Overview of feminist-based civil disobedience and direct action

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(These make great bedtime stories for young feminists!)

Sit-ins, whips, arson, armies and revolutions – A far cry from what many females have known about the history of their sex. I have enjoyed mentally traveling through time to learn about the many different ways in which females have fought against injustice. By putting this overview together, I hope to shed light on what, for some, may be an unknown history of bravery, civil disobedience and downright bad-ass-feminists that fought for a fairer and better world. Many of these heroines died in their pursuit of justice and many more were left injured and traumatised, but they did what had to be done.

Be inspired….

Fighting the Oppian Law

In 215 B.C/BCE, the Romans had just suffered a great military and economic loss. Many men died and their widows and daughters inherited their land and money and became rich. To help pay for the cost of the war, the state passed the Oppian Law which limited the amount of gold a woman could own and how luxuriously they could dress. The Oppian Law also forced women to give the state any money that she inherited after her husband’s death. Although the law went unopposed for a while, women eventually gathered and blockaded every street in the city and blocked every entrance to the Forum. When the law was up for possible repeal in 195 B.C/BCE, and it seemed the majority of the Tribunal members would veto the propose repeal, the crowds of women poured in to the streets and, as a collective, besieged the doors of the tribunes and did not quit until the veto had been stopped. [1]

The Nuns that besieged an abbey

Not only were the rebels in this case female — they were nuns; and if you think nuns can’t get pissed off, you’re wrong. In 600, two nuns at the Abbey of Sainte-Croix in Poitiers, who were princesses by birth, became tired of the abbess ordering them around, and convinced 40 other nuns to defect. Not content with that, the renegade nuns then besieged the abbey with a small army, trying to get one of the two troublemaking nuns, Princess Clothild, installed as abbess instead. The abbess won, and the snobbish princesses were sent elsewhere, but hey, women can rebel for bad reasons as well as good! [2]

Princess Pingyang helps assemble an army of 70,000

In the early 600’s, Li Yuan, a governor under the Sui dynasty, was becoming fed up with the way the current administration functioned. After a number of defeats at the hand of Goguryeo (modern northern and central Korea), Li Yuan and a number of agrarian rebels joined together to take down Emperor Yang. But without Princess Pingyang, daughter of Li Yuan, the Tang dynasty would never have been able to claim rule of China. Princess Pingyang, who stayed in Chang’an (Xi’an today) despite her father’s warning to flee, was able to convince 70,000 men to join her father’s cause. Li Yuan won the rebellion and became Emperor Gaozu, the first of the Tang dynasty. Lasting nearly 300 years, the Tang dynasty is regarded as a golden age of post-classical China. [3]

The Maldon riots

A big issue in the 1600’s England was enclosure, or the privatizing of land that had previously been public. This led to widespread riots, and some of them were made up entirely of women; like the 1602 rebellion of 37 women, led by a “Captain Dorothy” Dawson, who chased away a bunch of men working on a moor and broke all their fences.

In March of 1629 in Maldon, England, over one hundred women and their children boarded a Flemish ship and forced its crew to fill their caps and aprons with grain from its hold. After industrial depression and mass deaths, the riot came after the failure of the government to take action against rising food prices. Some of the women had already earned local notoriety for being previously found guilty of a range of petty offences in the town (community-building & survival?). Women were involved in almost every food riot in the period. In the short term, the riot was successful in its aims and the main grievances were removed. Grain was to be kept within the local economy and purchased for distribution to the poor at favourable rates. [4]

The Women’s March on Versailles

The Women’s March on Versailles in 1789 is credited as being one of the earliest and most important moments of the French Revolution. Women in Paris were starving and already near rioting over the high prices and scarcity of bread. Revolutionary allies joined the women and the angry mob grew by the thousands. In October, they ransacked the city armory and marched to the king’s palace in Versailles, 13 miles away from Paris. They, along with the arrival of the National Guard, forced the king to go back to Paris, ending the king’s independence. These events signified the change of power and reforms about to overtake France. Bringing together people representing sources of the Revolution in their largest numbers yet, the Women’s March on Versailles proved to be a defining moment of that Revolution. [5]

