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BOOK REVIEW

Fern Riddell. Death in Ten Minutes. Kitty Marion: Activist. Arsonist. Suffragette. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2018. 340pp. ISBN: 9781473666184, £25.00 Hbk.

Reviewed by Emelyne Godfrey.

On 23 April 1913 a warning was found in a doorway of Smeaton’s Tower, a memorial lighthouse on Plymouth Hoe, Devon. “Votes for Women. Death in Ten Minutes” had been painted on a canister filled with explosives. The oil-soaked wick had been lighted, but was then quickly blown out by the coastal breeze.  However, as far as the campaign for women’s suffrage was concerned, a timer had been set; the government was expected to react to the extreme militants’ demands or face the consequences.

The newspaper page on which the bomb is described resonates with images of anarchy and destruction which contextualize the planting of the bomb: women break into the Monument in the City of London, Mrs. Pankhurst tears up her Cat and Mouse license, ricks are set alight, bombs are found in York and mansions are targeted. 1 Was the WSPU a terrorist organization? The question has been asked with increasing frequency. In the film Suffragette (2015), suffragette Maud Watts, played by Carey Mulligan, is interviewed by Brendan Gleeson’s Inspector Arthur Steed. He warns her that the destruction of property could result in the loss of life. A few years prior to the film’s release, historian Christopher J. Bearman had argued that, despite the claims of the Women’s Social and Political Union that no persons or indeed animals were to be put at risk, the attacks on property and public space endangered human life as well as put the cause of women’s suffrage in jeopardy. He was challenged by suffragette historian June Purvis, who, in a 2008 article for The Guardian, wrote that Bearman’s work was influenced by the masculinist bias of George Dangerfield’s The Strange Death of Liberal England (1935) which portrayed the suffragettes as a group of unhinged women. “What is remarkable in Bearman’s analysis,” she says, “is that nowhere does he listen to the suffragettes themselves. His ‘evidence’ is based on newspaper accounts of the time, all filtered through a male gaze that thought that the suffragettes – and their leaders – were irrational, even mad. Nor does Bearman consider his own standpoint, his own gendered interpretation of events” (Purvis "We owe them the vote"). Out of this debate emerges Fern Riddell’s Death in Ten Minutes. Pitched at the popular market, the book is reinforced by strong academic research and offers a feminist slant on the more uncomfortable aspects of the campaign, the story of which is told through the words of one of the most notorious suffragette militants herself.

In 2015 Fern Riddell first tested the water in her History Today article “The Weaker Sex? Violence and the Suffragette Movement.” She argued that “[a]ll violent acts of militant suffrage can be viewed as acts of terror. They were specifically designed to influence the government and the wider public to change their opinions on women’s suffrage, not by reason, but by threats of violence” (21). In the article she introduces the point, which she elaborates in Death in Ten Minutes, that Kitty Marion was marginalized as part of a twentieth-century effort to sanitize suffragette history in which an emphasis was placed on window smashing and hunger striking with the more extreme militant acts being glossed over. Taking a cue from historian Laura E. Nym Mayhall, Riddell charts this airbrushing back to the Suffragette Fellowship which was formed in the 1920s. The Fellowship’s aim was to preserve the memories and relics of the campaign. Members also organized anniversary events and regular tributes to Mrs. Pankhurst. Kitty Marion’s two-volume autobiography proved to be an awkward addition. Nym Mayhall observed that a “highly stylised story” of the suffragettes which emphasizes “women’s martyrdom and passivity” was promoted by the group of women who campaigned to cut incorrect passages from existing and forthcoming memoirs (qtd. in Death in Ten Minutes 292-93). Sex was de-emphasized, Riddell points out, with the result that Kitty, who was involved in both extreme militancy and the birth control movement and donated copies of her memoir to archives in both America and Britain to ensure her story would be remembered, was “forgotten by historians.” Even historian Brian Harrison, whose taped interviews with suffragists can be consulted at the Women’s Library at the London School of Economics, dismissed Kitty Marion’s memoir. Fern Riddell says that Harrison, writing in the 1970s, described the memoir as “an unreflective catalogue of [music hall] engagements” (Harrison 73). In the same breath, Harrison also said that “oral historians could also have greatly improved the quality of the suffragette autobiographies which were written, for they can rescue the autobiographer from naïve notions of what is historically interesting … the probing questions of a skillful oral historian could have transformed them into an important document in feminist history.” Riddell, a feminist historian, makes the strong case that Kitty Marion’s memoirs are of great value. Other researchers have shared this belief as the last decade or so has seen a growing interest in Kitty Marion’s autobiography and its potential publication.

