Description
What suffragettes' debates over sex and birth strikes reveal about the women's suffrage movement and the cultural and intellectual world of the early twentieth century
Women's suffrage activists are remembered for their tactical ingenuity; they organized mass marches, broke windows and chained themselves to railings for the cause. Two tactics, not widely used but hotly debated, remain largely forgotten: sex strikes and birth strikes. In Sex Strikes and Suffragettes, Tania Shew pieces together for the first time the spirited and often tense discussions that took place at the turn of the twentieth century over whether suffrage campaigners in both Britain and the United States should refuse to have sex with men or bear their children as tactics to win the vote.
With Shew, readers listen in on suffrage meetings, stand in the crowd at suffrage talks and sit among the audiences at Edwardian cinemas and theatres. Shew finds suffrage campaigners staging adaptations of the Ancient Greek play Lysistrata and drawing broad inspiration from the sex strike depicted within it. She outlines the transatlantic connections of the movement, pointing to the impact of previously unknown feminist foot soldiers and revisiting well-known thinkers including Charlotte Despard and Emma Goldman. Suffrage campaigners, Shew explains, drew from a wide range of influences including trade union activism, emerging Freudian ideas about psychology and personality and Malthusian theorieswhich made for strange ideological bedfellows. She examines what the interest in sex and birth strikes reveals about suffragette thinking on the wider themes of democracy and militancy. Shew argues that these debates about women's economic and social roles from a century ago shed light on ideas about women's agency that resonate today.