Women’s Suffrage

The Women’s Suffrage Movement is known to have officially began in the 1840’s. The battle for voting rights for women lasted for over 100 years. In May 1869, led by Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the National Woman Suffrage Association was formed and began to fight for a universal-suffrage amendment to the U.S. Constitution. One of the largest protests of the suffrage movement happened the day before Woodrow Wilson was to be inaugurated as President in 1913. Between 5,000 to 8,000 suffragists marched down Pennsylvania Avenue, past the White House — and hundreds of thousands of onlookers. Organizers Alice Paul and Lucy Burns had secured a permit to march, however, many protesters were assaulted by those in the crowd who opposed the women's right-to-vote campaign. Attacks ranged from spitting and throwing of objects to all-out physical assaults. While many women were injured, public outrage at the violence translated to wider support for the suffrage movement. [6] [7]

British suffragettes

British suffragette activists didn’t play around. In 1903, not being particularly happy with Millicent Fawcett’s slow progress for women’s rights, Emmeline Pankhurst, and her daughters Christabel and Sylvia, founded the Women’s Social and Political Union. They wanted women to have the right to vote and they were not prepared to wait. The Union became better known as the Suffragettes. Members of the Suffragettes were prepared to use violence to get what they wanted. When they campaigned for the right to vote in 1912, they chained themselves to railings, detonated bombs, smashed shop windows and went on hunger strike. They even burned down unoccupied houses and churches. Close to 1000 suffrage activists went to prison, but their aim was achieved: women over 30 were given the right to vote in 1918. [8] On the 15th November, Winston Churchill came to Bristol to address the Anchor society at the Colston Hall. Theresa Garnett, a suffragette who had previously chained herself to a statue in the central lobby of the houses of parliament to protest against the ‘brawling bill,’ and who had been accused of biting a prison warden during a previous stay in Horfield jail, was also there that day. Churchill was walking down this platform with his wife when he was confronted by Theresa who was brandishing a whip. Theresa repeatedly struck Churchill screaming “Take that in the name of the insulted women of England!”

Theresa was first arrested for assaulting Churchill but because he did not want to appear in court he did not press charges. Instead she was charged with disturbing the peace and sentenced to 1 month in Horfield Prison. At this time prison officers would force feed suffragettes who went on hunger strike as the government did not want any suffragette martyrs. The decision to use forced feeding was taken by the Home Secretary at the time who was Winston Churchill. Theresa was force fed during her stay in Horfield prison and set fire to her prison cell in protest. She was made to spend the rest of her sentence in solitary confinement in what was known as a punishment cell, but after she was found unconscious she spent the rest of her sentence in hospital. [9]

Irish suffragette Mary Maloney was a member of the Women's Freedom League. Maloney was most famous for her acts of protest during the 1908 by-elections of Dundee, Scotland, in which a 34-year-old Winston Churchill was running to regain a seat in Parliament. For a week she would appear at Churchill's speaking engagements, demand that he apologise for insulting remarks he had made about the women's suffrage movement, and proceed to drown him out by ringing a large bell when he refused and attempted to carry on with his planned remarks, and it was very effective. On at least one occasion he gave up entirely on giving his intended speech. [10]

Strikes in Russia

In February of 1917, female workers in the city of Petrograd, Russia, went on strike. They were protesting about the scarcity of food and about Russia’s involvement in World War 1. Over 100,000 women protested in the streets. When the government responded with brutal force, the Russian Revolution was set in motion. [11]

The Women’s War

The ogu umunwanye, or, “the Women’s War,’ began in 1929 in Nigeria when the British decided to institute a form of ‘indirect rule’ in which they would control Nigeria through local representatives of their choosing. The British organized Igboland, the area in southeastern Nigeria that is home to the Igbo people, into Native Court areas. These areas were each governed by a Warrant Chief, an Igbo representative that the British had chosen. This new method of governance was starkly different from the Igbo political system. Traditionally, power was diffuse in Igbo communities, with a large group of elders making most decisions. Also, women had had a significant role in Igbo political life. They participated in village meetings, and had very strong solidarity groups. Through women’s kinship networks and market networks, they often organized to use strikes and boycotts to affect political decisions. They were respected members of society, and elder women especially were included in governance. This changed once the British instituted their new political system. Igbo women in southeastern Nigeria had had enough. From the perspective of the British colonizers, the women became loud, angry, and disruptive. They marched through cities and towns and demanded political leaders to step down. The women took their British rulers completely by surprise. The British were ignorant of the discontent among women that had been building for years, and that had recently bubbled over the surface. They mistook the women’s organized action for spontaneous, ‘crazy’ outbursts. After sending out palm leaves to neighboring villages in their district, female leaders a campaign to ensure that they would not be taxed. In early November, the hugely successful protest took place: over 10,000 women congregated outside the district administration office, and demanded that the Warrant Chief of Oloko give them a written assurance that they would not be taxed.