Riddell traces Kitty Marion’s story back to the life and works of Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley. While Wollstonecraft is often used as a historical starting point, Riddell makes her inclusion particularly germane to Kitty’s story. Like Wollstonecraft, Kitty suffered at the hands of an abusive father. Gustav Schäfer, a widower and engineer, who may well today be called a narcissist. While basking in the attention his charming daughter would attract, he was jealous of her achievements and, in private, he sought to instruct, to control, and to demean his only surviving child. Gustav drummed into her (sometimes physically, with his pipe or the back of his hand) feelings of inadequacy which she fought hard to shed. His offers of sweetmeats alternated, with frightening alacrity, with insults and injuries (on one occasion he broke her nose). When he beat to death Kitty’s puppy, Gustav’s violence recalls Philip Dendraith’s kicking of the cat in Mona Caird’s The Wing of Azrael (1889), a symbol of his mistreatment of his wife.

Fern Riddell shows Kitty to be a remarkably resilient woman, who, despite her deep sorrows, could immerse herself in opportunities for happiness. For instance, Kitty recalls with great fondness the two years spent with her grandparents, relishing the deep snow and festive atmosphere of these German winters. Through her uncle, Kitty Marion escaped Gustav’s clutches and came to Britain and, against her father’s wishes, eventually entered the world of the pantomime and music hall. She discarded her name – Katherine Marie Schäfer – and took the name Kitty Marion, which she felt to be sufficiently unrecognizable, so that he would never find her.

Death in Ten Minutes vividly navigates the world into which Kitty was stepping, with the example before her of the remarkable financially independent music hall star Belle Bilton who married an aristocrat and defeated the machinations of her father-in-law who tried to frame her as an immoral woman. Belle’s daring campaign won over the judge who concluded that “he did not think it fair to assume that every woman on the music hall stage, or every woman who had given birth to an illegitimate child, was purchasable.” 2

However, Kitty learnt that her career aspirations came with a price: sexual harassment. Sometimes she defused tension by laughing off unwelcome advances or by compromising with a peck on the cheek. On another occasion she fainted. Riddell rightly links Kitty’s discussion of these experiences with the #MeToo movement, a shrewd move given that the Harvey Weinstein scandal hit the news as Riddell was writing her book. So it seems that Kitty Marion, who spoke out for herself and others, is a woman for our times.

Yet, Riddell’s book shows us that despite Kitty Marion’s experiences of what today would be called “everyday sexism” (here I quote Laura Bates), she came to see sex as a potential source of liberation, not merely a form of oppression, and she learnt that the stage offered opportunities for women’s sexual self-expression. Riddell suggests that there is a feminist lineage in any discussion of women’s sexual freedom and sexual safety: Wollstonecraft shared with Kitty and Annie Besant (who tried to reprint Charles Knowlton’s The Fruits of Philosophy in 1877), with the suffragettes, and with Margaret Sanger, a desire that women be educated, that they be no longer kept in a childlike state of ignorance over matters which obviously profoundly concerned them. Wollstonecraft’s unconventional sexual past resulted in “her rejection by the Victorian feminists, for whom sex was a subject that had to be controlled at all costs” (Death in Ten Minutes 21), although it should be added that Millicent Fawcett introduced a centenary republication of the Vindication of the Rights of Woman.

