On a fall night in 2003, Harvard undergrad and computer programming genius Mark Zuckerberg sits down at his computer and heatedly begins working on a new idea. In a fury of blogging and programming, what begins in his dorm room soon becomes a global social network and a revolution in communication. A mere six years and 500 million friends later, Mark Zuckerberg is the youngest billionaire in history... but for this entrepreneur, success leads to both personal and legal complications.
Mark :
Did you know there are more people
with genius I.Q.s living in China
than there are people of any kind
living in the United States?
The Girl :
That can't possibly be True.
Mark :
It is.
The Girl :
What would account for that?
Mark :
Well, first, an awful lot of people live
in China, but here's my question :
How do you distinguish
yourself in a population
of people who allgot
1600 on their SATs?
The Girl :
I didn't know they
take SATs in China.
Mark :
They don't. I wasn't talking
about Chinaany more, I was
Talking about Me.
The Girl :
Yes.
Mark :
I could sing in an acappella
group, but I can't sing.
The Girl :
Does that mean you actually
got nothing wrong?
Mark :
I could row crew or
invent a $25 PC.
The Girl :
Or you could get
into a final club.
Mark :
Or I get into
a finals club.
The Girl :
You know, from
A Woman's Perspective,
sometimes not singing in an
a Cappella group is
a good thing.
Mark :
This is serious.
The Girl :
On the other hand, I do
like guys who row crew.
Mark :
Well, I can't do that.
The Girl :
I was kidding.
Mark :
And, yes, I got nothing
wrong on The Test.
The Girl :
Have you ever tried?
Mark :
I'm trying right now.
To row crew?
The Girl :
To get into a final club.
Mark :
To row crew? No. Are you,
like, whatever, delusional?
The Girl :
Maybe it's just -- sometimes you say two things at once.
I'm not sure which one I'm supposed to be aiming at.
Mark :
But you've seen guys
who row crew, right?
The Girl :
No.
Mark :
Okay, well, they're bigger than me.
They're world-class athletes.
And a second ago, you said you like
guys who row crew so I assumed
you had met one.
The Girl :
I guess I just meant I like the idea of it.
You know, the way a girl likes cowboys.
Mark :
Okay - Should we get something to eat?
Would you like to talk about something else?
The Girl :
No. It's just since the beginning of the
Conversation about finals club, I think
I may have missed a birthday. There are really
more people in China with genius IQs
than the entire population...
Mark :
The Phoenix is the most diverse.
The Fly Club... Roosevelt
punched the Porc.
The Girl :
Which one?
Mark :
The Porcellian, the Porc.
It's the best of the best.
The Girl :
Which Roosevelt?
Mark :
Theodore.
The Girl :
Is it true that they send a bus around
to pick up girls who want to party
with the next Fed chairman?
Mark :
So you can see why it's
so important to get in.
The Girl :
Okay, well, which is the
easiest to get into?
Mark :
Whywould you ask me that?
The Girl :
I was just asking.
Mark :
None of them. That's the point.
My friend Eduardo made $300,000
betting oil futures one summer and
Eduardo won't come close to getting in.
The ability to make money doesn't
impress anybody around here.
The Girl :
Must be nice. He made
$300,000 in a summer?
Mark :
He likes meteorology.
The Girl :
You said it was oil futures.
Mark :
You can read the weather, you can predict
the price of heating oil.
The Girl :
I think you asked me that because you think the final club that's easiest to get into is the one where I'll have the best chance. I...
The Girl :
What?
Mark :
You asked me which one was
the easiest to get into
because you think that
that's the one where
I'll have the best chance.
The Girl :
The one that's the easiest to get into would be
the one where anybody has the best chance.
Mark :
You didn't ask me which one was the best one,
you asked me which one was the easiest one.
The Girl :
I was honestly just asking, okay?
I was just asking to ask.
Mark, I'm not speaking in code.
Mark :
Enca.
The Girl :
You're obsessed with finals clubs.
You have finals clubs OCD and you
need to see someone about it
who will prescribe you some sort of medication.
You don't care if the side effects
may include blindness.
Mark :
Final clubs. Not "finals clubs." And there's a difference
between being obsessed and being motivated.
The Girl :
Yes. There is.
Well, you do. That was cryptic, so
you do speak in code.
The Girl :
I didn't mean to be cryptic.
Mark :
I'm just saying I need to do something substantial
in order to get the attention of The Clubs.
The Girl :
Why?
Mark :
Because they're exclusive. And fun,
and they lead to a better life.
The Girl :
Teddy Rooseveltdidn't
get elected president
because he was a member
of The Phoenix Club.
Mark :
He was a member
of The Porcellian,
and yes, he did.
The Girl :
Well, why don't you just concentrate on
being the best you you can be?
Mark :
Did you really just say that?
The Girl :
I was kidding. Just because
something's trite
doesn't make it less true.
