One of the less fondly remembered Schoolhouse Rock songs (certainly not as instantly familiar as the one about how a bill becomes a law) is about the passage of the 19th amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Its title is also a phrase featured in the chorus: “Sufferin’ for Suffrage.” The similarity between the words suffering and suffrage has, of course, caused problems for more than a few students when confronted on vocabulary tests but disregarding that downside, it makes for an almost irresistible play on words. The song “It’s Her Factory” by legendary British post-punk band Gang of Four not only uses the phrase, but alludes to its popularity even among mainstream journalism with the lyric, “subject story on the front page suffering from suffrage.” All of which would be needlessly digressive and utterly pointless information were it not for something that has Kate Walbert has confessed about the origin of her novel, A Short History of Women.
“I often write from an image, but I never had that image in mind. Really what started the book was the first line… I think this was six or seven years ago that I wrote that line. I kept circling that line because I really liked the voice.”
The line she is speaking of is, as indicated, the line which commences the novel" “Mum starved herself for suffrage, Grandmother claiming it was just like Mum to take a cause too far.” Starving for suffrage doesn’t have quite the musical quality of the more poetic similarity of sound between suffering and suffrage, perhaps, but it is more visceral. Suffering for something you believe in conveys a generality, but starving for it is much more profoundly tangible. Who cannot relate to the physical pangs as well as the creeping emotional paranoia that arrives with the onset of actually becoming so literally hungry as to express it terms of starving?
And that opening line would be very intense and effective even if it were merely metaphorical. Except that it isn’t. When the narrator of this section relates the joke made by her Grandmother it is much more than a quip, it is understated tragedy. Because “Mum” starved herself for the right for women to get the vote (for clarification, the book is not about the 19th amendment, but rather the suffering for suffrage experienced by British woman) quite literally. And it is the tragic joke that actually contains the resonance which flows throughout the rest of the book. The imagery of a woman so committed to the passage of legislation conferring upon women the equality with which they are naturally born so that they may partake in the free exercise of democratic politics that her metaphorical hunger for that right transforms into a literal acting out for activism is the thematic engine which drives every single work following the book’s opening line.
What has been lost in the historical retelling of the fight for women’s suffrage in England over the years is much of the nuance in the connection between the larger desire for getting a voice in politics and the more specific hope among women to use that right in the future to help prevent political disasters perpetrated entirely by men such as the events which led to World War I. That war and the final intense years of the suffrage movement coincided and the absolutely comprehensive failure of men at every level both leading to and during the outbreak of war itself is inextricably bound to British women fighting for equality at the ballot box.
A Short History of Women is an expansive multi-generational epic told by a various first-person narrators over a period of history stretching from 1914 to 2007. At the heart of the story is the failure of efforts that blow past being merely heroic by women like “Mum” who were willing to sacrifice their lives not merely for the purpose of making a decision between two different candidates from opposing political parties for the purpose of representation in a legislative body deciding whether to raise or lower taxes. The tragedy in the Grandmother’s joke about taking a cause too far is twofold: it is tragic that taking the cause too far results in the death of “Mum” but there is also tragedy in the larger reality of not enough people being willing to take a cause too far, resulting in the deaths of millions of others. And that is the story told throughout most of this short history.
