♀️ Feminist Friday ♀️
The Night Witches
They flew under the cover of darkness in bare-bones plywood biplanes. They braved bullets and frostbite in the air, while battling skepticism and sexual harassment on the ground. They were feared and hated so much by the Nazis that any German airman who downed one was automatically awarded the prestigious Iron Cross medal.
All told, the pioneering all-female 588th Night Bomber Regiment dropped more than 23,000 tons of bombs on Nazi targets. And in doing so, they became a crucial Soviet asset in winning World War II.
The Germans nicknamed them the Nachthexen, or “night witches,” because the whooshing noise their wooden planes made resembled that of a sweeping broom. “This sound was the only warning the Germans had. The planes were too small to show up on radar… [or] on infrared locators,” said Steve Prowse, author of the screenplay The Night Witches, a nonfiction account of the little-known female squadron. “They never used radios, so radio locators couldn’t pick them up either. They were basically ghosts.”
Using female bombardiers wasn’t a first choice. While women had been previously barred from combat, the pressure of an encroaching enemy gave Soviet leaders a reason to rethink the policy. Adolf Hitler had launched Operation Barbarossa, his massive invasion of the Soviet Union, in June 1941. By the fall the Germans were pressing on Moscow, Leningrad was under siege and the Red Army was struggling. The Soviets were desperate.
The squadron was the brainchild of Marina Raskova, known as the “Soviet Amelia Earhart”—famous not only as the first female navigator in the Soviet Air For ce but also for her many long-distance flight records. She had been receiving letters from women all across the Soviet Union wanting to join the World War II war effort. While they had been allowed to participate in support roles, there were many who wanted to be gunners and pilots, flying on their own. Many had lost brothers or sweethearts, or had seen their homes and villages ravaged. Seeing an opportunity, Raskova petitioned Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin to let her form an all-female fighting squadron.
On October 8, 1941, Stalin gave orders to deploy three all-female air fo rce units. The women would not only fly missions and drop bombs, they would return fire—making the Soviet Union the first nation to officially allow women to engage in combat. Previously, women could help transfer planes and ammunition, after which the men took over.
Raskova quickly started to fill out her teams. From more than 2,000 applications, she selected around 400 women for each of the three units. Most were students, ranging in age from 17 to 26. Those selected moved to Engels, a small town north of Stalingrad, to begin training at the Engels School of Aviation. They underwent a highly compressed education—expected to learn in a few months what it took most soldiers several years to grasp. Each recruit had to train and perform as pilots, navigators, maintenance and ground crew.
Beyond their steep learning curve, the women faced scepticism from some of the male military personnel who believed they added no value to the combat effort. Raskova did her best to prepare her women for these attitudes, but they still faced sexual harassment, long nights and gruelling conditions. “The men didn’t like the ‘little girls’ going to the front line. It was a man’s thing.”
The military, unprepared for women pilots, offered them meagre resources. Flyers received hand-me-down uniforms (from male soldiers), including oversized boots. “They had to tear up their bedding and stuff them in their boots to get them to fit,” said Prowse.
Their equipment wasn’t much better. The military provided them with outdated Polikarpov Po-2 biplanes, 1920s crop-dusters that had been used as training vehicles. These light two-seater, open-cockpit planes were never meant for combat. “It was like a coffin with wings,” said Prowse. Made out of plywood with canvas pulled over, the aircraft offered virtually no protection from the elements. Flying at night, pilots endured freezing temperatures, wind and frostbite. In the harsh Soviet winters, the planes became so cold, just touching them would rip off bare skin.
Due to both the planes’ limited weight capacity and the military’s limited funds, the pilots also lacked other “luxury” items their male counterparts enjoyed. Instead of parachutes (which were too heavy to carry), radar, guns and radios, they were forc ed to use more rudimentary tools such as rulers, stopwatches, flashlights, pencils, maps and compasses.
There was some upside to the older aircraft. Their maximum speed was slower than the stall speed of the Nazi planes, which meant these wooden planes, ironically, could manoeuvre faster than the enemy, making them hard to target. They also could easily take off and land from most locations. The downside? When coming under enemy fire, pilots had to duck by sending their planes into dives (almost none of the planes carried defence ammunition). If they happened to be hit by tracer bullets, which carry a pyrotechnic charge, their wooden planes would burst into flames.