Mark :
I wanna try to be straightforward with you
and tell you I think you might want to
be a little more supportive.
If I get in, I will be taking you to the events
and the gatherings, and you'll be meeting
a lot of people you wouldn't
normally get to meet.
The Girl :
(horrified) You would
do that for me?
Mark :
We're dating.
The Girl :
Okay - Well, I wanna
try and be straightforward
with you and let you know
that we're not any more.
Mark :
What do you mean?
The Girl :
We're not dating any more.
I'm sorry. Is this a joke?
The Girl :
No, it's not.
Mark :
You're breaking up with me?
The Girl :
You're gonna introduce me to people
I wouldn't normally have the chance to meet?
What the... What is that supposed to mean?
Mark :
Wait, settle down.
The Girl :
What is it supposed to mean?
Mark :
Erica, the reason we're able to sit here and drink right now
is 'cause you used to sleep with the door guy.
The Girl :
"The door guy"? His name is Bobby.
I have not slept with the door guy.
The door guy is a friend of mine,
and he's a perfectly good class of people.
And what part of Long Island
are you from, Wimbledon?
Mark :
Wait. Wait, wait.
The Girl :
I'm going back to my dorm.
Is this real?
The Girl :
Yes.
Then wait, I apologise, okay?
I have to go study.
Mark :
Enca?
Yes?
Mark :
I'm sorry, I mean it.
The Girl :
I appreciate that, but I have to go study.
Mark :
Come on, you don't have to study.
Let's just talk.
I can't.
Mark :
Why?
The Girl :
Because it is exhausting.
Dating you is like
dating a StairMaster.
Mark :
All I meant is that you're not likely to... Currently...
is the most valuable argument in modern politics."
-- Emmeline Pankhurst,
Votes for Women, 23 February 1912
The Suffragettes, Black Friday and two types of window smashing
Katherine Connelly
18 November 2010
History
The photograph the government tried to hide. Suffragette Ada Wright collapses through police violence on Black FridayThe photograph the government tried to hide. Suffragette Ada Wright collapses through police violence on Black Friday
‘The argument of the broken window pane is the most valuable argument in modern politics’, declared suffragette leader Emmeline Pankhurst
A hundred years ago today (on Friday 18th November 1910) a suffragette deputation to the House of Commons met with a six hour onslaught of police brutality resulting in the Suffragettes beginning a huge window smashing campaign in protest.
The attack was so horrendous, the Suffragettes remembered the day it happened as ‘Black Friday’.
Today, when the government and right-wing press are declaring moral outrage at the smashing of a window in the Milbank Tower, many activists have been looking back to the inspiring examples of suffragette direct action.
The anniversary of Black Friday gives us an opportunity to ask why the Suffragettes attacked property and whether the tactic helped the movement.
Black Friday, police violence and the cover-up
On 18th November 1910 the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), the main militant suffragette organisation, had called a ‘Women’s Parliament’ to challenge the legitimacy of the Westminster Parliament which excluded all women.
They had recently discovered that the Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith, who was deeply hostile to women’s suffrage, had announced that no more time would be given to a Bill which would give the vote to some women.
In response the ‘Women’s Parliament’ sent a deputation of 300 women to the House of Commons where they were met with ranks of police. For six hours women were batoned, beaten, punched, thrown to the ground, kicked on the floor and had their faces rubbed against railings in full view of the House of Commons. There were also widespread reports of police sexually abusing the demonstrators. They repeatedly pinched and twisted their breasts, lifted their skirts, groping and assaulting the women for hours.
The true cost of Black Friday would only be known some time after the event. At least two women died as a result of their injuries that day. Another woman who had been badly treated by the police and was arrested for stone throwing a few days later died after being released from prison on Christmas Day 1910. She was Emmeline Pankhurst’s sister, Mary Clarke.
The cover-up followed swiftly after. When the Daily Mirror published a photograph of suffragette Ada Wright lying collapsed on the ground, her hands clutching her face, the government tried to stop the newspaper being sold and ordered the negatives to be destroyed.
To add further shame to the government’s record, the Home Secretary, one Winston Churchill, refused to permit a Government inquiry into the events of Black Friday.
From the introduction of the Bill that Asquith sabotaged until Black Friday the WSPU had called a ‘truce’ on militancy. Now that truce was well and truly over as the WSPU launched a campaign of window smashing.
Black Friday – a turning point
The window smashing campaign and the suffragette attacks on property were in part a tactical response to police violence. Why let yourself be hurt and abused for hours before being arrested on a demonstration when you could shorten the whole process by smashing a window and obtaining instant arrest?
It was also a political statement. The suffragettes were exposing that the government cared more about a pane of glass than a woman’s life (force feeding for hunger striking suffragette prisoners had been introduced in 1909) or a woman’s political rights. If property was the government’s priority, then property was a target.
