Feminist firebrand

The suffragettes are largely remembered not as firestarters and bombers but as pale martyrs to patriarchy. The hunger artists refusing the rubber tube; Emily Wilding Davison dying under the King’s horse. We forget their destructive acts aimed at men and property; we remember the more sex-appropriate self-destruction.

Fern Riddell’s flawed book is intended as a corrective. Its subject, Kitty Marion (born Katherine Marie Schäfer in 1871 in Germany), was one of the suffragettes’ most prolific and dedicated practitioners of political violence: possibly a member of Christabel Pankhurst’s elite terror cell the Young Hot Bloods, undoubtedly an arsonist and a very effective one, the veteran of multiple imprisonments and force-feedings.

Marion’s radicalisation started with her abusive father (her mother died when she was two). On one occasion he threatened to break her legs if she behaved in an ‘unladylike manner’; another time he beat her puppy to death in order to show it ‘who was master’. An aunt in London offered an escape. Marion arrived in the city aged 15 and with no English, but within a few years was fluent enough to look for work in the theatre, with a newly anglicised name.

This was when the second act of her radicalisation occurred. Where her father had demanded her total obedience, and punished her with violence, the managers and agents of the music halls demanded her body, and punished her, Weinstein-wise, with career death when she resisted their assaults and spoke out.

This is a compelling tale, most of all when told in the words of Marion’s unpublished autobiography. But for some reason, Riddell has decided that the overarching story of Marion’s life is not the battle of early 20th-century women for the vote, but the contemporary contest between two schools of feminism: the ‘sex-positive’ strand that embraces pornography and prostitution, and the other one, variously described by Riddell as ‘conservative’ and ‘prudish’.