Technique and Ethos in Nonviolent Action: The Woman Suffrage Case

Abstract

The Woman's Party, a militant woman's suffrage organization, was active in nonviolent protests from 1916 through 1919. The party members, who drew their inspiration from the woman suffrage movement in Great Britain, were predominately middle and upper class. They were motivated to protest by the descrepancy between their relatively high social status and their relatively low political power. Although they continued to agitate for equal rights after the suffrage ammendment became part of the Constitution, they did not generalize their concern to an explicitly pacifist ethic but continued to emphasize the particularistic ideology of feminism.

Precarious geopolitics and the possibilities of nonviolence

“…First, nonviolence is perceived to be a principled action based upon an underlying belief system that desires to understand the truth within a conflict, believes in the noncooperation with evil, considers violence as something to be avoided and shows a willingness to accept the burden of suffering to break the cycle of violence. The ultimate intent of principled nonviolence is to confront injustice in order to increase social justice without using direct violence (Holmes, 1990; Kool, 1993; Lakey, 1968; Patfoort, 1987). For instance, sociologist Daniel Ritter’s (2005) two-dimensional theory of nonviolence upholds that it is through people’s conversion to a nonviolent mentality that a lasting peace is made possible.…”