The Polikarpovs could only carry two bombs at a time, one under each wing. In order to make meaningful dents in the German front lines, the regiment sent out up to 40 two-person crews a night. Each would execute between eight and 18 missions a night, flying back to re-arm between runs. The weight of the bombs for ced them to fly at lower altitudes, making them a much easier target—hence their night-only missions.
The planes, each with a pilot upfront and a navigator in back, travelled in packs: The first planes would go in as ba it, attracting German spotlights, which provided much needed illumination. These planes, which rarely had ammunition to defend themselves, would release a flare to light up the intended target. The last plane would idle its engines and glide in darkness to the bombing area. It was this “stealth mode” that created their signature witch’s broom sound.
There were 12 commandments the Night Witches followed. The first was “be proud you are a woman.” Killing Germans was their job, but in their downtime the heroic flyers still did needlework, patchwork, decorated their planes and danced. They even put the pencils they used for navigation into double duty as eyeliner.
Their last flight took place on May 4, 1945—when the Night Witches flew within 60 kilometers (approx. 37 miles) of Berlin. Three days later, Germany officially surrendered.
According to Prowse, the Germans had two theories about why these women were so successful: They were all criminals who were masters at stealing and had been sent to the front line as punishment—or they had been given special injections that allowed them to see in the night.
Altogether these daredevil heroines flew more than 30,000 missions in total, or about 800 per pilot and navigator. They lost a total of 30 pilots, and 24 of the flyers were awarded the title Hero of the Soviet Union. Raskova, the mother of the movement, died on January 4, 1943, when she was finally sent to the front line—her plane never made it. She was given the very first state funeral of World War II and her ashes were buried in the Kremlin.
Despite being the most highly decorated unit in the Soviet Air Force during the war, the Night Witches regiment was disbanded six months after the end of World War II. And when it came to the big victory-day parade in Moscow, they weren’t included—because, it was decided, their planes were too slow.
***
Disclaimer: It is important to remember that some of the women you will read about during Feminist Friday will have done unsavory, bad, and sometimes even terrible or unforgivable things during their lives. I have decided to include any women found to be problematic rather than disregard them entirely because I believe that it would be a disservice to do otherwise. The different women discussed here have lives that span over thousands of years during which life on Earth and humanity in general changed immensely and unrecognizably. Some of their values will be outdated. Some will be laughable. Some offensive. However, I implore you to try and look at these women as individual members of a world made to tame, shame, shackle, subjugate, abuse, and kill them. Do not ignore the horrors of the past. You are free to dislike them (I dislike many!) but recognize their achievements within the context of their time and place in the world.
𝐒𝐋𝐀𝐕𝐄 𝐓𝐀𝐒𝐊
Good morning! Here is your slave task for Monday 27th February 2023.
These tasks are designed to be interactive. They are an open invitation to send me a direct message to discuss the task and to send voice notes, photos or videos (whatever is best suited to the task) as proof of completion.
I am aware that not all slaves have the same interests, experience and/or threshold, so I have designed these tasks to be as mixed as possible. There should be something to appeal to everyone regardless of where you stand on the scale!
💋💋💋
Your Goddess,
Serena
A little peak at my photoshoot in Paris
These will be exclusive to OF until my new website is launched. So Shhh... 🤫🤫please keep them to yourself and DO NOT reshare them.
♀️ Feminist Friday ♀️
Amelia Earhart
Aviatrix Amelia Earhart is a household name for shattering a record-breaking 18,415-foot glass ceiling in her airplane. Almost as famous is her mysterious disappearance during her attempted around-the-world flight in 1937. Earhart was less a household name for her other qualities and achievements, which we celebrate today: a staunch and vocal feminist, an author, a social service worker, a fashion icon, and, for a time, a Greenwich Village resident.
