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Hi, everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's history hit you join me at a time when I'm feeling a bit emotional, I've just I've just received pictures and videos of my dad walking in, walking into a clinic surrounded by volunteers and health care professionals, seeing to his every need, making sure he's comfortable and confident at administering the first covid vaccine feels both very recently and also like a long time ago in March when I went around to mom and dad's house with a load of tuna and pasta and tell them, that's it, no more going outside.

We were locking down. I'm so happy that we're getting towards the point at which we can see light at the end of the tunnel.

I want to say a huge thank you to all the scientists and health care professionals involved in the creation administration of this vaccine.

This podcast is one of the classics from the archive, the wonderful Dr. Fern Ridell, she is a historian.

She's written fantastic books about Victorian sex. Death in 10 minutes about the political violence of the suffragette movement, she's been on TV.

She writes, she advises, she presents his podcast with every great writer and is always a terrific pleasure to hang out with her. She is here talking about the women's suffrage movement. It was this week in 1918 that women in Britain. Well, some women in Britain were given the vote in national elections for the first time that have property qualifications, they were of a certain age. It was the start of a process that would see women given political equality with men.

Over the next generation. You're going to get a history at Dotcom's flower shop. You get your fun Christmas present for anyone who loves history, those difficult to buy for members of the family who all your problems are now solved and you can give them tickets to live tour next year. You can give them subscriptions to history hit TV. It's all brilliant. Incredibly proud to say that history hit. TV has got the premier of our Winter Truc documentary exclusively to create original content.

Of course, as so much of our content is, we filmed it over the last few months. We've got some of the best historians. We've uncovered new archival material all about this remarkable Christmas truce of 1914, a drama documentary. Please go and check that out. Only on history. TV views Cape Cod one yet a month for free and the second month, just £1 zero dollar. I mean, just basically watch us for free.

Sweet. And then we got an audio version, extended interviews with some of those historians, some of the actors reading out the accounts on this podcast on the twenty third and 24th of December. So just super exciting and all in all fields feels like a seismic day.

So forgive my emotion, everybody. Here is Dr. Ferne Ridell. Enjoy.

Well, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. Thank you. Good to have you on this time to talk about your fabulous book. I'm super excited to tell everyone it's such a cool premise. Tell everyone the idea behind this book.

So my book is called Death in 10 Minutes. Kitty. Marion Arsenis, activist and suffragette. And it's the story of Kitty Marion, who was an incredible woman. We know so little about women's history. And this is someone who links both the birth control movement and the fight for the vote, the two most important aspects of feminist history in the last 150 years. And Kitty was a German child, immigrant. She was an actress in the music schools in England.

And she found that she was kind of getting casting couch syndrome. And so she was being abused and assaulted by actors and managers. And she thought that was awful and no one would listen to her. No one would change. The government wouldn't change. Politics wouldn't change.

And at that moment, the suffragettes appeared and she found this organization that we're really fighting for exactly what she was.

How interesting that that's an example of probably lots of people's journey towards the suffrage movement. I can't think of it as a Jeffersonian Enlightenment philosophy kind of driving people to it. But actually, it's interesting. You found an example of someone who who's who's experiencing the the patriarchy, experiencing abuse day to day. And it's and it's getting a vote that is actually a way of changing her own life and her own circumstances. Very much so.

And I think we never talk about this with suffrage. We always think that all they ever wanted was the vote for kind of grand philosophical reasons. And for many women, it was that actually they were finding terrible abuse within their own lives, whether that was domestic or economic, and were trying to maintain their independence and maintain their right to work and be free and not be indentured to anyone, whether that was through marriage or through anything else. And the vote represented a way to represent their views, to have their voices heard and to make sure that legislation was in place to protect themselves.

I mean, it's a it's a lovely example of of high politics and actual people's everyday lives.

Very much so. But I think what was so surprising about this for me wasn't that I'd found a woman who was fighting for the things we're still fighting for today, but someone who was conducting a bombing and arson campaign.

I'm going to come on to exciting. Can I ask how we know so much about her?

We don't know anything about her. She's been really only an occasional suffrage histories. She's been in a list of names of suffragettes.

Let me change the question. How do you know so much about her circumstances and her journey towards the suffrage movement?

So, Kitty, who is the really the focus of my PhD, which I've been doing for a number of which I had been doing for a number of years, and I was sitting in the archive at the Museum of London and I was working on the music halls and women and looking for how kind of how cool and amazing women were at that time and that they were absolutely on top of objectification and how to manipulate it for their own economic safety and security.

