British Suffrage Social Movement Theories

First, in the Bouvard reading about the Madres, they were loudly standing up against a government that was oppressing them, like the British suffragettes. Also, Bouvard states that “From the beginning they were criticized for their stridency and hysteria, castigated because they defied the cultural norms of femininity and because they assumed a more extreme and autonomous position in a society where dissent was portrayed as socially pathological and revolutionary” (82). This relates to the British suffrage movement as well. In a secondary source I found, the author states, “[M]ilitancy...meant challenging the conventional expectation that women should be submissive and compliant, accepting the political status quo; women, she believed, had to be more assertive and should force the issue of women’s enfranchisement into male party politics” (1201). It seems that in both the Madres movement and British suffrage movement, women defied social norms and protested in order to force change to happen.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/09612025.2019.1654638

I could also use Cathcart’s and Carlson’s articles which kind of debate the use of the tragic or comic frames in social movements. I think that the British suffrage movement was both comic and tragic depending on what time, and which side of the movement, you look at. The big divide here is between the militant suffragettes and the peaceful suffragists, the former of which we can look at in the tragic frame and the latter comic. I think it could be useful to look at both Carlson and Cathcart’s views on these dramatic frames because of this.

I think that it could also be useful to look at Griffin’s 3 “phases of development” for movements and his idea of “pro movements” and “anti movements.” I could be wrong, but the pro and anti movements sounds similar or related to the idea of comic and tragic frames. In that sense, the British suffrage movement could have been a pro movement with the peaceful suffragists and an anti movement with the violent suffragettes. Griffin defines anti movement as a rhetorical attempt is made “to arouse public opinion to the destruction or rejection of an existing institution or idea.” When Parliament repeatedly shot down bills for women’s suffrage, the suffragettes started rejecting the government and used violence--like bombing the houses of multiple members of Parliament.