The women sat outside the district office for several days, when, finally, the British offices above the Warrant Chief ordered him to give the women a written assurance that they were not to be taxed. The Warrant Chief, however, disliked having to respond to the women’s demands. After handing over the written assurance, he re-asserted his power by taking several women protesters hostage and harassing them. News of the harassment spread, and the protest swelled. The campaigners decided to continue their protest outside the district office, now demanding that the Warrant Chief be removed. After two days, the British again acquiesced. Not only was the Warrant Chief removed, he was sentenced to two years imprisonment. News of both the written tax assurance and the removal of the Warrant Chief spread, and soon, women all across Igboland were organizing to make the same demands. The protest had grown from one women’s network in Oloko demanding to not be taxed, to a protest that spanned across two provinces and over six thousand square miles. The goal had also grown: now, not only did women want written guaranties that they were not to be taxed, they wanted corrupt Warrant Chiefs to be removed.

When the women would gather in protest, they would come dressed in traditional warrior clothes: they would wear only loincloths, and have their faces smeared with paint. They would also have their heads wrapped in ferns, which was a war symbol for the women. They would be carrying sticks with leaves of young palms wrapped around them, meant to invoke the power of their ancestors. The women would chant traditional war songs, and participate in dances. They also followed the Warrant Chiefs everywhere, day and night, singing loudly and effectively disrupting the daily routines of the Warrant Chiefs. The women were forcing the Warrant Chiefs to pay attention to them and to meet their demands. The campaigners also burned down several district offices, as an extension of the practice of burning down a man’s hut. By mid-December, police officers and troops were called in to deal with the situation. Although the women had been steadfastly nonviolent, police were ordered to shoot into crowds. Over 50 women were killed, and 50 more were wounded.

In spite of the casualties, the Igbo people had regained some of their power to self-govern. The Women’s War had sparked this change, just as it later inspired many other important protests, like the Tax Protests of 1938, Oil Mill Protests of the 1940s, and the Tax revolt 1956. The Women’s War had convinced Igbo women and men of the power they held to protect their people’s rights. [12]

Fighting racism in (so-called) Australia

Set up in 1946 so black and white could meet and socialise, the Coolbaroo Club owed its existence to three ex-servicemen and a feisty young Aboriginal woman, Helena Murphy (Clarke). Now 91, Murphy will next week receive the John Curtin Medal for her courage, humour and dogged refusal to bow down to discrimination. (‘written’ on July 8th, 2019). Helena is a Western Australian civil rights activist and freedom fighter. Helena and her colleagues fought for the rights of Indigenous Australians on many fronts - including lobbying the government on issues such as the removal of children, citizenship laws, deaths in custody, education and voting rights.

When the Coolbaroo Club spawned the Coolbaroo League, police kept surveillance on the committee members. The League was a political movement that aimed to gain equal rights in post-war Western Australia at a time of extreme racism, before Aboriginal people had gained the right to vote. Murphy was stalked and abused, but the young firebrand kept pushing for change by writing letters and joining delegations for better housing, education and voting rights. By the time the Coolbaroo Club closed its doors in 1960, it had initiated an indigenous newspaper, provoked debate on child removal policies and citizenship laws, and shaped a new Western Australian Native Welfare Council. That same year, Aborigines became eligible for social service benefits, and in 1962 they were given the right to vote. [13]

Women in the Black Power and Civil Rights movements

African American women and Australian First Nations women played major roles in local and national organising efforts and frequently were the majority in local chapters of groups as dissimilar as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Black Panther Party. Familiar names like Rosa Parks, Angela Davis and Coretta Scott King have become little more than sanitized national icons, while their decades-long efforts to secure racial, economic, and gender justice remain relatively unknown. In short, examining women’s participation in the “long civil rights movement,” which historians increasingly date to the New Deal and World War II, calls for a redefinition of more conventional notions of leadership, protest, and politics. The civil rights movement—which was much more than a demand for citizenship rights and legal equality—is still often bracketed by the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision on one end and either the 1965 Voting Rights Act or the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. on the other. Yet even the national victories we think we fully understand take on new meaning when black women’s efforts are included: How many Americans know that women were the key petitioners in three of the five cases that made up the 1954 landmark Brown decision and that Constance Baker Motley was one of the three key litigators? Or that Amelia Boynton’s decades of local activism in Selma, Alabama, culminated in the historic march from Selma to Montgomery and the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

