really happening./”fight for their rights” (E:P. 26) knock “at the conscience of a nation” (Mrs. Clark, qtd. in S.P. 361)/”that the first step towards this [to] end is the enfranchisement of women” (F. P-L. 7)/”educate[ing] the people to the real meaning of this agitation” (Roberts