And I was really fascinated by that. And I was sitting in the archive at the Museum of London and Beverly Kirk, who's the senior curator that brought in this too tight bound manuscript and said, I've got this autobiography for you. It was written by a woman who was on the music halls but was also a suffragette. You might be interested.

And I thought, oh, I don't I don't want this. I don't want the suffragettes. It feels like a trap. As a young female historian, to be working on that aspect of women's history feels like that's what I'm supposed to do and that's what we're supposed to be interested in.

And I've never been interested in that because I've always had that kind of arrogance of someone who's grown up with all of those rights. I wasn't interested in how we got them. And I sat there with this manuscript and after about five pages, I couldn't leave. And I've never had that experience before in in all of the source material that I've worked on, I've worked on some really cool things.

But she was just this incredibly passionate, explosive voice who could write about her life and her world in a way that made you live it with her.

So it's unpublished, yes, until now gotten lost story. Yeah, so you've explained how she became she got interested in the suffrage movement. What did she do and how did she contribute?

I don't know if this is a fair term, but she she became one of the this really is the history that we don't know of suffrage. And for many of us, that history has been completely sanitized. It's been really just told us a history of women who marched or maybe chained themselves to railings or maybe broke a few windows. And the reality of what the Espoo, which is the women's social and political union, were actually doing at this time, is vastly different.

This is the most dangerous terrorist organization operating in the United Kingdom at this time, conducting the largest bombing, an arson campaign that we have ever witnessed in our entire history. Now, would you ever think that that was the case with the suffragettes? No one does. No one knows that. And one of the joys and one of the things I became incredibly fascinated with was unpicking the reality and the scope and scale of this nationwide bombing and arson campaign, which was orchestrated by Christobel Pankhurst and her lieutenants.

Well, tell me about this first. First of all, why did they turn? Why did they create the biggest cluster bombing campaign in the history of Britain? Why did they turn to those extreme methods?

Well, between the 60s and when we got when we started to get the vote in 1918, over 16000, 8000 petitions came before government asking for women's suffrage. And none of them were had none of them were passed.

So the fight for getting either universal enfranchisement, both working men and women and men and women, everyone, the voting age in our democracy had been going for a really long time, and it had been a campaign of words, really passionate, very powerful words. And Fawcett says, courage, call, courage, you know, incredible kind of quotes and speeches and language. But it hadn't got anywhere. It had failed over and over again. And whichever government was in charge, lost interest, didn't think it was important, was worried that enfranchising women over working men wouldn't work, that you had to enfranchise working men first.

And it just it just wasn't going anywhere. And after 50 years of campaigning, Emmeline Pankhurst created the WPA, whose motto were deeds, not words, because they had had enough of talking. And they knew in 1983 that something had to change. And within about five to ten years, they had begun and enacted and put in place their new campaign, which started with disrupting political meetings, sort of standing up and speaking when women weren't supposed to to window smashing, to chaining themselves to railings.

And then from 1912 onwards was the Boston bombing campaign because the government went listening over and over again. They were they were rejecting bills. They were also very proudly claiming to have torpedoed bills for female franchise. So it was constantly shutting down. Any chance to give women the vote, to give anyone the vote other than the people that they wanted to have it?

And we need to think about this in the context of Irish nationalist violence and, of course, violence in Russia. I mean, talk to me about the where this campaign of terrorism came from in the late 19th, early 20th century.

So that's really fascinating because no one's this research is so new. I am the only living historian doing it. And we only have one single journal article in our entire historiography on suffragette violence, the extreme suffragette violence, which is written by C.J. Women about 15, 10, 15 years ago. And nothing's been done before or since. So this is completely unknown. So we have a lot of questions that need to be looked at. And the interplay between Ireland and Russia is a fascinating one, because we know that some of the suffragettes, Kitty herself, goes to see James Connolly speak.

And the very first suffragette, serious, vicious, violent attack happens in Dublin when four English suffragettes are sent by Christobel Pankhurst over to Dublin to bomb and burn down a packed theater, the Theatre Royal, in 1912, whilst Herbert Asquith is speaking. And earlier in the day, they took a hatchet at the MP John Redman, who's the Irish MP who's arguing for home rule that because he refused to allow a clause for women's franchise to be included in his arguments for home rule.

So there's actually a massive interplay between all of these civil rights movements and how they were all trying to fight to be heard. You know, you have to look at in every single civil rights movement that we have has had an extremist element and the suffragettes of that for the women's movement.

I'm with Dr. Fernado, we're talking about suffragettes. I've lost my Benkert and I've just been paid.

I bet someone is drawing my cash around all over town, eating in fancy restaurants with those little breadsticks, renting exotic sports cars.