Amelia Mary Earhart was born on July 24, 1897, in Atchison, Kansas. She went to high school in Chicago and enrolled in a junior college, but during a visit to her sister in Canada, she developed an interest in caring for soldiers wounded in World War I, especially with the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918. She left junior college to become a nurse’s aide in Toronto, and in 1919 moved to New York to study medicine at Columbia. She only stayed there for one year, deciding to move to California, where her parents had relocated in 1920. It was there, in Long Beach, California, that she went on her first airplane ride. She recounted understanding, during her first trip into the sky, that this was where she was meant to be.
Earhart asked Anita “Neta” Snook, a pioneer aviatrix herself, for lessons, saying simply: “I want to fly. Will you teach me?” And so, Earhart’s first lesson was on January 3, 1921. In 1921 she bought her first plane, and two years later she earned her pilot’s license, following in the footsteps of the women aviators before her, like her teacher, and like Bessie Coleman, known as “Queen Bess,” the first Black woman to earn an international pilot’s license — two years before Earhart (Coleman opened her own flight school so other Black women would not face the same obstacles she did).
In the mid-1920s Earhart moved to Boston, where she became a social worker at the Denison House, a settlement home for immigrants. While she was doing that work, she also got work as a sales representative for Kinner Aircraft in the Boston area and wrote local newspaper columns promoting flying. As her local celebrity grew, she laid out the plans for what would become The Ninety-Nines, an organization for female pilots.
In 1927, Earhart relocated to Greenwich Village. She was flying more and more, and it was impeding her ability to hold her stable job at the Denison House in Boston. Her writing had been picked up by Cosmopolitan, and the famous magazine offered her a job. In addition to her other work, she was also a real fashionista and was already becoming a fashion icon, especially since she would wear slacks to fly, which was quite unusual at the time. Earhart accepted the “Aviation Editor” position at Cosmopolitan, but wanted to keep doing her social work as well. So, she wrote to Greenwich House, a settlement house which is still doing incredible community work in the West Village. Greenwich House offered her a room and a staff position – for when she was in town, at least – and she accepted, living at their still-extant main building at 27 Barrow Street in the Greenwich Village Historic District from 1927-1929.
Charles LeBoutillier, who had known Earhart in Boston, is quoted as seeing Earhart in the Village:
Peering under the open hood of a car parked near Greenwich House on Barrow Street. “It was a beautiful car—looked like a Stutz Bearcat—and she took care of it herself… I’d seen her at the Boston airport after her Atlantic flight with her arms full of flowers. She was living in an apartment in the Village that fall, in that settlement house. I think most of the people in the neighborhood knew who she was but nobody took much notice. She ate in a cafe with a courtyard—one a lot of us went to—and someone said she liked to talk about Edna St. Vincent Millay’s poetry. She didn’t seem different from us—just an ordinary person.”
In 1931, she married the wealthy George Palmer Putnam. Putnam was Vice President of the Explorers Club and a member of many other prestigious clubs who had divorced his wife for Earhart, been working for some years as Earhart’s publicist, and campaigning to make Earhart one of America’s most famous women. In the wonderfully-written New York Times marriage announcement, we learn:
Since living in New York Miss Earhart has resided first at the Greenwich Settlement House and, until now, at the American Women’s Association Clubhouse here [located at 356 West 58th Street]. Mr. Putnam has a country home at Rye, N.Y., but the couple for the present will occupy an apartment at the Hotel Wyndham, 42 West Fifty-eighth Street.
In addition to her piloting feats, Earhart was known for encouraging women to reject constrictive social norms and to pursue various opportunities, especially in the field of aviation. In 1929 she helped found an organization of female pilots that later became known as the Ninety-Nines. Earhart served as its first president.
Her interest in fashion continued, and she developed a clothing line for women who “live actively.” She made a flying suit with loose trousers, a zipper top and big pockets. Vogue advertised it with a two-page photo spread. The clothing line expanded from there, and in 1933 it was released in department stores like Macy’s.
Earhart was also a member of the National Woman’s Party and an early supporter of the Equal Rights Amendment.
