Protesting Like A Girl Embodiment, Dissent and Feminist Agency

03 Parkins (mh/d) (FT) 6/3/00 9:41 am Page 59
59
Protesting like a girl

Embodiment, dissent and feminist agency FT
Feminist Theory
Copyright © 2000
SAGE Publications
(London,
Thousand Oaks, CA
and New Delhi)
vol. 1(1): 59–78.
[1464-7001
(200004) 1:1;
Wendy Parkins Murdoch University 59–78; 012011]
Abstract This article examines feminist agency in the light of Merleau-

Ponty’s phenomenological account of the body subject. Stressing the
importance of embodiment to feminist agency (without reifying an
essential female body), I argue that bodies inhabit specific social,
historical and discursive contexts which shape our corporeal experience
and our opportunities for political contestation. Beginning with the
assertion that we cannot think of agency without the body, I examine a
historical instance of feminist agency in which women’s bodies were
central to the articulation of political dissent, namely the British
suffragette movement. In particular, I focus on the suffragette career of
Mary Leigh and argue that it represents a feminist agency derived from
corporeal performance. Through daring acts of protest which drew
attention to the comportment and capacities of their bodies, suffragettes
like Leigh contested the constitution of the political domain and the
nature of citizenship.
keywords citizenship, corporeality, performance, phenomenology,
suffragette movement
Nancy Fraser has succinctly outlined the ‘problem’ of women’s agency

within feminist theory:
. . . we have often opted for theories that emphasize the constraining power of
gender structures and norms, while downplaying the resisting capacities of indi-
viduals and groups. On the other hand, feminists have also sought to inspire
women’s activism by recovering lost or socially invisible traditions of resistance
in the past and present. . . . The net result of these conflicting tendencies is the
following dilemma: either we limit the structural constraints of gender so well
that we deny women any agency or we portray women’s agency so glowingly that
the power of subordination evaporates. Either way, what we often seem to lack is
a coherent, integrated, balanced conception of agency, a conception that can
accommodate both the power of social constraints and the capacity to act situat-
edly against them. (1992b: 17; original emphasis)
This article is an attempt to rethink the political agency of women, and
specifically feminist agency, in the light of Fraser’s concerns. I begin with
60 Feminist Theory 1(1)
the assertion that we cannot think of political agency in abstraction from

embodiment and I go on to outline the influence of Maurice Merleau-
Ponty’s phenomenology of the body on my consideration of feminist
agency. I then delineate the context of the British suffragette movement,
which placed great emphasis on female embodiment in the campaign for
the vote.1 In particular, I examine the suffragette career of Mary Leigh as
an instance of embodied feminist agency. It is not my contention that em-
bodied political agency is the unique provenance of women. Rather, through
returning to the historical example of women’s dissent at the beginning of
the century, I examine how an emphasis on embodiment in practices of
political dissent was politically enabling for women.
Agency and embodiment

Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s The Phenomenology of Perception emphasizes
our experience as embodied subjects in the world (1962: 204). For Merleau-
Ponty the body is our ‘anchorage in the world’ (1962: 144); it is ‘what opens
me out upon the world and places me in a situation there’ (1962: 165).
Merleau-Ponty also emphasizes the significance of ‘habit’ for human
agency (1962: 144–6). By habit, Merleau-Ponty does not imply the kind of
passivity associated with custom or with animal instinct (1962: 146). Habit
‘has its abode neither in thought nor in the objective body [body as object],
but in the body as mediator of the world’ (1962: 145). Arising from our own
history of personal acts in particular situations, habits develop which give
us ‘stable dispositional tendencies’ which are not fixed and immutable –
we can and do change – but rather give us resources for acting meaning-
fully in the world through the ‘expressive space’ that is our body (1962:
146). Habits are the basis of our agency: they provide us with the resources
to confront the exigencies of life (1962: 146). It is in the interface between
our mode(s) of bodily being and the specificity of a given situation that we
act meaningfully: we endow meaning on ourselves and our (material and
cultural) situation.2 Our situated-ness in the world marks the indetermi-
nacy of human existence (we don’t know with any certainty what will
happen next here) but at the same time provides the very possibility of our
agency (we face what happens next with our own history of how we have
acted in other situations). While Merleau-Ponty does not use the term
‘agency’, instead utilizing the vocabulary of existential phenomenology
and referring to ‘transcendence’, ‘power’ or ‘freedom’, his discussion of our
capacity to take up and transform a given situation (1962: 169) has great
potential for an account of feminist agency.3 The usefulness of Merleau-
Ponty’s understanding of the ‘body as an effective agent and thereby as the
very basis of human subjectivity’ (Crossley, 1995: 44–5) lies in his con-
tention that meaningful action is possible and that it is made possible in/by
the body as we find ourselves located in a ‘physical and social world’.
Merleau-Ponty’s theory of the body-subject is not, of course, virgin terri-
tory for feminist theory. Seeking alternatives to a Cartesian dualist subject,
feminist theorists have turned to Merleau-Ponty on a number of occasions.
As Elizabeth Grosz has stated, ‘As one of the few more or less contempor-
ary theorists committed to the primacy of experience, Merleau-Ponty is in
Parkins: Protesting like a girl 61
a unique position to provide a depth and sophistication to feminist

attempts to harness experience in political evaluation’ (1994: 94). As early
as 1989, Judith Butler concluded that ‘a feminist appropriation of Merleau-
Ponty is doubtless in order’ (1989: 98) but feminists have been critical of
his failure to acknowledge sexual specificity. The omission of sexual differ-
ence from Merleau-Ponty’s account of the embodied subject is, of course, a
serious one which warrants attention. Perhaps the most sustained critique
of this aspect of his account is that by Butler in ‘Sexual Ideology and
Phenomenological Description: A Feminist Critique of Merleau-Ponty’s
Phenomenology of Perception’. ‘Although Merleau-Ponty intends to describe
the universal structures of bodily existence’, writes Butler, ‘the concrete
examples he provides reveal the impossibility of that project’ (1989: 95):
Aided by a methodology that fails to acknowledge the historicity of sexuality and

of bodies, [Merleau-Ponty’s version of lived experience] commits the fallacy of
misplaced concreteness, giving life to abstractions, and draining life from exist-
ing individuals in concrete contexts. (1989: 98)
While Butler concludes that it should be possible for a feminist appro-

priation of Merleau-Ponty to offer accounts of embodied subjects which are
both sexually specific and historicized, subsequent feminist engagements
with Merleau-Ponty have not really borne this out. Iris Marion Young’s
phenomenological essays in Throwing Like a Girl considered aspects of
women’s bodily existence from the Merleau-Pontian assumption that ‘it is
the ordinary purposive orientation of the body as a whole toward things
and its environment that initially defines the relation of a subject to its
world’ (1990: 143). Young found, however, that female-specific forms of
embodiment such as pregnancy exposed the limitations of Merleau-Ponty’s
delineation of a unified subject (1990: 161). More recently, within what
Claire Colebrook has called ‘the Australian project of corporeal feminism’
(forthcoming: 10), there has been a sustained engagement with the work of
Merleau-Ponty and its possibilities for feminism. Rosalyn Diprose, in her
examination of biomedical ethics and women’s bodies, draws heavily on
Merleau-Ponty’s emphasis on the lived body’s engagement with others in
the world but concludes that ‘to the extent that phenomenology views a
change in the body’s integrity negatively as disruption and deviation from
the norm, [it cannot] account for the flexibility of our being-in-the-world:
the self-creativity inherent in corporeal change’ (1994: 116–17). Cathryn
Vasseleu, in her fertile exploration of metaphors of vision and touch Tex-
tures of Light, writes positively of the impact of Merleau-Ponty’s phenom-
enological project which has yielded ‘original and provocative analyses of
embodiment’ (1998: 25) but ultimately supports Irigaray’s critique that
Merleau-Ponty subordinates the tactile to the economy of the visual (1998:
68). Grosz includes Merleau-Ponty as a possible resource for her project of
a feminist philosophy of the body (1994: 21) but concludes in Volatile
Bodies that Merleau-Ponty’s inability to address the question of sexual
difference means that ‘Feminists need to seriously question whether
phenomenological descriptions are appropriate for women’s experience
and, if they are not, whether it is desirable that they should be’ (1994: 111).
In her later work, Butler leaves phenomenological accounts of the