Lose your card, freeze your card in seconds, no drama. Get it done in your AIB app and unfreeze it in seconds to unfreeze AIB, we back doing allied Irish banks VLCC regulated by the Central Bank of Ireland.

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And this suffragette you're talking about is the extreme, she's on the extreme flank of the extremists.

Well, so Kitty is one of the leading I call her Edwardian England's most dangerous women because she is one of the leading figures. And she says that not only is she responsible for numerous attacks, but she's also sent across the country to help advise other branches of the CPU in how to commit these arson bombing campaigns. And she burns down House. Harcourts, who's the MP for Hastings, she bends down his house with a big arson attack. And that film, The Aftermath, is on Pathé on their website.

And it's kind of the most incredible if you want to get a sense of the scale of destruction, the burning gutted how huge mansion house that the women are responsible for is an incredible site. And all of the people milling around, you can see it online. But Kitty is someone who is leaving pipe bombs from Manchester to Portsmouth, who's conducting burning down railway stations. I mean, it's kind of get a sense of the violence. We're talking chemical attacks on postboxes, bowling greens, golf greens, the sending of chemicals in the post that when you open it, irritate your eyes, nose and throat.

That's very that's intensely serious. And then we're talking bombs that the one that they send to the southeast and post office has enough nitroglycerin and to destroy the entire building and kill all 200 people inside. You know, these are huge things and we've never understood that aspect of the suffrage movement. And yet he's got a huge hand in that. She's also very close to Emilie Wilding Davison, who we know very little about. And the research that I've done.

And what it all brings together is that Emily Wilding Davidson is actually the one responsible for the bombing of Blowtorches Cottage.

That's good to hear. My great grandfather, lucky to get away with his life. Well, he wasn't there at the time, luckily. Well, that's the thing that I should ask about, because there's a there's a that's a myth. There was suffragette violence, but they were very careful. They bombed empty houses there and they were committing arson against properties. They need to be empty. It doesn't sound like that's true.

It's it is. I would agree with you. It's a myth, but it's a myth that the suffragettes themselves created Christobel Pankhurst, Emmeline Pankhurst were very always gave these great speeches about how there was no threat to life and no harm to life. Well, that's very noble when you're not the person leaving the bombs, but when your followers are. And many of these are untimed devices, those empty houses at one a.m. that you sneak in to leave a bomb and to leave an incendiary device to set a fire may not be empty three hours later.

And I have certainly found reports of bombs on packed commuter trains that go off later down the line once Third-Class Carriage is empty. Well, it was packed at the time the bomb was left. And we know that many of the postman who deal with the chemicals being sent through the post, which are often very flimsy vials of phosphorous, which is a chemical ideally designed that they will smash and break in the interaction of the post-box itself and set everything and burst into flames, because that's what frustrates us once in his ER.

And those postman, once they if they either find an unbroken file and don't realise it in an envelope or I'm moving it into post bags and everything explodes are covered in horrific burns. So this idea that we have that the suffragettes didn't hurt anyone is very much a myth of their own creation. And I would disagree.

Have we got a figure for the number of people killed and maimed? There wasn't anyone killed and at least that I haven't found yet.

But again, if you're arguing whether or not suffragette ideology killed anyone, of course, we have Emily Wilding Davison, who sacrificed her life in the fight for the vote.

So they were burning down houses and setting bombs. And just by chance, none of them killed anyone.

I think when we're looking from 1912 to to the outbreak of the First World War, we're seeing an extreme escalation. So it starts out with maybe a couple of bomb attacks a month, a couple of sort of arson attacks across the year. Then throughout 1913, it becomes very extreme. In May alone, there are 52 attacks, including a serious bombs and severe arson attacks, you know, in one month alone. And that grows throughout 1913, grows into 1914 when we start to see the inclusion of guns being used by the suffragettes.

And there's an amazing moment where Emmeline Pankhurst appears on the stage, I think in in Glasgow, it's up in Scotland. And she's been on the run for the police. She's there to speak and the police are waiting outside to try and seize her. And she manages to find her way onto the stage. And this whole erupts in kind of a wild cheer. The policemen try and rush in. And as the policemen try and rush in from the side of the stage, up stands a woman and a beautiful black evening gown who draws a gun and fires at the first policeman.

And he falls back because as far as he is aware, that's a loaded gun that's gone off at him at that stage was fitted with a blank. But you are starting to see the guns being used. And when Jenny Baines. He's another suffragette who's who's conducting the Boston bombing campaigns when she's arrested for blowing up a railway carriage, I think in Yorkshire with her husband and her son at home is found another homemade bomb, a fully made bomb, a loaded revolver and a loaded gun.

