Glossary on the Republic

Suffragette

Movement

It started as a sneer in a London newspaper. The women it was meant to mock printed it on a banner and marched.

The fight was over suffrage, the right to vote. The people campaigning for it were suffragists, a neutral word for both women and men in the cause. Then, in 1906, a writer at the Daily Mail in London coined a diminutive to belittle the more militant British women: suffragette, the little -ette ending meant to make them sound small and unserious.

It did not work. The women took the insult and owned it. In Britain they turned suffragette into a banner, even naming their newspaper after it, wearing the would-be slur as a mark of pride and militancy.

There was a transatlantic split in usage. In Britain, suffragette came to mean the militant wing willing to break windows and go to prison and hunger strike. In the United States, many activists preferred suffragist, but the world remembers the marches, the white dresses, and the decades of relentless organizing on both sides of the ocean.

The American campaign ran from the Seneca Falls convention of 1848 to victory in 1920, when the Nineteenth Amendment finally barred denying the vote on account of sex. Three generations of women worked for a right most of them did not live to use.

Origin

Coined as a belittling term by the Daily Mail in 1906, reclaimed by the women it targeted.

Why it matters

Suffragette is a lesson in who controls language. An insult, handed down to diminish women who would not be quiet, became the proud name of one of the most successful movements in history. They were told the word made them small. They made it mean the opposite.