embodied subject entirely behind and instead offers an account of perfor-
mativity which is ‘the discursive mode by which ontological effects are
established’ and which thus ‘contest[s] the very notion of the subject’
(1996: 112). This shift away from a theory of embodied subjectivity results
in a radically different account of agency, which is also, for Butler, discur-
sively constituted: ‘Construction is not opposed to agency; it is the neces-
sary scene of agency, the very terms in which agency is articulated and
becomes culturally intelligible’ (Butler, 1990: 147). In Bodies That Matter,
Butler expands on this account of agency as citationality, contrasting it with
a view derived from a metaphysical conception of the subject in which
agency is synonymous with ‘voluntarism or individualism’ (1993: 15). This
dichotomy between either a voluntarist subject or a discursively-constituted
one is precisely the point at which I would argue that a feminist appropri-
ation of Merleau-Ponty’s body-subject may be most useful. As Vasseleu
states, Merleau-Ponty insists on a subject whose ‘body is a locus of inten-
tionality that is essential to all conscious experience’ (Vasseleu, 1998: 22)
and who, through the body, is situated, anchored, confronted with the
world in which it has the capacity to make meaning.4 Intentionality does
not precede performance, however, as in the voluntarist view of the subject,
so much as it is bound up in the very performance; the action of the body
represents a kind of horizon of intentionality for Merleau-Ponty which is
realized only in the performance itself. Intentionality ‘is understood as the
ability of a body to direct itself towards, establish linkages with or act and
locate itself in relation to a world, not as the action of a guiding con-
sciousness’ (Vasseleu, 1998: 22; my emphasis).
Understood in this sense, subjectivity and agency arise out of the experi-
ence of embodiment located and engaged in a specific material and his-
torical situation. The subject in Merleau-Ponty’s account is not ‘outside
social, political, historical and cultural forces’, as Grosz concedes (1994:
94): it is, precisely, constituted. Subjectivity cannot be thought of as exist-
ing in a vacuum, un-situated, nor as existing in isolation from the body;
rather, subjectivity arises from the experience of embodiment in both time
and space. So it is not the case that ascribing to subjects pre-existing agency
is the only alternative to Butler’s concept of performativity as the means by
which ontological effects are established. It is rather that we cannot think
of agency without the body. As Susan Dwyer expresses it: ‘We cannot make
sense of the notion of agency simpliciter without taking note of embodied
subjectivity’ (1998: 33).
Body politics
If we begin with a notion of agency as necessarily embodied, what does this
mean for political agency? In ‘Contingent Foundations: Feminism and the
Question of Postmodernism’, Butler asks, ‘Do we need to assume theoretic-
ally from the start a subject with agency before we can articulate the terms
of a significant social and political task of transformation, resistance, radical
democratization?’ (1992: 13; original emphasis). Traditional liberal accounts
precisely assumed political subjects whose agency derived from their legal
entitlement to political participation. This entitlement was based on prop-
erty rights, not merely over material goods but over one’s person and will;
it was these proprietal rights based in the self which established the subject’s
status as self-governing (Yeatman, forthcoming). Historically, those (such as
women and the working class) who wanted to transform, resist and radi-
cally democratize, to paraphrase Butler, were deemed to lack this necessary
capacity for self-government and could not therefore participate in the
political domain: they were not citizens, and therefore did not possess politi-
cal agency. As Carole Pateman puts it: ‘Women lack neither strength nor
ability in a general sense, but, according to the classic contract theorists,
they are naturally deficient in a specifically political capacity, the capacity
to create and maintain political right’ (1988: 96; original emphasis).
When women sought enfranchisement, therefore, the problem was how
to intervene in the political domain to voice their demands when they were
not recognized as political subjects with a concomitant capacity for politi-
cal participation. While agitation for women’s enfranchisement preceded
the suffragette campaign, it was the suffragettes, I would argue, who pro-
vided an ingenious solution to this problem: they refigured political agency
as based on performance rather than entitlement. Suffragettes did not simply
act to become citizens or act like citizens, they acted citizenship. (We need
a verb in English meaning ‘to citizen’.) Whereas traditional formulations of
citizenship in the bourgeois public sphere were informed by ‘rhetorics of
disincorporation’, in Michael Warner’s words, in which claims to self-
abstracting disinterestedness were in fact only valid when made by certain
subjects (white, male, propertied) entitled to enter public discourse
(Warner, 1992: 382), the suffragette performance of citizenship insisted on
particularity as/at their point of entry into the political domain: it was as
embodied women citizens that suffragettes sought enfranchisement.5
The British suffragette movement had a historical precedent in the
women of the French Revolution who, though formally disqualified from
citizenship, nevertheless continued to perform politics, to constitute them-
selves as political women (see Landes, 1996: 302–5).6 In their performance
of citizenship, which featured spectacular and daring feats of activism, suf-
fragettes enacted a feminist agency which worked in three ways: it sub-
verted dominant constructions of citizenship as exclusively masculine and
primarily deliberative; it kept the women’s cause at the forefront of public
attention and debate; and it provided them with a powerful sense of their
own bodily capacities, forming the basis of the women’s self-proclaimed
status as suffragettes.7
The performance of citizenship, of course, did not in itself constitute
legal recognition or political inclusion and this remained the primary aim
of the suffragettes. In drawing attention to the embodied performance
which characterized so much of their protest, I am not suggesting that suf-
fragettes did not share any of the assumptions of modern liberalism. In their
rhetoric, suffragettes consistently articulated their knowledge of the forms
and rights of citizenship while their activism subverted the discourse of
citizenship: claiming the entitlements of modern democratic citizenship,
they were determined to take creative, dangerous or illegal action in order

to achieve them. Emmeline Pethick Lawrence’s 1908 editorial in the suf-
fragette newspaper, Votes for Women, captured this dual sense of citizen-
ship in terms of rights and dissent:
The House of Commons, ‘the People’s House’, is closed to us. If we send a depu-
tation, the police bar the way. If we persist in the attempt to effect an entrance,
we are arrested and imprisoned. We cannot see [a Cabinet Minister] on our politi-
cal business at his private house. If we write for an appointment we are refused.
If we ring his door bell, we are arrested and thrown into prison. The only place
where women can see the public servants of this country who have usurped tyran-
nical power over them is when these public servants face a public meeting. (Votes
for Women, 1908: 360)
Pethick Lawrence’s editorial was in defence of the suffragette practice of

asking questions at party political meetings, usually heckling and interject-
ing during the speeches in order to attract maximum attention. The suf-
fragettes’ performance of citizenship while they were technically excluded
from the polity can be understood as ‘dissident citizenship’ which Holloway
Sparks describes as:
the practices of marginalized citizens who publicly contest prevailing arrange-