Earhart kept her maiden name when she was married G.P. Putnam, and specifically wrote to The New York Times reminding them to never call her Mrs. Putnam. Before the wedding, Earhart sent Putnam a letter addressing her concerns about marriage. Hesitant about marriage in the first place, Putnam proposed six times before Earhart agreed. Even then, she demanded an equal partnership, with her career being treated as a valid part of their life. She would not be held to a “medieval code of faithfulness.”
During the time she lived in the Village, Earhart became the first woman to fly across the Atlantic on June 17, 1928. In 20 hours and 40 minutes, she flew herself to international fame, earning invitations to air shows, flights, and organizations across the country. She wrote about the flight in 20 Hrs. 40 Min. (1928) and undertook a lecture tour across the United States.
She published her book during this time and took it on tour across the country. She bought another airplane, a single-engine Lockheed Vega. In 1929, Earhart won third place – and $875 – in a Women’s Air Derby, affectionately coined the “Powder Puff Derby,” Earhart called it “a chance to play the game as men play it, by rules established for participants as flyers, not as women.”
Of her amazing fortune and skill in flying, Earhart said: “My ambition is to have this wonderful gift produce practical results for the future of commercial flying and for the women who may want to fly tomorrow’s planes.”
In 1937 Earhart set out to fly around the world in a twin-engine Lockheed Electra, with Fred Noonan as her navigator. On June 1 the duo began their 29,000-mile journey, departing from Miami and heading east. Over the following weeks, they made various refueling stops before reaching Lae, New Guinea, on June 29. At that point, Earhart and Noonan had traveled some 22,000 miles. Reportedly on the morning of July 2, 1937, Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, took off from Lae on what was supposed to be one of the last legs in their historic attempt to circumnavigate the globe. Their next destination was Howland Island in the central Pacific Ocean, some 2,500 miles away. A U.S. Coast Guard cutter, the Itasca, waited there to guide the world-famous aviator in for a landing on the tiny, uninhabited coral atoll. But Earhart never arrived on Howland Island. Battling overcast skies, faulty radio transmissions and a rapidly diminishing fuel supply in her twin-engine Lockheed Electra plane, she and Noonan lost contact with the Itasca somewhere over the Pacific. Despite a search-and-rescue mission of unprecedented scale, including ships and planes from the U.S. Navy and Coast Guard scouring some 250,000 square miles of ocean, they were never found.
There have been endless theories about whether Earhart had been a spy and was shot down, whether she and Noonan had ended up on one of the islands in the area, near Japan, or elsewhere. Some thought that she came back to the United States and assumed a new name.
Needless to say, no conclusive evidence has been found about what happened to the pair and their plane, and the mystery continues to this day.
****
Disclaimer: It is important to remember that some of the women you will read about during Feminist Friday will have done unsavory, bad, and sometimes even terrible or unforgivable things during their lives. I have decided to include any women found to be problematic rather than disregard them entirely because I believe that it would be a disservice to do otherwise. The different women discussed here have lives that span over thousands of years during which life on Earth and humanity in general changed immensely and unrecognizably. Some of their values will be outdated. Some will be laughable. Some offensive. However, I implore you to try and look at these women as individual members of a world made to tame, shame, shackle, subjugate, abuse, and kill them. Do not ignore the horrors of the past. You are free to dislike them (I dislike many!) but recognize their achievements within the context of their time and place in the world.
𝐒𝐋𝐀𝐕𝐄 𝐓𝐀𝐒𝐊
Good morning! Here is your slave task for Friday 24th February 2023.
These tasks are designed to be interactive. They are an open invitation to send me a direct message to discuss the task and to send voice notes, photos or videos (whatever is best suited to the task) as proof of completion.
I am aware that not all slaves have the same interests, experience and/or threshold, so I have designed these tasks to be as mixed as possible. There should be something to appeal to everyone regardless of where you stand on the scale!
💋💋💋
Your Goddess,
Serena
𝐒𝐋𝐀𝐕𝐄 𝐓𝐀𝐒𝐊
Good morning! Here is your slave task for Monday 20th February 2023.
These tasks are designed to be interactive. They are an open invitation to send me a direct message to discuss the task and to send voice notes, photos or videos (whatever is best suited to the task) as proof of completion.
