Seen from a 21st-century viewpoint, this particular Pankhurst quote is typical of much turn-of-the-century feminist rhetoric. In today’s commemorative moment, many of us have been confronted – sometimes for the first time – with the hard, incontrovertible evidence of the racism and classism in the history of feminism. Suffrage histories illustrate both the best and the worst of the early 20th-century women’s movement. Why has this rallying cry become so inflammatory in the 21st century? Prior to the October 2015 release of Sarah Gavron’s much-anticipated film Suffragette, a regrettable photoshoot was produced with the magazine Time Out London, for which the film’s stars Carey Mulligan, Romola Garai, Anne-Marie Duff and Meryl Streep wore promotional T-shirts emblazoned with the slogan: ‘I’d rather be a rebel than a slave.’ This created a furore on social media, which then spread to various other media outlets.
Their since-deleted Tweet quoted a slogan that had become infamous only three years earlier. To celebrate the Representation of the People Act, for example, the UK bookseller Waterstones chose a historical quotation from the leader of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), Tweeting: ‘I would rather be a rebel than a slave.’ – Emmeline Pankhurst #vote100’ on 6 February 2018. With all this commemorative fervour, social media and popular culture have become platforms that offer insight into what our feminist foremothers said to advocate for women’s enfranchisement. The United States will soon witness the centenary of the Nineteenth Amendment in 2020, that enfranchised most American women. This year, Britain has observed 100 years of women’s suffrage by honouring the Representation of the People Act of 1918, while New Zealand celebrated 125 years of women’s enfranchisement. The centenaries of the Easter Rising and the Russian Revolution were observed in 20 respectively, while 2018 saw South Africa hail the 100th anniversary of Nelson Mandela’s birth. The Great War ended a century ago, an anniversary that has been widely celebrated.
We are in the midst of a global commemorative epoch.