ments of power by means of oppositional democratic practices that augment or
replace institutionalized channels of democratic opposition when those channels
are inadequate or unavailable. . . . Dissident citizenship, in other words, encom-
passes the often creative oppositional practices of citizens who, either by choice
or (much more commonly) by forced exclusion from the institutionalized means
of opposition, contest current arrangements of power from the margins of the
polity. (Sparks, 1997: 75)
The practice of interjecting at political meetings is illustrative of the cre-

ativeness of dissident citizenship which, in ‘address[ing] the wider polity
in order to change minds, challenge practices, or even reconstitute the very
boundaries of the political itself’ as Sparks puts it (1997: 75), must first of
all attract a public audience to persuade.8 Of course, such behaviour ran
the risk of being classified as simply illegitimate, of proving that women
were in fact not fit to be citizens because they did not follow the rules, and
this charge was levelled at the suffragettes throughout their campaign. But,
as Sparks argues, dissident citizenship needs to be recognized as a vital
form of legitimate political participation, as part of a recognition that ‘dis-
cursive contestation and dissent’ are ‘at the heart of citizenship along with
deliberation’ (1997: 87); in short, that the political agency of dissidents is
the agency of citizens (1997: 100).
Such a reconceptualization of citizenship, which assumes an irreducible
aspect of conflict within the political domain, is at odds with accounts of
citizenship which concentrate solely on citizen deliberation (Sparks, 1997:
75). Chantal Mouffe’s contention that ‘Politics is about the constitution of
the political community, not something that takes place inside the politi-
cal community’ (1992: 30) is well illustrated by the suffragette campaign of
activism and the state’s violent responses to it.9 In the case of the suf-
fragettes, where contestation centred on who was entitled to citizenship,
their forms of protest effectively challenged the boundaries of the political

by throwing open to question what would count as public and what as
private.10 The wearing of the WSPU colours of purple, white and green, for
instance, which became so popular that department stores like Selfridges
even devoted whole window displays to these colours, signified a recon-
figuration of apparently-fixed demarcations between politics, fashion and
consumption and allowed women to construct practices of conventional
femininity as political.11 Suffragette attacks on apparently private insti-
tutions such as golf courses – in order to write slogans like ‘Votes before
Sport’ in sulphuric acid on the putting greens – also contested what
counted as political. As an editorial in The Suffragette argued: ‘After all, a
golfer is a man and a citizen, and because he is a man and a citizen he is
responsible for the way in which the Government are [sic] treating the
women and the Women’s Cause’ (21 February 1913).
In the suffragette movement, political dissent involved embodied sub-
jects whose participation in the ‘ruptures and uncertainties which mark
democratic politics’ (Honig, 1993: 4) frequently put them at physical risk;
as Sparks asserts, courage is ‘a central component of participatory citizen-
ship’ (1997: 94). When even displaying the suffragette colours could incite
physical attack (Richardson, 1953: 53–5), dissident citizenship was a risky
business. Violent assault at street protests at the hands of both spectators
and police became increasingly common while imprisonment, with hunger
striking and forcible feeding, became the defining suffragette experience
(Mayhall, 1995). Emily Davison’s fatal protest at the Derby is perhaps the
best-known single incident of suffragette courage, although the intention
and efficacy of her protest remains contentious.12 But it is her close col-
league, Mary Leigh, who best exemplifies courageous dissident citizenship
and whose protests enacted a distinctive form of feminist agency in which
female bodily performance was constructed as political contestation.
Leigh’s career reminds us that political practice is ‘disruptive, agonistic,
and, most important, never over’ (Honig, 1993: 9).
The feminist agency of Mary Leigh

By 1912, Leigh, of working-class background, had had a distinguished
career as a suffragette – beginning with organizing work in Lancashire in
1907 – and had been imprisoned nine times.13 She was the first suffragette,
with Edith New, to smash windows, for which she received wide recog-
nition in the WSPU;14 she had been one of the first to be forcibly fed and
subsequently sued both the prison authorities and the Home Secretary for
assault (unsuccessfully); and she had staged a number of daring protests
requiring physical agility and strength. But perhaps the most noteworthy
passage of Leigh’s suffragette career occurred in Dublin in 1912 where
Leigh received a five-year prison sentence for attempted arson, part of the
protests staged during a visit by Asquith (see discussion later).
I have argued elsewhere that suffragette reportage played a remarkable
role in constructing a distinctive suffragette body, in contradistinction to
the mainstream press in which suffragette bodies were usually emphasized
as sites of criminality, madness and disorder (see Parkins, 1997; Young,

1988). In the case of Mary Leigh, this emphasis on a particular corporeal-
ity was especially marked because of the high profile of her actions and the
relative silence of the woman. Despite the fact that Leigh was apparently
an accomplished public speaker who ably defended herself at trial on more
than one occasion, there is a marked discrepancy between the communi-
cative power of her embodied protest and the self-effacement of the pro-
tester. In narratives, tributes and photographs of Leigh, it was Leigh’s body
which was singled out for attention: its strength, agility, deportment and
dress represent a feminist agency derived from corporeal performance. In
considering some of these accounts of Leigh, I will show how these bodily
signifiers of feminist agency not only worked effectively to promote the suf-
fragette cause and inspire other women’s activism, but to construct Leigh
as the exemplary suffragette.
In 1909, Leigh instigated two similar protests, which attracted wide pub-
licity and comment and gave her a considerable public profile. On 20
August 1909, Richard Haldane, a Cabinet Minister in the Liberal govern-
ment, was to address a party-political meeting at the Sun Hall in Liverpool.
Women were no longer admitted to such meetings, given the impact of the
militant campaign of heckling and interjecting, so suffragettes had to resort
to other tactics in order to make their presence felt in the political domain.
In the previous month, Leigh had still managed to interject at a Cabinet
Minister’s meeting in Nottingham, via a megaphone, ‘which issued from an
overlooking window conveniently close to the hall’ (Votes for Women 1909:
1011). The Liverpool protest, however, was more intrepid. Leigh climbed
to the vantage point of the roof of a house opposite the Sun Hall and, with
the aid of other suffragettes in the house below, threw roof slates and bricks
at the windows of the hall until a police officer clambered on to the roof to
apprehend her. The Liverpool Courier recorded that:
Window-panes fell one after another before the unerring shots of the attacking
force. . . . [The women] devoted themselves to handing up bricks and stones to
their comrade on the roof [Leigh], and she transferred them through the windows
of the Sun Hall with a dexterity which was nothing short of marvellous. . . . The
officers commented upon the remarkable agility and daring which she must have
displayed to reach this extraordinary position for attack. (quoted in Votes for
Women, 1909: 1111)
The grudging admiration for Leigh’s bodily strength and agility – the
remarkable fact that she did not throw like a girl – was juxtaposed in press
accounts with a deep anxiety about the agency of such a vigorous female
body. For instance, the Liverpool Daily Post stated that:
The gentle being who carried out this wicked and abominable outrage, according
to one of the officers who took part in the unpleasant and dangerous work of secur-
ing her, ‘fought more like a cat upon the tiles than a human being’. (quoted in
Votes for Women, 1909: 1110)15
The transmogrification of Leigh in this account – from gentle being to cat

