HEPHZIBAH ANDERSON
HISTORY
Death In Ten Minutes Fern Riddell Hodder & Stoughton €35
They were supposed to have an hour to make their getaway, but calamity struck, leaving the two suffragettes choking and blinded by smoke as they fled the racecourse pavilion they’d just torched. This book centres around the life of one of them, a 43-year-old actress named Kitty Marion, using her story to recast the suffragette movement vividly as a terrorist organisation.
Timber yards, cotton mills, railway stations, MPs’ homes, churches – all were destroyed during an escalating campaign of violence that also saw the Prime Minister attacked.
Marion was among the most dangerous of all the ‘wild women’ whose stories were suppressed by mainstream history. The fire at Hurst Park racecourse – payback after her friend Emily Wilding Davison’s death at the Epsom Derby – was already Marion’s fifth. During her four-year career as a feminist soldier she would be beaten black and blue, arrested and imprisoned multiple times and force-fed more than any other suffragette.
German-born Katherina Maria Schafer – Marion’s real name – was sent to England at 15 to escape an abusive father and became an actress, only to face multiple sexual assaults from theatrical agents. By the time Emmeline Pankhurst’s suffrage movement embraced the slogan ‘Deeds Not Words!’, Marion was ripe for radicalisation.
Her legacy and its subsequent burial illustrate some of the overlooked contradictions in feminism’s history. The sanitising of the suffragettes’ violence is most revealing. ‘How do we feel when we discover such actions in a movement we idolise? Is there room for our heroes to be flawed?’ asks Fern Riddell.
If we’re ever to realise fully the equitable future that Kitty and Co were fighting for, the answer has to be yes.