Do I just know stuff other people don't, or is this person really, really ignorant?

[oursin]

Interview with Rebecca Lenkiewicz, writer of play on the suffragettes which is going to be produced in the National Theatre:
'I wrote the play because I felt the suffragettes had been forgotten. They suffered so much.
....
She was particularly shocked by the way the suffragettes were force-fed in jail.
Wot????
Because, in the 90th year since women got the limited parliamentary franchise, and the 80th year since the 'flapper vote' gave it to them on equal terms with men (see this utterly annoyingly trivialising piece a few pages earlier in the Observer Review), no-one, but no-one, has ever heard of the suffragettes and the fact that they went on hunger-strike and were force-fed in prison. Have they?

Okay, I knew about the suffragettes even before watching the 70s series Shoulder to Shoulder: but I don't really think this made me uniquely well-informed about the history of feminism.

[Poll will not let anyone actually answer it: am trying again in a fresh post]

Comments

[aella_irene]

History, yr 8/9 and GCSE. Yes, Rebecca Lenkiewicz is just really ignorant.

[unblinkered.livejournal.com]

Sufragettes....well, duh.

Would answer poll, but when I click the submit button I get a "you are not permitted to see this poll" message. Which is odd, since I can see it perfectly well.

[noveldevice.livejournal.com]

Me too.

[white_hart]

Me three. LJ is clearly on the fritz again. I would pick the first answer for all of them, though!

[noveldevice.livejournal.com]

"Martyr to the cause" bugs me a bit. "Bonehead for the cause" maybe.

[oursin.livejournal.com]

There's some evidence that she didn't actually intend to get killed - merely to disrupt the Derby.

[noveldevice.livejournal.com]

If she'd intended to be killed I'd think she was a little more martyry than someone who thought that a racehorse would stop for her like a carriage horse on the street. It strikes me as a singularly foolish thing to do--a ton of muscle coming at you at thirty miles an hour doesn't stop on a dime.

[white_hart]

Fair point. Still closer than "Who?", though.

[noveldevice.livejournal.com]

Very true. :)

[legionseagle.livejournal.com]

I was frankly more boggled by the statement that this was the first time the work of a female playwright had been produced on the Olivier Stage than by the awesome ignorance of the playwright.

[sacred-sarcasm.livejournal.com]

I didn't know the suffragettes went on hunger strike - and we never mentioned them in history lessons or anything. What I do know I know from... books? Various tv shows? It's just one of those things people know. Like Nelson or Waterloo. (or don't, apparently)

[rivrea.livejournal.com]

I must admit that I hadn't heard about Emily Davison before, but I still think that Rebecca Lenkewicz (if the article does indeed cite her statements accurately) displays a staggering amount of ignorance. I, for one, had happened to hear the name Emily Pankhurst at the age of 10 or 11, and neither was it relevant in the context of my national history (there was no mass movement of early feminism with the same impact as the British suffragettes here in Germany) nor was anyone in my family particularly interested in teaching me about women's lib and women's history.

To brush up my knowledge of the era, though, I should finally get around to reading Sylvia Pankhurst's history of suffragism, which I recently came across in our local Oxfam.

[oursin.livejournal.com]

Possibly I should warn you that Sylvia's version was about spin! - she had had significant differences with her mother and sister Christabel and had been a pacifist in the Great War. V readable though, unlike their versions.

[rivrea.livejournal.com]

Thanks for pointing this out to me. I'll try to keep it in mind!

[rivka.livejournal.com]

The suffragettes were a vivid part of my elementary school (ages 6-12) education, and were touched on again in my later history courses. Much more focused on the American fight for women's suffrage, obviously, but I still recognize the name of Pankhurst.

Then again, when I exposed my Sunday School students (aged 13 and 14) to what I thought of as one of the most famous 19th-century expressions of women's rights (Sojourner Truth's "Ain't I a Woman?" (http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/sojtruth-woman.html) speech), none of them were familiar with it. I remember it popping up in my textbooks again and again and again.

[buffysquirrel.livejournal.com]

Never mentioned at my school. But then nor was the Cuban Missile Crisis. I did know about the suffragettes tho'. The Missile Crisis I learnt about when I met my husband.

[daegaer.livejournal.com]

I'm pretty sure I heard about the suffragettes in primary school - I know I'd seen newspaper illustrations of them before secondary school, though I don't know when I first saw photos. I don't know when I knew about the forced feeding, but I certainly knew about the hunger strike.

Other things I've been irritated people have "discovered" when they weren't particularly lost: the PoW camp on the Curragh that the Guardian expressed shock about a couple of years ago (The tone of which was, "Oh noes! The Irish didn't allow military personnel of various armies to skip gaily across the country during the war, but kept them in a military (open) prison that no one knew they had . . . except for Britain, who'd built it in the first place. Damn those Paddies."), and the highly irritating book I spied in a bookshop promising to tell the Totally Unknown and Recently Discovered story of the Lost To History Christmas Truce in the Great War. When I read that Connie Willis wanted to write something about Dunkirk because that was also Totally Unknown and she'd Discovered it, my head exploded.

[buffysquirrel.livejournal.com]

Oh dear. I do so hate to think badly of Connie Willis....

[daegaer.livejournal.com]

I may be misremembering that, and I hope I am, as I hate to think badly of her too!