– is emblematic of a certain slippage in the press accounts whereby the suf-
fragettes are both ‘militant and daring’ and ‘viragos’ and ‘hooligans’ (quoted
in Votes for Women, 1909: 1110, 1111). As Moira Gatens has noted, ‘Women
who step outside their allotted place in the body politic are frequently
abused with terms . . . that make clear that if [they attempt] to speak from
the political body, about the political body, [their] speech is not recognised
as human speech’ (1996: 24).
The inconsistency of tone in press reports is matched by inconsistencies
in descriptions of Leigh’s body in these protests: she is variously agile and
dextrous, or a ‘frail figure of a little woman, peeping out from behind a
chimney stack’ (Liverpool Courier, quoted in Votes for Women, 1909: 1110).
Nevertheless, it is the corporeality of Leigh’s protest which is central to its
efficacy: the precarious rooftop position which enables the breaking of
windows represents both her capacity to dissent and her exclusion as a
woman from the political. She is, in a sense, simultaneously frail and vig-
orous. Her frailty stems both from cultural constructions of femininity and
from her lack of legal entitlement to citizenship which rendered her vulner-
able to juridical prohibitions.16 In the liberal body politic, women had no
political agency.17 Within this construction of the body politic, Leigh’s
protest was illegitimate before she had even hurled a roof slate because the
specificity of her body excluded her from the political. In this instance,
however, Leigh’s body was also vigorous because her unconventionally ath-
letic protest deliberately drew attention to her female body while she
insisted on her right to participate in the political domain, an insistence
which could not be ignored by the ‘legitimate’ citizenry (especially if they
were standing in the street below!).
After a term of imprisonment (shortened by hunger strike), Leigh
repeated her rooftop strategy in September 1909, this time in Birmingham
during a visit by the Prime Minister.18 Despite extraordinary security pre-
cautions (including barricading and evacuating all streets surrounding
Bingley Hall where Asquith was to speak), suffragettes were ensconced in
houses adjacent to the hall on the day of the meeting. Votes for Women gave
this account of the protest:
Suddenly there was a sound of splintering glass, and a voice was heard denounc-
ing the Government. Two windows of the outer office of Bingley Hall had been
broken by the women in the house opposite. Literally dozens of policemen rushed
into the house . . . and, dragging the two women out, they threw them into the
street, where they were immediately arrested. Scarcely a minute passed before
there was another shout, and more glass splintering, accompanied by the sound of
missiles being thrown on to the roof of the hall. This time it was on the other side
of the hall; two women [Mary Leigh and Charlotte Marsh] had succeeded in climb-
ing on to a neighbouring roof, from which, with the help of axes, they managed to
dislodge some slates, which they flung on to the roof of the hall, and on to Mr
Asquith’s motor-car. . . . The police and stewards below, finding it impossible to
dislodge the acrobats, turned the hose on them; still they did not budge. Then the
outwitted and furious men hurled stones and bricks at their plucky antagonists;
for some time they withstood even this, but presently three policemen managed to
climb round at the back, and dragged them bruised and bleeding to the ground,
one of them with her head cut open by a brick [Marsh]. Wet, wounded and weary
they were led off to the police-station, being forced to walk the whole way in their
stockinged feet, in spite of the injuries they sustained. (1909: 1206)
The mainstream press was, of course, less glowing in its treatment of this
politically-motivated disruption of Asquith’s speech, depicting Leigh and
Marsh as ‘maniacs’ who carried out a ‘frenzied’ attack on the Prime Minis-
ter, police and bystanders (Daily Telegraph and Daily News, quoted in
Votes for Women, 1909: 1208, 1209).19 As in the Liverpool protest, the two
suffragettes turned their parlous position to their advantage, at least tem-
porarily, by attracting the maximum amount of attention to the event and
making it difficult for the authorities to stop their activities on the roof. The
women’s agency here is juxtaposed with the impotence of the police who,
in an interesting reversal, resorted to replicating the suffragette tactic of
stone-throwing against the women themselves. The eventual arrest of Leigh
and Marsh, however, not only curtailed a striking display of feminist
agency but sought to reduce the women’s bodies to objects of passive
display by forcing them to walk through the crowds in clinging wet clothes,
a humiliation which the Votes for Women account stressed (1909: 1206).
The sight of dishevelled, wet, barefoot and bleeding women must have
been a reassuring sign of feminine incapacity to those anxious about the
capacities of strong, active suffragette bodies.
Leigh’s capacities for protest were perhaps most severely tested in Dublin
in 1912, when she faced charges for hurling a hatchet into Asquith’s car-
riage20 and, the same day, setting fire to the Theatre Royal.21 Her trials were
reported verbatim in Votes for Women, treatment usually reserved for trials
involving the WSPU leaders, and her five-year term was widely believed
to be a death sentence because Leigh had made it clear she would hunger
strike, as she had done in the past. She was in fact released on licence from
Mountjoy Prison after serving only six weeks of her sentence: she weighed
a mere 5 stone 4 pounds and prison authorities believed she was on the
point of death. Leigh could neither walk nor speak but managed to request
a telegram be sent immediately to her mother which read ‘No surrender’
(Votes for Women, 1912: 828). Some of the reportage of Leigh at this time
was decidedly eulogistic and one anonymous article included the follow-
ing description:
There is something about Mrs. Leigh that suggests a daughter of the regiment. Her
upright carriage, and her precision of movement seem as though they must be the
result of military drilling, though we believe they are natural to her. This com-
plete harmony of organisation – the well-disciplined body so evidently the
servant of the mind – is one of her most noticeable characteristics. Her agility,
coupled with great physical courage, enables Mrs. Leigh to perform feats very sur-
prising to less adventurous colleagues. (Votes for Women, 1912: 749)
This description of Leigh offers us the suffragette body as disciplined rather
than disorderly, self-controlled rather than hysterical, and understands
Leigh’s political dissent through the feats and morphology of her body, even
as it resorts to a dualist discourse. The capacity of Leigh’s body to com-
municate dissent, as well as courage and endurance, powerfully interpel-
lated other suffragettes to identify with her commitment to the cause,
despite an insistence on Leigh’s uniqueness.22
The military bearing emphasized in this description was a common rep-
resentation of Leigh in the WSPU and was due in part to Leigh’s role as
drum major of the WSPU drum and fife band, formed in 1909. It may be
difficult now to see a uniformed band as a form of feminist protest but the
drum and fife band was of great symbolic significance for suffragettes and
non-suffragettes alike. Not only did its capacity to draw large crowds into
the streets make it an effective means of suffragette publicity but it also pro-
vided suffragettes with another opportunity to command public urban
space in a way which had formerly been exclusive to men. Mainstream
press accounts of the band’s first appearance stressed that this was the final
marker of men’s superfluity (quoted in Votes for Women, 1909: 693) and
expressed suspicion that women were actually capable of such a perform-
ance: ‘So great was the surprise at seeing women thus equipped and thus
able to march with military precision that some onlookers questioned
whether they were not boys in disguise’ (Yeoman, Vol. II). An all-woman
band, drilled to military precision and wearing uniforms in the WSPU
colours, provided suffragettes with a visual representation of a collective
feminist agency. Photographs of Leigh in her drum major uniform – holding
the silver mace, staring defiantly at the camera and saluting – which
appeared in Votes for Women and were sold as postcards, offered a power-
ful singular embodiment of this agency. Leigh as suffragette soldier was also
consistent with the WSPU’s recurrent representation of the campaign in
terms of warfare, from appropriating Joan of Arc as a kind of patron saint
to explicitly designating the later campaign of property destruction as
‘Guerrilla Warfare’.23
The body of Leigh in such photographs and descriptions – its dress, com-
portment, gesture and morphology – reiterated meanings associated with
military discourse (duty, courage, strength) in order to signify commitment
to the cause: the salute offered a corporeal metaphor for the motivation
behind all the diverse forms of protest associated with the suffragettes. The
connotation of blind obedience and devotion to duty at the expense of the
individual which the military salute evokes is, however, confounded by
Leigh’s own history in the movement. There is still debate about the extent
to which guerrillas like Leigh operated on their own initiative without the
leadership’s knowledge or approval and Leigh’s drum major photographs,
far from denoting passive obedience, could have signified to contemporary
viewers the need for ongoing resistance, for contestation even within the
movement itself.24 In Butler’s terms, Leigh’s salute is an instance of
citationality, a reiterative practice which relies on the discourse of mili-
tarism for its effect but which, in its very reiteration by a woman engaged
in an overtly feminist campaign, co-opts and transforms the citation as a
strategy of dissent. Butler locates agency in this kind of reiterative practice
which is immanent to power (1993: 15) but Lois McNay has criticized a
tendency in Butler’s work to valorize ‘resignification per se as inherently
subversive’ (1999: 181). Leigh’s gesture signifies contestation only when it
is understood within the historicity of the suffragette campaign and Leigh’s
previous actions and statements. That is, the salute becomes a meaningful
action, in this case, an action which contests the construction of the politi-
cal, through the expressive space of Leigh’s body and its proven capacities
for endurance and resistance.25
McNay’s critique of Butler’s account of agency as ‘abstract potentiality’