I am aware that not all slaves have the same interests, experience and/or threshold, so I have designed these tasks to be as mixed as possible. There should be something to appeal to everyone regardless of where you stand on the scale!
💋💋💋
Your Goddess,
Serena
♀️ Feminist Friday ♀️
Marina Ginesta
In July 1936, a yo ung woman stood on the roof of the Placa de Catalunya hotel in Barcelona, Spain. She was just 17, yet the rifle she carried and the defiantly optimistic look on her face would ensure her name went down in history.
The you ng woman was Marina Ginestà. She was born in Toulouse, France, to a working class family, and moved to Spain at the age of 11. Sometime in the next six years, she joined the Unified Socialist Party, a communist political party that wanted to defend the middle classes against land seizures. When civil war broke out in Spain, Marina served as a reporter and translator for Mikhail Koltsov, a correspondent for the Soviet paper Pravda.
This photo, likely part of her time with Mikhail, was published in a local paper. Dressed in military uniform with the wind in her hair, and armed with a rifle (the first and only time in her life, she later stated), Marina was witness to a historic moment, and instantly became a symbol of the hopefulness of revolution. In a 2008 interview, she stated,
It’s a good photo. It reflects the feeling we had at that moment. Socialism had arrived, the hotel guests had left. There was euphoria. We retired in Columbus, we ate well, as if bourgeois life belonged to us and we would have changed category quickly.
The photograph quickly became a symbol of the conflict and anti-fascist resistance. It was a piece of propaganda at a time of rapid social and political change, but it was also a symbol of hope. Hope for a better future, for herself and her comrades. Hope that the rising tide of fascism would be stopped.
It was one moment of glory before the storm. Marina was wounded before the end of the Spanish Civil War and evacuated to France, which was occupied by the Nazis. She soon fled her homeland, immigrating to the Dominican Republic and escaping the horrors of war in Europe. Within ten years, though, her peace was interrupted again by the rise of dictator Rafael Trujillo. She fled and returned to Europe, eventually marrying a Belgian diplomat and finally returning to Barcelona in 1952. Marina moved to Paris in the 1970s, where she died in January 2014 at the age of 94.
Disclaimer: It is important to remember that some of the women you will read about during Feminist Friday will have done unsavory, bad, and sometimes even terrible or unforgivable things during their lives. I have decided to include any women found to be problematic rather than disregard them entirely because I believe that it would be a disservice to do otherwise. The different women discussed here have lives that span over thousands of years during which life on Earth and humanity in general changed immensely and unrecognizably. Some of their values will be outdated. Some will be laughable. Some offensive. However, I implore you to try and look at these women as individual members of a world made to tame, shame, shackle, subjugate, abuse, and kill them. Do not ignore the horrors of the past. You are free to dislike them (I dislike many!) but recognize their achievements within the context of their time and place in the world.
𝐒𝐋𝐀𝐕𝐄 𝐓𝐀𝐒𝐊
Good morning! Here is your slave task for Friday 17th February.
These tasks are designed to be interactive. They are an open invitation to send me a direct message to discuss the task and to send voice notes, photos or videos (whatever is best suited to the task) as proof of completion.
I am aware that not all slaves have the same interests, experience and/or threshold, so I have designed these tasks to be as mixed as possible. There should be something to appeal to everyone regardless of where you stand on the scale!
💋💋💋
Your Goddess,
Serena
𝐒𝐋𝐀𝐕𝐄 𝐓𝐀𝐒𝐊
Good morning! Here is your slave task for Monday 13th February 2023.
These tasks are designed to be interactive. They are an open invitation to send me a direct message to discuss the task and to send voice notes, photos or videos (whatever is best suited to the task) as proof of completion.
I am aware that not all slaves have the same interests, experience and/or threshold, so I have designed these tasks to be as mixed as possible. There should be something to appeal to everyone regardless of where you stand on the scale!
