In Europe

wide open with major social reforms. This time, Emily Davison was sentenced to two months.
    She became one of the first to wield the new weapon of the powerless: the hunger strike.‘When they locked me in the cell, I smashed seventeen windows right away,’ she wrote to a friend afterwards. ‘Then they threw me into another cell, where everything was bolted down … Then the real gnawing began. I fasted for 124 hours, and they set me free. I lost nineteen pounds and a great deal of muscle. I suppose you're in Switzerland now? Send me some picture postcards.’ On the wall of her cell she had scrawled the following text: ‘Rebellion against tyranny is obedience to God. Emily.’
    After that she was arrested again and again, went on hunger strike once more, was force-fed through a tube and finally attempted to throw herself down the prison stairwell. ‘My idea was, one great tragedy can prevent many more. But the safety net prevented serious injury.’
    Emily's story was not the only one of its kind. Although most of those in the women's movement did their best to remain calm and as rationalas possible, in order to break through the image of the ‘emotional’ female who was unfit ‘by nature’ for business and politics, another part of that movement radicalised in a way that had never been seen before. In the
Suffragette
of 26 December, 1913, I stumbled upon a list of the major polit-actions of that year, 130 in total. The following is a random selection, taken from only a single month:
    2 April: arson at a church in Hampstead Garden; 4 April: a house in Chorley Wood destroyed by fire, a bomb attack at Oxted station, an empty train destroyed by an explosion in Devonport, famous paintings damaged in Manchester; 8 April: an explosion in the grounds of Dudley Castle; a bomb found on the crowded Kingston train; 11 April: a cricket pavilion destroyed in Tunbridge Wells; 12 April: arson at public schools in Gateshead; 19 April: an attempt to sabotage the famous lighthouse at Eddystone; 20 April: an attempt to blow up the offices of the
York Herald
; 26 April: a rail carriage in Teddington destroyed by fire.
    They were gradually becoming highly organised female guerrillas. But after the outbreak of the First World War, it suddenly stopped. The women ceased their attacks, and the government released all female militants. Had things gone differently, how would it have all turned out?
    I was reminded of a doll's house I had seen at the Bethnal Green Museum of Childhood, showing the home of the Loebe family in Kilburn, the whole Edwardian female universe in a nutshell: the bedroom, the busy nursery, the bathroom, the parlour with its grand piano and conservatory, the full dining room with carpets, cupboards, mirrors and knickknacks, the kitchen with a fish on the table and two cats prowling below, everything reduced to a scale of 1:10.
    In that Edwardian world, a family dwelling of this type was the ultimate symbol of the sheltered environment, regularity and eternal routine. Emily and her companions in arms rejected that, and their behaviour may better reflect what was actually happening in the country than all the doll's houses put together. Around 1900, Great Britain was much more modern than the British people themselves wished to admit. All the traditions – the bowler hats, the gentlemen's clubs and burnished walnut institutions – could not hide the fact that the City was filling with female personnel, that women were at work everywhere in thefield of education, that class distinctions were fading and that feudal gentility could not be combined with the equality of modern citizens. The empire's sober, macho values, in other words, collided head-on with the increasing priority given to care, consumption, democracy and women's rights.
    Beneath the surface, from 1900–14, the England of the broad middle classes lacked the manifest cohesion of that doll's house, the inner calm of the cathedral. In the words of Jose Harris it was, in fact, ‘a chaotic and amorphous society, characterised by countless contradictory trends and opinions, and well capable of flying completely off the handle.’ It was, to put it differently, a society in which people at all stages of historical development lived side by side: modern commuters beside villagers who scraped together a living in exactly the same way that their grandparents and great-grandparents had done; Victorian patriarchs beside female academics; colonial conquistadors