which can only explain ‘the private realm of individual action’ (1999: 189)
means that McNay insists on the need for conceptualizing agency as
‘embedded practices’, which make social change possible at a collective
level (1999: 183, 189). This insight is an important addition to the account
offered here of agency as embodied practices. In the case of Mary Leigh,
her ‘military’ bearing and physical capacities were the embodied practices
– the ‘habits’, in Merleau-Ponty’s terms – on which her feminist agency was
based, enabling a ‘creativity of action’ which ‘detaches itself from its orig-
inal conditions of enactment and may give rise to a set of new values which
become resources for further action’ (McNay, 1999: 189). While Leigh’s suf-
fragette colleague described these qualities as ‘natural to her’ we might
more usefully consider Leigh’s dispositional tendencies as the resources
with which she staged political protest, resources which had accrued over
a lifetime of corporeal experience and which, when acted out in the politi-
cal domain, effectively contested the constitution of that domain.26 This
contestation was based on the disjuncture between Leigh as embodied, dis-
senting female subject and the liberal political subject, construed as
rational, deliberative and, by implication, masculine. Leigh’s feminist
agency began with her body – her anchorage in the world – and the esca-
lation of Leigh’s tactics illustrates how the embodied subject takes up and
transforms a given situation. Even during imprisonment and hunger strik-
ing, Leigh continued to express dissent through the comportment and
capacities of her body; in short, to embody feminist agency.
The exigencies of situation, then, provided Leigh with the means for
embodied protest which continually interrogated and challenged the
boundaries of the political and the constitution of citizenship. In the prac-
tice of hunger striking, that practice most exemplary of suffragette self-
discipline, for instance, suffragettes like Leigh expressed their protest
exclusively through their bodies. Such protest insisted on the suffragettes’
status as embodied political subjects: they framed their hunger strike in
political terms and understood their bodies as a powerful means of dissent.
Maud Ellmann has speculated that the suffragette practice of hunger strik-
ing was an expression of an unconscious desire for the disintegration of self
(1993: 2, 35) but in many autobiographical accounts suffragettes explicitly
represented this form of protest as the most potent evidence of feminist
agency (see, for example, Gordon, 1911; Lytton, 1914). Leigh was well
known for rallying suffragette prisoners with her cry of ‘No surrender!’ and
the hunger strike was the corporeal expression of this ongoing resistance
and dissent.27 When imprisonment meant that street marching, window
breaking or public speaking were no longer possible, contestation could
still continue through the body’s refusal of food; the expressive space of the
body making it possible to continue acting meaningfully in the world.
Leigh’s own account of her first experience of forcible feeding – in the form
of a statement to her solicitor, the basis of her subsequent action against the
Home Secretary in 1909 – illustrates the many modes of resistance Leigh
resorted to in order to articulate her dissent:
On my arrival at Winson Green Gaol on Wednesday afternoon, September 22, I

protested against the treatment to which I was subjected and broke the windows
in my cell. Accordingly at nine o’clock in the evening I was taken to the punish-
ment cell. . . . I was then stripped and handcuffed. . . .
On Thursday afternoon the visiting magistrates came, and I was taken before
them, handcuffed. After hearing what I had to say they sentenced me to nine days’
close confinement. . . . The handcuffs were removed at midnight on Thursday. . . .
I still refrained from food. About noon on Saturday I . . . was taken to the doctor’s
room, where I saw the matron, eight wardresses, and two doctors. . . .
[The doctor said] ‘If you still refrain from food I must take other measures to
compel you to take it.’
I then said: ‘I refuse, and if you force food on me I want to know how you are
going to do it.’
He said: ‘That is a matter for me to decide.’
I said he must prove I was insane, that the Lunacy Commissioners would have
to be summoned to prove I was insane, and that he could not perform an opera-
tion without the patient’s consent. The feeding by mouth I described as an oper-
ation and the feeding by the tube as an outrage. I also said: ‘I shall hold you
responsible, and shall take any measure in order to see whether you are justified
in doing so.’
. . . . I was then surrounded and forced back onto the chair, which was tilted
backward. There were about ten persons around me. The doctor then forced my
mouth so as to form a pouch, and held me while one of the wardresses poured
some liquid from a spoon. . . . On Saturday afternoon the wardresses forced me
onto the bed and the two doctors came in with them. While I was held down a
nasal tube was inserted. . . . The end is put up the right and left nostril on alter-
nate days. . . .
On Sunday, [the doctor] came in and implored me to be amenable and have
food in the proper way. I still refused. I was fed by spoon up to Saturday, October
2, three times a day. . . .
[A]bout dinner time, I determined on stronger measures by barricading my cell.
I piled my bed, table, and chair by jamming them together against the door. They
had to bring some men warders to get in with iron staves. I kept them at bay about
three hours. . . . I was again placed in the padded cell, where I remained until Sat-
urday evening. I still refused food. . . .
Sunday noon, four wardresses and two doctors entered my cell and forcibly fed
me by the tube through the nostrils with milk. . . . I remained in the padded cell
until Monday evening, October 4. Since then I have been fed through the nostril
twice a day.
The sensation is most painful – the drums of the ears seem to be bursting and
there is a horrible pain in the throat and breast. The tube is pushed down twenty
inches. I have to lie on the bed, pinned down by wardresses, one doctor stands
up on a chair, holding the funnel end at arm’s length, so as to have the funnel end
above the level, and then the other doctor, who is behind, forces the other end up
the nostrils.
. . . . I have used no violence, though having provocation in being fed by force.
I resist and am overcome by weight of numbers. . . . (quoted in Mackenzie, 1975:
126–9)
This statement of Leigh’s resilience and resourcefulness refigures hunger

striking as active resistance rather than passive endurance. Despite system-
atic forcible feeding, Leigh continues to dissent through verbally resisting
and challenging authority, physically resisting force and destroying prop-

