#sufferagettes

A History of Feminism and Sex Binary by Alok Vaid-Menon

Texts to reference:

"The Male Madonna and the Feminine Uncle Sam: Visual Argument, Icons, and Ideographs in 1909

Anti-Woman Suffrage Postcards" (Palczewski 2005)

"Inversion and the Third Sex: Gender Variance and Queer Expression in Anti-Suffrage Rhetoric" (Pankuch 2018)

Gina Krog (1847-1916), photographed by Christen Olsen, 1865

Gina Krogh was a radical and uncompromising Norwegian suffragette. Gina’s father died shortly before she was born and she grew up with her mother and her three siblings. At the time, getting a higher education was impossible for women, so Gina studied on her own and worked as a teacher in private schools. She later supported her sister in law, Cecilie Thoresen Krog, in becoming the first female student in Norway to be allowed access to the university in 1882. Contrary to contemporary norms she enjoyed being active and independent. She never married and was one of the first women to go hiking in Jotunheimen Mountains.

In 1880 Gina became a full time activist dedicated to women’s rights. She believed women should have the exact same rights as men, on the same conditions, including the right to vote. She went on a study trip to England to learn from the English suffragette movement. There she stayed at Bedford College and got to know Millicent Garrett Fawcett and the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies. During her stay she wrote articles for Norwegian newspapers under a pseudonym. 

Back home again she co-founded the Norwegian Association for Women’s Rights with Hagbart Berner. She was dedicated to working for full voting rights for women but Berner was a moderate and he presented a mission statement that did not oblige the association to work for voting rights but rather take a softer approach and work for economic equality. This became a conflict that ended with Berner resigning and Gina founding a new group; the Women’s Voting Association, this time run by women only. This conflict between compromise and full equality followed Gina and she ended up leaving the group in 1897 before founding the National Association for Women’s Suffrage with Fredrikke Marie Qvam.

In 1904 one of the big political questions was if Norway should seek independence from Sweden. A national referendum was to be held, but only men would be allowed to participate. Gina and her newly founded Norwegian National Women's Council campaigned in support of the dissolution of the union. In 1905, on the day of the vote, Gina walked into parliament and gave a statement from 565 women's associations to the government calling for independence and the right to vote in the referendum. A petition with almost 300,000 votes from women from a nationwide poll was delivered to corroborate the statement. This convinced many of the male politicians that women could be trusted with the right to vote.

The National Association continued working for women’s suffrage until 1913, when Norwegian women gained full voting rights, making Norway the third country in the world with national voting rights for women (behind Finland and New Zealand), and the first sovereign state to constitutionalize universal suffrage. 

I can’t believe the town we’re I live was at the centre the industrial revolution.

It shouldn’t come as much of a surprise because Oldham is a town full of surprises.

Historically it was at the centre of the global cotton industry, and as part of that was also at the centre of social reform.

During this period workers campaigned for better working conditions and improved social welfare and these…