It’s often forgotten in modern times that women’s most basic rights weren’t won prettily or peacefully: the suffragettes‘ campaign for the vote included a coordinated campaign of vandalism against shops, a protracted hunger strike that led to women being forcefed in prison (with some horrific injuries, as one can imagine of turn-of-the-century doctors trying to “safely” forcefeed women gruel with a tube) and the famous Epsom Derby incident. Their protests were often violently broken up by the police (in modern media parlance, “the demonstration turned violent”) and much of British and US society was terrified of this new breed of women (called “modern girls” in Japan) who were willing to do very unlady-like things to get what they believed women deserved.
To the suffragettes’ long list of violent activism we can add the deployment of an organized militia trained in jujitsu: the Guardian today reports on Edith Garrud, a diminutive woman with jujitsu training who was responsible for training Emmeline Parkhurst’s bodyguards[1]. I would be intrigued to read more about this situation, because I guess there were no jujitsuka in Britain at the time, and certainly no white jujitsuka – this means that she must have learnt from a Japanese person who was, one presumes, a Japanese man. Or did Japan also have a secret cadre of highly-trained female jujitsu practitioners? I have visions of a cabal of art nouveau-styled schoolgirl feminist ninjas, deploying jujitsu in defense of … of … ninja things. And teaching it to passing suffragettes.
So there you go – western feminists polished up their violent mojo under the tutelage of the Japanese. Is there a stranger connection in the history of radical politics?
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fn1: never let it be said that feminism and Libyan socialism have no common roots! Just like Gaddafi, the leaders of the suffragette movement had an all-female bodyguard!
July 9, 2012 at 8:10 am
T’was this chap apparently…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sadakazu_Uyenishi
July 10, 2012 at 1:56 pm
wow! And that entry says that the first book on judo in English was by a woman – also a suffragette, I wonder?
April 10, 2013 at 5:01 pm
Jujitsu was introduced to England in 1908 by Edward Barton-Wright, who incorporated that art, along with boxing and walking stick self defense, into his own method called Bartitsu. By the time the Suffrage movement was becoming truly radical, there were several professional instructors in the UK, including Edith Garrud; her main teacher had been Sadakazu Uyenishi but she also trained with Yukio Tani and Taro Miyake, both famous at the time.
The book you referred to was “The Fine Art of Jujutsu” by Emily Watts, who was a free-thinker but not a suffragette.
April 11, 2013 at 11:09 am
Thanks for commenting Forteza, and for the information. I’m interested to know how these women were able to become Jujitsu experts when they weren’t even allowed to vote – was this form of equal opportunity thinking common in the martial arts of the time or was it specific to Bartitsu? And if the latter, do you have any insights into why?
I’ve noticed that different kinds of martial art have different levels of acceptance of women, and this seems to vary by nation. For example, kickboxing in the UK was, in my experience, much less welcoming towards women than it is in Japan or Australia; and most martial arts in Japan are much more equal opportunity than they are in Australia or the UK. Boxing always seems to come near the bottom of this kind of ranking, and kickboxing and many of the weapon arts (kendo, kudo, etc) near the top. So I’m intrigued as to why Bartitsu in 1908 was ahead of most martial arts in the developed world now. Any ideas?
May 16, 2013 at 1:19 pm
Sorry, I missed your response until now.
Between 1899-1902, the Bartitsu Club was literally the only place in the Western world where anyone (male or female) could learn Asian martial arts. Circa 1900 it was very unusual for women to be offered the chance to learn any combat sport/self defense method; Barton-Wright was very progressive in that regard, though it also made good commercial sense to offer classes to women as well as men.
Over the subsequent decade, I think it helped that the “early adopters” of women’s jujitsu in the UK were trendy, upper-middle-class types whose activities were written up in newspapers and magazines. On that basis, and because of its association with progressive causes (feminism and fitness), jujitsu was seen as a morally positive fad – self-improvement being one of the defining popular obsessions of the early 20th century.
With regards to the Suffragette Bodyguard team, this upcoming graphic novel project may be of some interest: http://www.bartitsu.org/index.php/2013/05/mrs-pankhursts-amazons-a-thrilling-tale-of-suffragette-super-heroine/
May 19, 2013 at 6:07 pm
Thanks for the reply Forteza, late is better than never! At the time that Bartitsu was being developed were there many other martial arts in the UK, or was it largely a choice between boxing and jujitsu? In that case Bartitsu would probably have had to distinguish itself from a British “traditional” martial sport, and I suspect appealing to instincts about self-improvement and fitness would have been a good way to go about it. I’m guessing that Bartitsu arrived in Britain before the suffragettes became really big?
I will certainly check out the comic!