erty. The female body here is a site of perpetual struggle, as the present
tense of Leigh’s statement ‘I resist’ signifies.28 While Leigh’s action for
damages against the Home Secretary and prison authorities was unsuc-
cessful – the Lord Chief Justice ruling that prisoners did not have the right
to forbid an operation on their bodies and thus that forcible feeding of suf-
fragettes could legally continue – Leigh’s resistance at Winson Green Gaol
was depicted by suffragettes as a ‘victory’ and Leigh as a ‘conqueror’:
Fighting every inch of the ground, she burst open the prison gates and escaped
last Saturday, winning . . . a victory in which we all rejoice with exceeding joy.
Mary Leigh re-enters the fight as a conqueror, having inflicted signal defeat on the
armies of physical force. . . . (Votes for Women, 1909: 8)
Three years later, readers were still being reminded of Leigh’s Winson
Green imprisonment and urged to emulate Leigh who, ‘slight, delicate
woman as she is . . . set her will against the whole weight of the prison
system and overcame’ (Votes for Women, 1912: 750). The capacity of the
suffragette’s body to withstand forcible feeding (and thus to win early
release from prison) allowed suffragettes to affirm the efficacy of feminist
agency, despite the reversals suffered during the long suffrage campaign.
While embodiment continued, so did the capacity to intervene (and there-
fore resist) in a given situation, even in an extreme situation such as Leigh
described.
Leigh’s statement (published in Votes for Women) provided suffragette
readers with a narrative in which state-sanctioned torture was represented
as another instance of feminist agency centring on the suffragette’s body.
The female body represented in Leigh’s account contradicted the culturally
valorized feminine characteristics of weakness, silence and passivity.
Leigh’s embodiment of feminist agency confounded the traditional associ-
ation of female specificity with political exclusion because her bodily
resistance is figured as dissident citizenship. Suffragettes were not, of
course, the only dissidents to deploy hunger striking as a tactic29 but this
form of protest had a unique resonance when enacted by female bodies
whose feminine specificity was the grounds for their political exclusion. In
effect, suffragettes like Leigh relentlessly corporealized the political; they
insisted that their ‘citizenship’ be recognized as female citizenship, refus-
ing a model of citizenship consisting solely of disembodied deliberation.
Conclusion
Beginning with a phenomenological emphasis on ‘what the body does’, to
borrow Crossley’s phrase (1995: 43), I have focused on Mary Leigh here to
provide an account of a feminist agency in which the body is crucial to/for
political contestation. While the suffragette campaign was an important
historical instance of embodied political dissent, many subsequent femin-
ist campaigns also deployed forms of protest which emphasized female
embodiment in their contestation of the political domain, the women of
Greenham Common being just one recent example (see Harford and
Hopkins, 1984). Where the specificities of female embodiment have been

grounds for exclusion or diminished participation, deliberately drawing
attention to their bodies has been an important strategy for women engaged
in dissident citizenship. Such dissidents have understood their embodi-
ment not as a limitation but as a means by which the parameters of the
political domain could be contested. As Dwyer puts it, ‘whether a woman
recognises she has options with respect to action is in part determined by
the body she has’ (1998: 34). The dissident citizenship of Mary Leigh –
which presented the suffragette body as a speaking, acting, resisting body
– allowed other women to reconceptualize their own feminine bodily com-
portment as the basis of agency not passivity. The story of the suffragette
who yelled exultantly ‘I’m doing it! I’m doing it!’ as she smashed windows
in Oxford Street testifies to the surprised delight with which women
claimed their own new-found capacity for feminist agency (quoted in
Housman, 1937: 221).
But as Joan Scott reminds us, ‘feminist agency has a history; it is neither
a fixed set of behaviours nor an essential attribute of women’ (1996: 16).
Certain historical continuities in strategies deployed by women engaged in
political contestation should not be construed as offering a blueprint of
feminist agency. In stressing the centrality of embodiment to feminist
agency I am not seeking to reify an essential female body; on the contrary,
I have stressed that bodies inhabit specific social, historical and discursive
contexts which shape our experience(s) of embodiment and our capacities
for political contestation. As much as I might think there are still many
institutions that need a (metaphorical) brick through the window, this kind
of activism may no longer have the impact that Mary Leigh’s escapades did
in a historical context where feminine bodily comportment was somewhat
differently configured. Rather, the historical example of Mary Leigh
reminds us of the complex and inventive ways in which feminism pro-
duces political subjects which make agency ‘possible even when it is for-
bidden or denied’ (Scott, 1996: 16) and thus enables political contestation
to continue.
Notes
This paper results from a Visiting Fellowship to the Institute for Women’s
Studies, Lancaster University in 1998. I am very grateful for the support of staff
and students there.
1. By the British suffragette movement I am specifically referring to the

Women’s Social and Political Union (hereafter, WSPU), formed by the
Pankhursts in Manchester in 1903, which was the main organization of the
militant suffrage campaign active between 1905 and 1914.
2. ‘Bodily experience forces us to acknowledge an imposition of meaning
which is not the work of a universal constituting consciousness, a meaning
which clings to certain contents. My body is that meaningful core which
behaves like a general function, and which nevertheless exists. . .’
(Merleau-Ponty, 1962: 147).
3. The following quotation is a good example of how Merleau-Ponty
expresses agency in the terms of existential phenomenology: ‘I am given,