While the image of armed Black men monitoring the oppressor seems to be synonymous with the Black Panther Party name, it was the organisation's women members who upheld and ensured the survival of the party. By the 70's, women made up the majority of the party and today, those same women continue to fight in the name of justice and Black liberation. Some female members of the Black Panther parties in Australia and America have talked about the abuse they endured at the hands of male BPP members, cementing the importance and necessity of understanding the basis for intersectionality and implementing pro-intersectional strategies in to activism. [14]

Sit-in at Ladies’ Home Journal office

On March 18th, 1970, a group of feminists staged a sit-in at the offices of the Ladies’ Home Journal (LHJ) to protest how the magazine’s mostly male editorial board depicted women. At the time, LHJ was the second largest women’s magazine in the United States. The sit-in involved women from groups such as Media Women, New York Radical Feminists, National Organization of Women (NOW), the Redstockings, and Barnard College students.

The activists chose Ladies’ Home Journal as the target for the sit-in for several reasons. Protesters believed the magazine’s focus on beauty and housework reinforced patriarchy. Protesters demanded the magazine: hire a female editor in chief and editorial staff, hire women to write columns to avoid inherent male bias, hire non-whites in proportion to the United States’ population, raise women’s salaries to a minimum of $125 a week, provide free child-care in the offices, open editorial meetings to all staff members to avoid traditional power hierarchies, stop running ads that degraded women, stop running articles tied to ads, and end the “Can This Marriage Be Saved?” column. The morning of the protest, the women met at St. Peter’s Church on Lexington Avenue, near the magazine’s 54th street offices. One of the protesters had previously worked at the magazine, giving protest leaders an opportunity to enter the offices prior to the sit-in and gather information that helped them plan their actions. At approximately 9:00am, the women entered the building and marched to Editor in Chief John Mack Carter’s office where they presented their demands. While in the office, a cameraman from an unknown network entered the office and punched one of the demonstrators. He was removed from the premises. Demonstrators also began talking to secretaries and other women who worked in the LHJ offices to explain their reasons for protesting. By the end of the day, the protesters were able to gain tentative understanding from office workers who had originally questioned the motivation for protesting. The protest lasted for eleven hours.

In addition to sitting-in, the protesters created a 20-page mock magazine titled, “Women’s Liberated Journal,” and displayed a banner displaying the title from the office windows. They held Editor in Chief Carter and female managing editor Lenore Hershey during negotiations, and smoked Carter’s cigars. In their magazine, the women suggested article titles such as “How to Get a Divorce,” “How to Have an Orgasm,” “What to tell your Draft-Age Son,” and “How Detergents Harm our Rivers and Streams.”

Equal Rights

1980 was an enormous year for all-female protests. The National Organization of Women were outraged when Illinois refused to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment, and organized several gigantic protests in opposition. One, held in Chicago on Mother’s Day 1980, attracted a record 90,000 female ERA protesters. [15]

Women of Liberia Mass Action of Peace

In 2003 the Women of Liberia Mass Action of Peace was started by women in Liberia, Africa. This nonviolent direct action movement used different tactics including threats of a curse, sex strikes and sit-ins. They forced a meeting with President Charles Taylor and extracted a promise from him to attend peace talks in Ghana to negotiate with the rebels from Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy and Movement for Democracy in Liberia. A delegation of Liberian women went to Ghana to continue to apply pressure on the warring factions during the peace process. Two hundred women surrounded the room, dressed in white, dominating the conversation. Any time the negotiators tried to leave, the women threatened to take off all of their clothes. Enclosed in the room with the women, the men would try to jump out of the windows to escape their talk. But the women persisted, staging a sit in outside of the Presidential Palace. They blocked all the doors and windows and prevented anyone from leaving the peace talks without a resolution.

The women of Liberia became a political force against violence and against their government. Their actions brought about an agreement during the stalled peace talks. As a result, the women were able to achieve peace in Liberia after a 14-year civil war and later helped bring to power the country's first female head of state, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf. [16]

The Gulabi Gang

One day when Sampat Pal Devi, a simple woman living in a village in Northern India, saw a man mercilessly beating his wife. She pleaded with him to stop but he abused her as well. The next day she returned with a bamboo stick and five other women and gave the rogue a sound thrashing.

The news spread like wild fire and soon women started approaching Sampat Pal Devi in droves requesting similar interventions. Many women came forward to join her team and in the year 2006 she decided that the sisterhood needed a uniform and a name and thus the pink sari was chosen, to signify the womanhood and understated strength.

