My great-great-aunt was a terrorist: women’s politics went beyond the vote | Ash Sarkar
My great-great-aunt was a terrorist. I’m not talking about the sense in which the pacifist Mahatma Gandhi was branded a terrorist by the British parliament in 1932: Pritilata Waddedar was an active participant in armed struggle against the British state. She supplied explosives. She fired a gun. And I’m proud of it.
As Tuesday marks 100 years since some British women were given the right to vote, now is the time to consider the impact of imperialism on women’s suffrage, and the crucial role played by women in anticolonial movements. The fight for equal participation was bigger than expansion of the franchise.
The Representation of the People Act 1918, which granted voting rights to property-owning women over 30,. In the words of suffragist Millicent Fawcett: “The war revolutionised the industrial position of women.” Just 2,000 women worked in government dockyards, factories and arsenals in 1914; by the time of the armistice, this number had grown to almost a quarter of a million.