that is, I find myself already situated and involved in a physical and
social world – I am given to myself. . . . My freedom, the fundamental
power which I enjoy of being the subject of all my experiences is not
distinct from my insertion in the world’ (1962: 360).
4. ‘[T]he life of consciousness – cognitive life, the life of desire or perceptual
life – is subtended by an “intentional arc” which projects round about us
our past, our future, our human setting, our physical, ideological and
moral situation, or rather which results in our being situated in all those
respects. It is this intentional arc which brings about the unity of the
senses, of intelligence, of sensibility and motility’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1962:
136).
5. For another account of citizenship with a phenomenological emphasis
see Crossley, who argues that ‘Citizens are intersubjects’ who become
citizens through the performance of citizenship in a shared context with
other citizens (1996: 153, 162).
6. Throughout the Revolutionary period in France, ‘women joined in
collective demonstrations, often with the application of force; they
petitioned the authorities, and made their presence known in clubs,
section assemblies, popular societies, festivals, street demonstrations, on
bread lines and at the markets. They frequented the galleries of the
Convention and appeared at revolutionary tribunals and executions. The
most militant among them practiced a politics of intimidation, unrelenting
surveillance and control, either through legal or insurrectionary means’
(Landes, 1996: 304). As Darline Gay Levy and Harriet Branson Applewhite
conclude: ‘In discourse and act, [women] forced real, if short-lived and
incomplete, transformations and expansions of the meaning and practice
of citizenship and sovereignty’ (1992: 98).
7. Examples of suffragette activism included: women chaining themselves to
the grille in the Ladies’ Gallery in the House of Commons; staged
interruptions of political meetings; window-smashing raids in the West
End; attacks on paintings in art galleries; vandalism of golf courses; fire-
bombing empty buildings.
8. The suffragettes did not, of course, ‘invent’ the practice of political
heckling; on the importance of heckling in political campaigning in
Britain, see Mark Harrison (1988: 183–4). As suffragettes repeatedly
observed, heckling was a practice of long-standing in British politics but
they were constantly surprised at the violent response their deployment
of a ‘traditional’ strategy invoked (see, for example, Pankhurst, 1911: 32).
9. On this point, see also Claude Lefort’s description of the state of
indeterminacy which characterizes modern democracy: ‘There is no law
that can be fixed, whose articles cannot be contested, whose foundations
are not susceptible of being called into question. . . . Democracy
inaugurates the experience of an ungraspable, uncontrollable society in
which the people will be said to be sovereign, of course, but whose
identity will constantly be open to question. . . .’ (1986: 303–4).
10. On the political as a domain where the constitution of public and private
are debated and contested, see Fraser (1992a: 129).
11. On the suffragette imbrication of fashion, femininity and political protest,
see Parkins (1997) and Lisa Tickner (1987).
12. See Stanley and Morley (1988) for the best account of Davison’s protest
and its reception.
13. Including once for refusing to pay her dog tax (Votes for Women, 17
March 1911: 884). Tax resistance was a form of protest employed by
suffragettes as well as (non-militant) suffragists, derived from the liberal
slogan, ‘No Taxation without Representation’.
14. For example, she had received coverage in Votes for Women; she had
featured in postcards sold by the WSPU; she had been honoured in
January 1909 with a special meeting and presentation in recognition for
her work (which she did not attend).
15. This account conflicts with that of the Liverpool Courier, which described
Leigh’s arrest in this way: ‘the fair belligerent quietly submitted to
capture. Having accomplished their object, the young women gave little
trouble to the police’ (1110).
16. In the trial following this protest, the magistrate discounted the political
motivation of the women’s actions, classifying them as simple acts of
criminality. This was a standard feature of suffragette trials even though,
as suffragettes often noted, the sentences the women received were
unusually harsh for ‘petty’ crimes (see Votes for Women, 1909: 1110).
There are striking historical parallels here with the trials of Greenham
Common women in the 1980s, in which competing definitions of what
constituted keeping and breaching the peace meant that the courts
regarded protests as criminal acts (see Harford and Hopkins, 1984:
52–3).
17. From the extensive literature on this topic, see Joan Landes (1995).
18. During 1909, Leigh was repeatedly in prison and repeatedly on hunger
strike. She had only recently been released from Holloway prior to the
protest in Liverpool and in prison had been the leader and spokeswoman
for other suffragettes serving sentences. Dorothy Shallard reported, ‘We
were surrounded by wardresses, but linked arms and resisted with all our
might, Mrs Leigh rallying us with her cries of ‘No surrender!’ (Votes for
Women, 1909: 1080). After her Liverpool protest, Leigh was released from
prison after six days of hunger strike, although she was ‘too ill to leave
the gaol until twelve hours after receiving her order of discharge’ (Votes
for Women, 1909: 1128).
19. Leigh received a four-month prison sentence with hard labour and was
forcibly fed for the first time during this imprisonment; she was
eventually released on 30 October, near death but having served less than
half her sentence. The Daily News reported on a meeting to protest
against forcible feeding, held at Queen’s Hall in early October, during
which a woman in the audience implored the suffragette leadership on
stage: ‘Can you not lead us on to some definite action, and bombard the
prison and release Mrs Leigh?’ (Yeoman, Vol. II).
20. Leigh always maintained that she merely dropped a toy hatchet in the
carriage, bearing the message ‘This is a symbol of the extinction of the
Liberal Party for evermore’ (Mitchell, 1965: 1209).
21. Leigh faced two trials for attempted arson in Dublin, after the jury could
not agree on a verdict in her first trial.
22. Suffragettes who explicitly cited Leigh as the inspiration for their own
activism include Edith New (Votes for Women, 1908: 406) and Emily
Wilding Davison, whose first act of post-box sabotage was carried out in
Leigh’s name (Daily News, 22 December 1911, Yeoman, Vol. II).
23. On this point, see Cheryl Jorgensen-Earp (1997).
24. Discursive contestation of the meanings of Leigh’s actions can be found,
for instance, in The Freewoman, in which feminists hostile to the WSPU
used Leigh’s Dublin protest as the basis of an attack on the WSPU
leadership and its exploitation of courageous women like Leigh as
‘cannon-fodder’: ‘The “leaders” extol war, and run away. Mrs Leigh and a
handful of like-minded, wage the conflict’ (1912: 264). In this account,
Leigh’s corporeal protests signified her individuality and differentiated
her from other WSPU suffragettes. See also Stanley and Morley (1988) on
Leigh’s relationship with the WSPU leadership. Leigh, always a
committed pacifist, was clearly untroubled by the military connotations
of her WSPU uniform: until at least the mid-1960s she wore it to the
annual Labour Day marches in London (Mitchell, 1965).
25. Any discussion of conflicting significations of a salute must, of course,
acknowledge the influence of Roland Barthes’ discussion of an Algerian
soldier saluting the French tricolour in Mythologies (1972: 125–38).
26. Little is known of Mary Leigh’s life. The only biographical information
found in suffragette literature on Leigh focuses exclusively on her life as a
suffragette. The Fawcett Library holds a small archive of material on
Leigh but access to this material is not yet permitted (despite the
entreaties of the researcher!). Michelle Myall records that Leigh, born in
Manchester, became a schoolteacher prior to her marriage to a builder
(1998: 174). In her Dublin trial, Leigh also mentioned her experience in
sweated labour (Votes for Women, 1912: 744).
27. See the prison accounts of Lucy Burns and Dorothy Shallard, Votes for
Women (1909: 1080).
28. Leigh seemed to have had an unflagging capacity for resistance: when
interviewed in 1965, she had recently been ejected from the public
gallery in the House of Commons for heckling during a debate on old-age
pensions (Mitchell, 1965).
29. See, for example, Ellmann (1993) on the IRA hunger strike in Long Kesh
in 1981.
References
Barthes, R. (1972) Mythologies. London: Paladin. (Orig. 1957.)
Butler, J. (1989) ‘Sexual Ideology and Phenomenological Description: A
Feminist Critique of Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception’,
pp. 85–100 in J. Allen and I.M. Young (eds) The Thinking Muse: Feminism
and Modern French Philosophy. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Butler, J. (1990) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity.
New York: Routledge.
Butler, J. (1992) ‘Contingent Foundations: Feminism and the Question of
Postmodernism’, pp. 3–21 in J. Butler and J. W. Scott (eds) Feminists
Theorize the Political. New York: Routledge.
Butler, J. (1993) Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’. New
York: Routledge.
Butler, J. (1996) ‘Gender as Performance’, pp. 109–26 in Peter Osborne (ed.)
A Critical Sense: Interviews with Intellectuals. London: Routledge.
Colebrook, C. (forthcoming) ‘What is Australian Feminism?’ Hypatia.