💋💋💋
Your Goddess,
Serena
♀️ Feminist Friday ♀️
Julian of Norwich
Julian of Norwich (1343 – after 1416), also known as Juliana of Norwich, the Lady Julian, Dame Julian or Mother Julian, was an English mystic and anchoress of the Middle Ages. Her writings, now known as Revelations of Divine Love, are the earliest surviving English language works by a woman, although it is possible that some anonymous works may have had female authors. They are also the only surviving English language works by an anchoress.
Julian of Norwich lived through the worst pandemic in European history, the bubonic plague of the 14th century. Unlike many of her contemporaries (and ours), she did not curse the darkness or create scapegoats of Jews or “heretics” or “others.” She instead grounded her view of the world and of Christ in the “goodness of creation” where encountered a God who is “the goodness in all things.”
She also developed a profound theology of the divine feminine and the “motherhood of God” and even the “motherhood of Christ.” She states that “the deep wisdom of the Trinity is our Mother.” Notice how she is linking together Wisdom, Divinity (understood in its richness and diversity as Trinity), Motherhood, the feminine. Julian was very familiar with the wisdom tradition of the Hebrew Bible (scholars agree that Jesus came from the wisdom tradition also), a tradition that is both cosmic and practical, nature-based and committed to creativity as the work of the creating Spirit.
Preexistent wisdom is celebrated in Israel on numerous occasions. In the book of Job the question is asked, “Where does wisdom come from?” (Job 28:12 20) and in Baruch wisdom is celebrated as the divine attribute by which God governs the world (Bar. 3:9-4:4). She is personified in Proverbs:
Wisdom calls aloud in the streets,
she raises her voice in the public squares;
she calls out at the street corners,
She delivers her message at the city gates. (Prv. 1:20f)
Notice: She is not elitist. She is not ensconced in the ivory tower at the academy but in the streets and public squares and at the street corners and the city gates. She is eager to speak truth and justice to all, especially the oppressed. Like a mother who cares.
Disclaimer: It is important to remember that some of the women you will read about during Feminist Friday will have done unsavory, bad, and sometimes even terrible or unforgivable things during their lives. I have decided to include any women found to be problematic rather than disregard them entirely because I believe that it would be a disservice to do otherwise. The different women discussed here have lives that span over thousands of years during which life on Earth and humanity in general changed immensely and unrecognizably. Some of their values will be outdated. Some will be laughable. Some offensive. However, I implore you to try and look at these women as individual members of a world made to tame, shame, shackle, subjugate, abuse, and kill them. Do not ignore the horrors of the past. You are free to dislike them (I dislike many!), but recognize their achievements within the context of their time and place in the world.
𝐒𝐋𝐀𝐕𝐄 𝐓𝐀𝐒𝐊
Good morning! Here is your slave task for Friday 10th February 2023.
These tasks are designed to be interactive. They are an open invitation to send me a direct message to discuss the task and to send voice notes, photos or videos (whatever is best suited to the task) as proof of completion.
I am aware that not all slaves have the same interests, experience and/or threshold, so I have designed these tasks to be as mixed as possible. There should be something to appeal to everyone regardless of where you stand on the scale!
💋💋💋
Your Goddess,
Serena
𝐒𝐋𝐀𝐕𝐄 𝐓𝐀𝐒𝐊
Good morning! Here is your slave task for Monday 6th February 2023.
These tasks are designed to be interactive. They are an open invitation to send me a direct message to discuss the task and to send voice notes, photos or videos (whatever is best suited to the task) as proof of completion.
I am aware that not all slaves have the same interests, experience and/or threshold, so I have designed these tasks to be as mixed as possible. There should be something to appeal to everyone regardless of where you stand on the scale!
💋💋💋
Your Goddess,
Serena
♀️ Feminist Friday ♀️
Emily Wilding Davison
Emily Davison, in full Emily Wilding Davison, (born October 11, 1872, Roxburgh House, Greenwich, Kent [now part of Greater London], England—died June 8, 1913, Epsom, Surrey [now part of Greater London]), British activist who became a martyr to the cause of women’s suffrage when she entered the racetrack during the 1913 Epsom Derby and moved in front of King George V’s horse, which struck her while galloping at full force. She never regained consciousness and died four days later.