However, it was also part of a move away from the collective action and mass mobilisations that had characterised the early years of the militant suffragette movement. Christabel Pankhurst, one the of the leading figures in the WSPU, had become completely dismissive of the capacity of working-class women to fight for their rights. She now looked to heroic individuals or influential (generally rich) women to win the struggle.
Her sister Sylvia Pankhurst, a socialist suffragette, later recalled that Christabel felt ‘a working women’s movement was of no value: working women were the weakest portion of the sex: how could it be otherwise? Their lives were too hard, their education too meagre to equip them for the struggle’. [1]
It was not, however, the end to all suffragette demonstrations although they changed in character considerably. In June 1911 the WSPU organised a Coronation Procession in honour of the new King. The modern equivalent would be the anti-cuts protestors of last week suddenly deciding to celebrate Prince William’s already-tedious engagement!
Meanwhile, Christabel Pankhurst ensured that suffragettes kept their distance from the new social movements that were emerging. 1910 also marked the beginning of the Great Unrest – a huge wave of strike action which included women workers and which terrified the government. If the WSPU had wanted to co-operate with this new movement it is very likely their combined strength would have forced the government to concede.
The East London suffragettes around Sylvia Pankhurst did attempt to link up with the new movements, working with socialists and attending the May Day rally as suffragettes alongside huge numbers of East End workers. In the end it would be Sylvia’s attempts to unite with other progressive movements that would see her forced out of the WSPU by Christabel who was unable to tolerate Sylvia’s appearance on a platform alongside Irish trade unionist James Connolly at a meeting protesting at the employers’ lock-out of workers in Dublin.
Militancy from below
Was direct action, then, inevitably incompatible with collective action? In fact window-breaking emerged as a response to the government’s failure to listen to mass action.
In 1908 the government challenged the suffragettes to prove that votes for women had popular support. When the suffragettes organised one of the biggest demonstrations ever seen at that time in Hyde Park the government refused to alter its position. It was immediately after this, and an earlier bout of police violence, that the suffragettes threw their first stones – through the windows of 10 Downing Street.
Much of the direct action undertaken by suffragettes was pioneered by militants since described as ‘freelance’ [2] – they acted without the permission or foreknowledge of the WSPU’s more conservative leaders. These women were often closer to socialist ideas than their leadership.
Mary Leigh was one of the first two window-smashing suffragettes. She was a working-class woman with a deep commitment to militancy, and she was one of the first suffragettes to endure forcible feeding. She was also a socialist who worked with Sylvia in the East End campaigns and publicly spoke out against the WSPU leadership’s support for the British state in the First World War.
Her closest friend was Emily Davison – who committed the most famous militant act of all: disrupting the Derby Day race by running in front of the King’s horse, an action that, in collision with the horse, cost her her life. She too was sympathetic to socialist ideas and was involved with the newly-formed Workers Educational Association (WEA).
Sylvia Pankhurst herself was amongst the most militant of the suffragettes, suffering repeated imprisonments where she undertook hunger, thirst, sleep and rest strikes.
There were many other suffragettes with socialist sympathies who, like these examples, were at the forefront of the struggle, undertaking some of the most famous militant actions. For them, however, the individual acts of vandalism or sacrifice were part of a wider struggle against a system that not only excluded women from its political institutions but also oppressed working-class people and indulged in unjustifiable wars.
Suffragette militancy continues to inspire today. The broken pane at Milbank Tower has brought the suffragettes charging back into political debate. Activists insisting that smashing education is far worse than smashing a window are right when they point out that the Suffragettes did not win the vote by asking politely or avoiding windows.
However, there were two traditions of militancy. One began to substitute individual heroism for a mass movement and moved away from wider questions of equality in society. Its focus became increasingly narrow and began to reflect the politics of the richer women who Christabel sought to lead it.
The other tradition is the tradition that Sylvia Pankhurst stood in. Militancy was a part of the movement, not in opposition to it. They used militancy to capture peoples’ imagination and to pull them into a wider struggle against oppression everywhere. That is the tradition that can help us build the resistance today.
Notes
[1] E.S. Pankhurst, The Suffragette Movement An Intimate Account of Persons and Ideals (London: Virago Press Limited, 1977 – first published 1931), p.517
[2] See L. Stanley and A. Morley, The Life and Death of Emily Wilding Davison (London: The Women’s Press, 1988)
Katherine Connelly
Kate Connelly is a writer and historian. She led school student strikes in the British anti-war movement in 2003, co-ordinated the Emily Wilding Davison Memorial Campaign in 2013 and is a leading member of Counterfire. She wrote the acclaimed biography, 'Sylvia Pankhurst: Suffragette, Socialist and Scourge of Empire' and recently edited and introduced 'A Suffragette in America: Reflections on Prisoners, Pickets and Political Change'.