Crossley, N. (1995) ‘Merleau-Ponty, the Elusive Body and Carnal Sociology’,
Body & Society 1(1): 43–63.
Crossley, N. (1996) Intersubjectivity: The Fabric of Social Becoming. London:
Sage.
Diprose, R. (1994) The Bodies of Women: Ethics, Embodiment and Sexual
Difference. London: Routledge.
Dwyer, S. (1998) ‘Learning from Experience: Moral Phenomenology and
Politics’, pp. 28–44 in B.-A. Bar On and A. Ferguson (eds) Daring to be
Good: Essays in Feminist Ethico-Politics. New York: Routledge.
Ellmann, M. (1993) The Hunger Artists: Starving, Writing and Imprisonment.
London: Virago.
Fraser, N. (1992a) ‘Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the
Critique of Actually Existing Democracy’, pp. 109–42 in C. Calhoun (ed.)
Habermas and the Public Sphere. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Fraser, N. (1992b) ‘Introduction’, in N. Fraser and S. L. Bartky (eds) Revaluing
French Feminism: Critical Essays on Difference, Agency, and Culture.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Gatens, M. (1996) Imaginary Bodies: Ethics, Power, Corporeality. London:
Routledge.
Gordon, H. (1911) The Prisoner: A Sketch. Letchworth: Garden City Press.
Grosz, E. (1994) Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. St Leonards:
Allen & Unwin.
Harford, B. and S. Hopkins (1984) Greenham Common: Women at the Wire.
London: Women’s Press.
Harrison, M. (1988) Crowds and History: Mass Phenomena in English Towns,
1790–1835. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Honig, B. (1993) Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics. Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press.
Housman, L. (1937) The Unexpected Years. London: Jonathan Cape.
Jorgensen-Earp, C.R. (1997) ‘The Transfiguring Sword’: The Just War of the
Women’s Social and Political Union. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press.
Landes, J. (1995) ‘The Public and the Private Sphere: A Feminist
Reconsideration’, pp. 91–116 in J. Meehan (ed.) Feminists Read Habermas:
Gendering the Subject of Discourse. New York: Routledge.
Landes, J. (1996) ‘The Performance of Citizenship: Democracy, Gender and
Difference in the French Revolution’, pp. 295–313 in S. Benhabib (ed.)
Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Lefort, C. (1986) The Political Forms of Modern Society: Bureaucracy,
Democracy, Totalitarianism. Cambridge: Polity.
Levy, D.G. and H. Branson Applewhite (1992) ‘Women and Militant
Citizenship in Revolutionary Paris’, in S.E. Melzer and L.W. Rabine (eds)
Rebel Daughters: Women and the French Revolution. New York: Oxford
University Press.
Lytton, C. (1914) Prisons and Prisoners: Some Personal Experiences. London:
William Heinemann.
Mackenzie, M. (1975) Shoulder to Shoulder. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
McNay, L. (1999) ‘Subject, Psyche and Agency: The Work of Judith Butler’,
Theory, Culture & Society 16(2): 175–93.
Mayhall, L.E.N. (1995) ‘Creating the Suffragette Spirit: British Feminism and
the Historical Imagination’, Women’s History Review 4(3): 319–44.
Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962) The Phenomenology of Perception. London:
Routledge.
Mitchell, D. (1965) ‘Interview with Mary Leigh’, David Mitchell Collection,
Museum of London.
Mouffe, C. (1992) ‘Citizenship and Political Identity’, October 61: 28–32.
Myall, M. (1998) ‘“No surrender!”: The Militancy of Mary Leigh, A Working-
class Suffragette’, pp. 173–87 in M. Joannou and J. Purvis (eds) The
Women’s Suffrage Movement: New Feminist Perspectives. Manchester:
Manchester University Press.
Pankhurst, E.S. (1911) The Suffragette: The History of the Women’s Militant
Suffrage Movement 1905–1910. London: Gay and Hancock.
Parkins, W. (1997) ‘Taking Liberty’s, Breaking Windows: Fashion, Protest and
the Suffragette Public’, Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies
11(3): 37–46.
Pateman, C. (1988) The Sexual Contract. Cambridge: Polity.
Richardson, M. (1953) Laugh a Defiance. London: George Weidenfeld and
Nicolson.
Scott, J.W. (1996) Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of
Man. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Sparks, H. (1997) ‘Dissident Citizenship: Democratic Theory, Political
Courage, and Activist Women’, Hypatia 12(4): 74–110.
Stanley, L. and A. Morley (1988) The Life and Death of Emily Wilding
Davison: A Biographical Detective Story. London: Women’s Press.
Tickner, L. (1987) The Spectacle of Women: Imagery of the Suffrage Campaign
1907–14. London: Chatto and Windus.
Vasseleu, C. (1998) Textures of Light: Vision and Touch in Irigaray, Levinas
and Merleau-Ponty. London: Routledge.
Warner, M. (1992) ‘The Mass Public and the Mass Subject’, pp. 377–401 in
C. Calhoun (ed.) Habermas and the Public Sphere. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Yeatman, A. (forthcoming) ‘Feminism and Citizenship’, in N. Stevenson (ed.)
Cultural Citizenship. London: Sage.
Yeoman, I.V. (1905–14) ‘Scrapbooks of Newspaper Cuttings 1905–14’ (15
vols), Pankhurst Collection, Murdoch University Library.
Young, A. (1988) ‘“Wild Women”: The Censure of the Suffragette Movement’,
International Journal of the Sociology of Law 16: 279–93.
Young, I.M. (1990) Throwing Like a Girl and Other Essays in Feminist
Philosophy and Social Theory. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Wendy Parkins lectures in women’s studies and cultural studies at

Murdoch University, Western Australia. Her research interests include the
British suffragette movement, the New Woman, feminist ethics and
embodiment.
Address: School of Media, Communication & Culture, Murdoch Uni-

versity, South Street, Western Australia 6150, Australia.
Email: Wparkins@central.murdoch.edu.au

Protesting Like A Girl Embodiment, Dissent and Feminist Agency

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Protesting Like A Girl Embodiment, Dissent and Feminist Agency

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

03 Parkins (mh/d) (FT) 6/3/00 9:41 am Page 59

Protesting like a girl

Abstract This article examines feminist agency in the light of Merleau-

Nancy Fraser has succinctly outlined the ‘problem’ of women’s agency

60 Feminist Theory 1(1)

the assertion that we cannot think of political agency in abstraction from

Agency and embodiment

Parkins: Protesting like a girl 61

a unique position to provide a depth and sophistication to feminist

Aided by a methodology that fails to acknowledge the historicity of sexuality and

While Butler concludes that it should be possible for a feminist appro-

62 Feminist Theory 1(1)

In her later work, Butler leaves phenomenological accounts of the

Parkins: Protesting like a girl 63

64 Feminist Theory 1(1)

they were determined to take creative, dangerous or illegal action in order

Pethick Lawrence’s editorial was in defence of the suffragette practice of

the practices of marginalized citizens who publicly contest prevailing arrange-

The practice of interjecting at political meetings is illustrative of the cre-

Parkins: Protesting like a girl 65

their forms of protest effectively challenged the boundaries of the political

The feminist agency of Mary Leigh

66 Feminist Theory 1(1)

as sites of criminality, madness and disorder (see Parkins, 1997; Young,

The transmogrification of Leigh in this account – from gentle being to cat

Parkins: Protesting like a girl 67

68 Feminist Theory 1(1)

Parkins: Protesting like a girl 69

70 Feminist Theory 1(1)

McNay’s critique of Butler’s account of agency as ‘abstract potentiality’

Parkins: Protesting like a girl 71

On my arrival at Winson Green Gaol on Wednesday afternoon, September 22, I

This statement of Leigh’s resilience and resourcefulness refigures hunger

72 Feminist Theory 1(1)

and challenging authority, physically resisting force and destroying prop-

Parkins: Protesting like a girl 73

Hopkins, 1984). Where the specificities of female embodiment have been

1. By the British suffragette movement I am specifically referring to the

74 Feminist Theory 1(1)

expresses agency in the terms of existential phenomenology: ‘I am given,

Parkins: Protesting like a girl 75

76 Feminist Theory 1(1)

Parkins: Protesting like a girl 77

Colebrook, C. (forthcoming) ‘What is Australian Feminism?’ Hypatia.

78 Feminist Theory 1(1)

Wendy Parkins lectures in women’s studies and cultural studies at

Address: School of Media, Communication & Culture, Murdoch Uni-

You might also like