Davison was born to a merchant and his second wife. As a you ng woman, she attended Royal Holloway College (now part of the University of London). After a brief hiatus during which she worked as a governess, she attended St. Hugh’s Hall, Oxford, and in 1895 took first class honours in English there. But Oxford at that time did not award degrees to women. Thereafter she taught for some years, eventually earning a degree from the University of London. In photographs of the period, she is often shown wearing a mortarboard.
By increments, Davison became radicalized to the cause of women’s suffrage. In 1906 she joined the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), which had been founded in 1903 by the noted mother and daughter suffragettes Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst. Some three years later, when Davison was also involved with adult education and the Workers’ Educational Association, she had stopped teaching day school full-time to turn her attention to the cause of women’s suffrage, about which she had grown passionate. After the return to power of the Liberal Party in 1906, the succeeding years saw the defeat of seven suffrage bills in Parliament. As a consequence, many suffragists became involved in increasingly violent actions as time went on.
Several arrests followed in short order. In March, July, September, and October 1909, she was arrested—twice for “obstruction” and twice for “stone throwing.” Soon after her first stint in j ail, suffragettes in Great Britain adopted a policy upon their arrests of immediately beginning a hunger strike. Initially, this strategy resulted in prisoners’ early release, as the British authorities did not want to be responsible for their deaths, but, as the government became more desperate to control the protesters, authorities began to respond to these hunger strikes by force-feeding the prisoners. During Davison’s October 1909 incarceration, she too was force-fed. When she barricaded herself in her cell to avoid further such treatment, her jailers flooded her cell with water.
Again in November 1910 she was arrested, this time for breaking windows in the House of Commons. In January 1912 she received a six-month sentence for setting fire to a pillar-box (a British term for a pillar-shaped mailbox). During this ja il term—having concluded that the movement needed a martyr—she attempted more than once to hurl herself from a staircase, but she succeeded only in injuring herself. In November 1912 she was sentenced to 10 days (and served only four after starting a hunger strike) for assaulting a man she mistook for David Lloyd George, then chancellor of the Exchequer.
As to the act in June 1913 that proved to be her final attempt to bring about change, history is divided. Although the incident itself was caught on film and there were thousands of people in attendance at the Epsom Derby, Davison’s intent remains mysterious. Those convinced that she intended to martyr herself by being trampled to death cite both her earlier suicidal actions in prison and her statements to fellow suffragettes, notably those recorded in Emmeline Pankhurst’s My Own Story (1914), about the necessity to the cause for a public (as opposed to a prison) death to occur. Others claimed that she was trying to stop King George’s horse and attach to it one of two suffragette flags she carried with her that day. Those who saw her death as a tragic accident rather than a deliberate act noted the presence among her belongings of a return train ticket as well as a ticket to a later event. Whatever the case, many were offended by Davison’s perceived disrespect for king and country, and her death did not effect the political change she wanted to achieve through her actions. Thousands marched in her funeral procession.
Disclaimer: It is important to remember that some of the women you will read about during Feminist Friday will have done unsavoury, bad, and sometimes even terrible or unforgivable things during their lives. I have decided to include any women found to be problematic rather than disregard them entirely because I believe that it would be a disservice to do otherwise. The different women discussed here have lives that span over thousands of years during which life on Earth and humanity in general changed immensely and unrecognizably. Some of their values will be outdated. Some will be laughable. Some offensive. However, I implore you to try and look at these women as individual members of a world made to tame, shame, shackle, subjugate, abuse, and kill them. Do not ignore the horrors of the past. You are free to dislike them (I dislike many!), but recognize their achievements within the context of their time and place in the world.
𝐒𝐋𝐀𝐕𝐄 𝐓𝐀𝐒𝐊
Good morning! Here is your slave task for Friday 3rd February 2023.
These tasks are designed to be interactive. They are an open invitation to send me a direct message to discuss the task and to send voice notes, photos or videos (whatever is best suited to the task) as proof of completion.
I am aware that not all slaves have the same interests, experience and/or threshold, so I have designed these tasks to be as mixed as possible. There should be something to appeal to everyone regardless of where you stand on the scale!
💋💋💋
Your Goddess,
Serena