Riddell reminds us that female sexual pleasure was alluded to in nineteenth-century texts such as the little-known pamphlet The Art of Begetting Handsome Children (1860). The female orgasm was important, Riddell writes, as it was believed to be an essential precondition to conception. Yet, these advances in thinking about women’s needs and desires were severely tempered by legislation which prioritized men’s health and wellbeing over women’s right to dignity. The history of the passing and repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts has been well-documented as has the way the Acts effectively rendered any woman who was found within the areas specified vulnerable to arrest and examination, but Riddell’s book offers a slightly different slant on the subject. As Riddell argues, the Acts strengthened the link between sex and fears over morality. Kitty Marion, the young artiste, found herself at the mercy of a rescue organization, the likes of which Riddell tells us sprang up in the wake of Josephine Butler’s campaign against the Contagious Diseases Acts, begun in 1869. These groups could be “intensely bigoted and occasionally [did] more harm than good” (90). While Kitty was angered by the sanctimonious stance of the temperance group she had accidentally fallen in with, she felt trapped into giving them her address.

The impact of the Acts carried through to the campaign for women's rights. A suffragist had to display an air of sexual respectability and conformity, an expectation not always required of men, Riddell maintains. She adds that “the women who advocated for greater understanding of sex, female desire and female empowerment have been written out of history as dangerous and unusual aberrations” (24; 37), although Elizabeth Robins’s much-praised writing indicates that suffrage campaigners did talk about sex and some of the difficult choices women might have to make.

Marion, who was somewhat skeptical about joining, was swayed by the spectacle of the Women’s Sunday March in 1908, the first mass parade of the WSPU colors. As her involvement increased, Riddell shows how Kitty juggled her commitment with the need to find work.

Perhaps the closest market competitor with Death in Ten Minutes is Simon Webb’s 2015 masculinist The Suffragette Bombers: Britain’s Forgotten Terrorists, which, as can be readily guessed by its title, emphasizes the danger to life and property that WSPU’s campaign of terror signaled. Riddell takes this approach, too, albeit not from a masculinist perspective.  In addition, she has delved deeply into primary sources while Webb’s book appears to be almost entirely reliant on secondary material. Nonetheless, neither of them holds Christabel Pankhurst in high regard: Webb dismisses her campaign to raise awareness of venereal diseases publication, “The Great Scourge and How to End It” (1913), as a hysterical fantasy, while Riddell writes that “Christabel had little interest in the damage her methods had wrecked on the bodies of her soldiers, unless of course they could be used to further the propaganda and press of the suffrage cause” (221). Both these points have been countered in June Purvis’s recent biography of Pankhurst which, like Death in Ten Minutes, was published in 2018.

As well as carrying out arson attacks, Kitty Marion was forcibly fed 232 times in 1914. Riddell does not attempt to apologize for her subject’s violent actions and Death in Ten Minutes leaves me with the feeling that Kitty’s extreme militancy must remain an unpalatable aspect of a justifiable cause. What Riddell’s book does do is to explore thoughtfully the attitudes and perspective of an arsonist who became an anti-war campaigner and a representative of the birth control movement.

The book also rivetingly discusses the tensions within the suffrage movement as well as the strong friendships which were formed. Kitty herself writes of the generosity of the hosts with whom she stayed, women who let her into their homes to aid her in her work to help women into Parliament: “There was great astonishment at the Freemasonry among suffragettes for one to trust a mere acquaintance who had never previously been to her house, with a latch key and to bring another, an utter stranger” (Marion 242).

Emelyne Godfrey graduated with a PhD in English Research from Birkbeck College in 2008. Her books, Masculinity, Crime and Self-Defence in Victorian Literature: Duelling with Danger (2010) and Femininity, Crime and Self-Defence in Victorian Literature and Society: From Dagger-Fans to Suffragettes (2012), and an edited volume, Utopias and Dystopias in the Fiction of H.G. Wells and William Morris: Landscape and Space (2016), were all published by Palgrave.  Godfrey’s first trade book, Kitty and the Cats: Mrs. Pankhurst’s Suffragette Bodyguard and the Police Officers on her Trail, published by Francis Boutle, will be released in early 2019. She is the current chairman of the H.G. Wells Society and is a regular contributor to the Times Literary Supplement.