CCP has a new petition.
Put a statue of a suffragette in Parliament Square to mark 100 years of female suffrage
Caroline Criado-Perez London, United Kingdom
Why Parliament Square?
There are eleven statues in Parliament Square. Not a single one is of a woman.
There are some great men honoured, Nelson Mandela and Mahatma Gandhi among them. These are men who fought hard for their democratic and human rights and they deserve to be recognised.
But today is International Women’s Day. And I find myself thinking of others who fought hard for their democratic and human rights. I find myself thinking of the women who defied convention and police batons. Who went out on the streets. Who faced ridicule, imprisonment, violent assault, simply because they believed women were equal to men.
In two years’ time it will be 100 years since those women won their fight and women were first granted the right to vote.
They deserve to be remembered. They deserve to be commemorated at the heart of our democracy. Give them a statue in Parliament Square.
She made a list of the eleven men:
Churchill, Lloyd George, Jan Smutts, Palmerston, the 14th Earl of Derby, Disraeli, Peel, Canning, Lincoln, Mandela, Gandhi. I have no idea what the 14th Earl of Derby did.
Comments
17 responses to “They deserve to be remembered”
Edward Smith-Stanley was a 19th century Prime Minister, and is sometimes described as the “father of the modern Constervative Party.” Yeah, I know. See also, Disraeli.
I know, I did Google him after I posted. Disraeli seems considerably more memorable, what with the novels and the Jewishness and the relations with Victoria and the being played by Alec Guinness and so on.
Smith-Stanley still holds the record for being the longest serving leader of the Conservative Party but, but I don’t think he did anything else of note, except beget the 15th Earl of Derby.
He put effort into pursuing peace and what at the time passed for religious rights in Ireland. Including making provision for what then passed for secular education.
Didn’t work. My ancestors weren’t standing for THAT. They liked their religious warfare. But he tried.
“In two years’ time it will be 100 years since those women won their fight and women were first granted the right to vote.”
A rather misleading statement, it seems to imply that British women were the first to be given the right to vote, they weren’t. So lets amend it to “…and British women were first granted the right to vote”
Churchill was an imperialist war-monger and a racist, even by the standards of his time.
Well the petition is addressed to the mayor of London, so it seems pretty clear that she means British women.
Parliament Hill rather than Square
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Famous_Five_(Canada)
@6 Ophelia,
I can’t see how the fact that the petition is addressed to the mayor of London, is definitive.
We would have to ask CCP herself, it’s either clumsy wording or she actually thinks that British women were first to get the vote.
I didn’t say it was definitive, did I! I said “it seems pretty clear” – which is the opposite of saying it’s definitive.
Sounds like a good idea, as long as they don’t pick Mary Richardson or Norah Elam.
I have no idea what the 14th Earl of Derby did.
Why, he fathered the 15th Earl of Derby!
Stanley passed the reform act which began the long slow process towards full democracy in the UK, including votes for women.
The obvious candidate for a women in Parliament Square is, of course, Margaret Thatcher, still the only woman to be PM in the UK, a successful war PM and. love or loathe, a brilliantly effective reformer. I wonder if Caroline Criado-Perez would get behind that campaign?
I assume this is a quotation from Goebbels?
Churchill’s statue is the best one in the Square, and deserves to be there on artistic merit if nothing else.
@13 Pinkeen,
Actually it’s a moral judgement. He was duplicitous even when dealing with his allies, even those as powerful as the Americans, Churchill also attempted to divert Australian troops returning to defend Australia, to Burma. His priority seemed to be the preservation of the British Empire (not racist?) particularly India, rather than the defeat of Germany in Europe. Also google the “Bengal famine”.
He was above all a propagandist and his message was probably ideal for a moribund imperial power like Britain with rather inflated ideas of its resources. Luckily for the UK, the Nazis were defeated by the Soviet Union and the US.
This will be the Russia that was an ally of the Nazis until 1941, and the US who didn’t join hostilities until 1942? Thank goodness the Nazis didn’t need resisting earlier!
Exactly, that is the difference between resisting an defeating. Not to minimise the contribution of the U.K., NZ, Aus etc, but the USA and soviet forces were decisive. It’s all complex of course.
Pinkeen@15
“This will be the Russia that was an ally of the Nazis until 1941, and the US who didn’t join hostilities until 1942?”
How does that alter the fact that the Soviets and the US played the decisive role in the defeat of Nazi Germany?
The US also supplied Britain with war materiel under the Lend lease program, before it entered the war.
Of course the British resisted, however they were incapable of posing a serious threat to the Nazi hegemony in Europe, so in the case of the Soviets and Americans, better late than never.