The Gulabi Gang kept a watch on all community activities and protested vociferously when they saw any manifestation of injustice or malpractice. On one occasion, when Sampat Pal went to the local police station to register a complaint, a policeman abused and attacked her. She retaliated by beating him on the head with her lathi. On another occasion she dragged a government official out of his car to show him a crumbling road that was in need of urgent repair. After all, what cannot be endured must be cured! [17]

Pussy Riot

Founded in August 2011 in the Russian city of Moscow, all female punk band Pussy Riot have been using their platform for political protest for years and have been jailed numerous times for their protests. They began to gain momentum after two members, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Yekaterina Samutsevich – who used to belong to another anarchist art collective called Voina – played a recording of Pussy Riot’s song ‘Ubey seksista” (‘Kill the Sexist’) at a lecture on feminist punk. Over the following months, Pussy Riot staged a series of public performances. Their first, in November 2011, was called ‘Release the Cobblestones’. Sampling Angelic Upstarts’ 1978 track ‘Police Oppression’, masked members of the group performed on top of scaffolding on the Moscow subway, tearing open feather pillows and hurling the contents onto the track.

The Russian media paid close attention to the performances that followed. Later in 2011, Pussy Riot performed on top of a garage next door to the Moscow Detention Center No. 1, which was holding activists arrested a week earlier at the mass protests against the results of the recent State Duma elections. At the beginning of 2012, Pussy Riot gained further notoriety after two members were arrested for their ‘Putin Zassa’ performance at Moscow’s Red Square. Translating roughly to ‘Putin Has Pissed Himself’, the group let off a smoke bomb, and Galkina and Schebleva were later found guilty of breaking the rules around conducting rallies and pickets. [18]

Wave of Feminist Civil Disobedience Occupies Patriarchy in Chile

Dozens of university faculties and high schools across Chile are in occupation or on strike, demanding an end to the abusive patriarchal culture inside Chilean classrooms. Within the space of only three days this June, five women were killed, highlighting the magnitude of the issue. Tens of thousands of students are taking part, and two months on from the first occupation, the movement is persisting. Chile has a long history of student protests (police often clash with students, and many demonstrations end with tear gas and water cannons), normally mobilizing against the privatized education system put in place by the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. What’s happening today emerges from that experience, but with feminism at its core. It started at the Universidad Austral in Valdivia, in southern Chile. On 17 April 2018, a group of students occupied the building of Philosophy and Humanities as a reaction to a mismanaged disciplinary case against a professor found guilty of sexual harassment. The Faculty of Law of Universidad de Chile in Santiago came next, ten days later, igniting the movement in one of the country’s most prestigious institutions.

The last straw was a case of sexual harassment involving Professor Carlos Carmona, former president of the Constitutional Court. It took the university eight months to process the case, at the end of which Carmona was suspended for three months for ‘lack of integrity’. The outcome prompted an emergency student assembly that decided to occupy the Law Faculty building. In a matter of days, dozens of faculties and schools across the country followed. The first step in most of the occupations was to share the experience of sexism, strengthening awareness of its systemic character. Each school in mobilization organizes several feminist events a day. From courses on self-defence and workshops on resistance embroidery, to feminist stand-up comedy, debates on socialist feminism, non-patriarchal football matches, and gynaecology lessons.

It’s hard to predict how the movement will evolve, but to date it has reached an unprecedented level of support and visibility. No matter what is achieved in the short term, their struggle is not just about basic demands to improve the living conditions of women students. It is about making everyday gender violence visible. It is about challenging heteronormative gender roles. And above all, it is about creating new spaces for reflection in which to envisage social change. With a right-wing president in power, this constitutes a healthy cultural resistance that could be a source of inspiration for action beyond Chilean borders. [19]

Learn more about women that are a part of civil disobedience history here - https://nvdatabase.swarthmore.edu/search/node/women

Other movements and protests you may want to check out are [20] –

The 'Bra Burning' Miss America Protest

Take Back the Night

The Million Mom March

The March for Women's Lives

Defiantly Driving in Saudi Arabia

[1] http://www.womeninworldhistory.com/lesson10.html

[2] https://www.bustle.com/articles/73968-10-all-women-protests-through-history-because-badass-feminist-civil-disobedience-didnt-start-with-pussy-riot

[3] https://explorethearchive.com/influential-women-in-history

[4] https://reviews.history.ac.uk/review/618

[5] http://www.ancientpages.com/2018/10/11/womens-march-on-versailles-one-of-the-most-significant-events-of-the-french-revolution/