What do Just Stop Oil protesters have in common with the suffragettes? Their antics of blocking motorways and chucking tomato soup at famous paintings might lead you to think there are few parallels. But Helen Pankhurst – great-granddaughter of Emmeline – thinks they do share some common ground.
Both groups, Pankhurst suggests, are on the right side of history. In an article for the Guardian, she claims that ‘the climate crisis is a feminist issue’.
‘I have absolutely no doubt that in 100 years’ time (climate activists) will be seen as the real heroes,’ she says.
Like Just Stop Oil, the suffragettes targeted museums, sports events and public buildings to raise the profile of their cause. But contrary to what Pankhurst suggests, the similarities stop there.
The ‘Just’ in ‘Just Stop Oil’ couldn’t be more misleading
Take the decision to vandalise art. Unlike Just Stop Oil, the paintings attacked by the suffragettes had an ideological significance. When Mary Richardson took out a meat cleaver and slashed one of the world’s most famous nudes – Velázquez’s Rokeby Venus – her motive was crystal clear:
‘I have tried to destroy the picture of the most beautiful woman in mythological history as a protest against the Government for destroying Mrs Pankhurst, who is the most beautiful character in modern history. Justice is an element of beauty as much as colour and outline on canvas.’
Her choice of painting back in 1914 was a clarion call, not just for Pankhurst, but for women to be seen as more than mere ornaments.
Compare this clear-sightedness to the bemusing pronouncements of Just Stop Oil, and you start to see just how muddled the campaign’s group’s messaging is. The group might have made waves on TikTok, but Just Stop Oil couldn’t articulate a convincing reason for throwing soup over Van Gogh’s Sunflowers: ‘Fuel is unaffordable…and hungry families can’t even afford to heat a tin of soup,’ they said in a statement afterwards.
But where Just Stop Oil really distinguishes itself from the suffragettes is in the vastness of its goal. Suffragists, who believed in more peaceful, constitutional campaign methods, pursued a single change in the law – one that cost legislators little, but whose societal impact was immeasurable. The cause cut through to the public because it was both simple and achievable.
Just Stop Oil has tried in vain to do the same. It has distilled the generalised talk of a climate emergency popularised by Extinction Rebellion into one seemingly simple aim: the abandonment of fossil fuels. But demanding the country gives up fossil fuels in the middle of a cost-of-living crisis is not just tin eared; it’s unrealistic. The ‘Just’ in ‘Just Stop Oil’ couldn’t be more misleading.
The suffragist movement was far more pragmatic. Millicent Fawcett was astute enough to realise that pragmatism trumped idealism when it came to gaining the vote: ‘We would greatly prefer an imperfect scheme that can pass to the most perfect scheme in the world that could not pass,’ she said in 1917.
Contrast this with the language of Just Stop Oil’s activists, which becomes more hyperbolic by the day. Just yesterday, protestors from a group called Last Generation Austria threw black ink over a Klimt painting in Vienna. ‘We are racing into a climate hell,’ the protesters declared.
While Fawcett painted an upbeat picture of a brighter future where women would have ‘a wider intellectual horizon…and more dignity and happiness in their lives’, Just Stop Oil focuses on the doom and gloom of today. This failure to spell out what the future could look like if the country carried out its aims is yet another reason why its message isn’t winning over the public – that, and getting stuck for hours on the M25.
Instead of aping the protests of the suffragettes, Just Stop Oil could learn from them. It was arguably Millicent Fawcett’s patient lobbying of parliament through the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies that shifted the dial on votes for women – more so than the visceral protests of Pankhurst.
Before management consultants even coined the phrase, the suffragist movement succeeded thanks to a Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound goal. Just Stop Oil would do well to find one of its own.
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