So to be honest, what we're seeing is the grand escalation of this campaign that by pure blind luck, doesn't result in the death or serious injury of anyone by the outbreak of World War One. But if war hadn't happened, I really don't know where we would be.

So let's let's ask the old age level question. What was the response of the British public to this escalation?

Well, that's a really interesting one. And you see, there were a lot of there are some amazing kind of campaigns against the violence, obviously. And Emmeline Pankhurst states very clearly that the motivation for the violence is to terrorize the British public into forcing the government's hand. And she's very clear that's what she wants to do. And the British public seem to kind of object very seriously to all of these. And the newspapers start to run weekly columns rounding up all of the violence across the country, what's happened and where.

But there seems to be silence as far as the historical record is currently concerned with understanding what happens then because we've ignored suffrage, violence, because there has been a determined campaign to sanitize this history and ignore what was happening. We don't have an understanding of people's reactions to it yet. We know that the suffragettes that Christobel was publishing in the suffragette, which was her weekly magazine double page, spreads of every single attack, including photographs that were taken underneath headlines like Reign of Terror.

You know, she's not shying away from what's happening and she's wanting it. She's wanting to see it communicated to the British public to scare, to intimidate, to draw people to her cause who feel as angry, as disenfranchised, are looking as much to become part of a civil war, which is what they're trying to cause is what they believe in and what they state is happening. And we we laugh, you know, when we look at the arguments of the suffragettes and the issues between people who think women should be equal and people who don't.

And I don't mean women who think they should be equal against men. I don't mean that as a gender war. I mean, this is a war of ideas. That is how it was. It was absolute warfare. I suppose it's the ultimate subversion of the feminine Edwardian feminine ideal is saying, no, we're trying we're not. We're warriors and we're trying to start a war which this is violent revolution.

Exactly that. And Christobel actually says exactly that. She's in Paris in 1913 and she states very clearly if men use the if menu's bombs, that's called a glorious and heroic deed. Why shouldn't women use the same? We're fighting for revolution.

So she's absolutely they always are completely clear cut about what the violence is, what was happening and why. And yet, in the last 90 years, we have forgotten this completely. And the suffragettes have become nice women who chained themselves to railings and occasionally threw them, you know, not stone. And the reality is far more exciting, far more violent, far more radical and its history that we should have because it tells us so much about where we are today.

No, I don't want to ruin the book. But let's talk about let's come back to your story, Cathy.

What what's her how does her journey go?

So she has this kind of incredible life and she's an actress in the musicals. She's Dritz. She fights to try and get safety from women like her, doesn't get anywhere, joins the suffragette, becomes an arsonist and a bomber. And at the outbreak of war, because she's German by birth, even though by this point she spent the majority of her life in England, the government seizes on an opportunity to try and get rid of one of their most dangerous women by trying to deport her back to Germany, because by that point, we were we were really driving out anyone who was who was German, even British women who were married to German husbands.

And so if you're thinking kind of around London or any port city, that could be incredibly destructive. So she they tried to get rid of her and try and throw her out of Germany. There's an accusation that she's a spy and a whole investigation, which is really exciting. And she's kind of escorted to Liverpool, escorted onto a boat, and she manages to get away instead to New York. Because that's another place that's arguing for suffrage and has a lot of kind of women's movements in it, and once in New York, there's kind of this moment of wilderness where she's alone and forgotten and abandoned.

And the New York suffragettes want nothing to do with her because she's a well-known violent militant.

And she kind of she kind of disappears for a year. And a journalist finds her working as a maid in this big posh house in downtown New York. And she's kind of regretting everything instead of going, oh, but, you know, maybe maybe women shouldn't have the vote. And that's all, you know, maybe everything. I just ignore it. And he kind of brings her back to life a bit. I don't know if it's because seeing her name in print was something to do with it, but she suddenly realizes that this secret life she's built for herself is pointless and useless.

And it's not it's not what she had committed to and what she wanted. So she joins the birth control movement with Margaret Sanger at that time and becomes the only person selling the birth control review on the streets. What's fascinating is that Margaret Sanger's birth control campaign becomes Planned Parenthood very quickly. So that's a well-known name that a lot of people would recognize now as one of the leading birth control organizations in the world, in the country, in the U.S., across everywhere.

So this is one woman who is in the hole in the foundation of two of our most important feminist movements. And no one knows her name. We should know her name like we know Emmeline Pankhurst name or Margaret Sanger's name. And yet we don't. And I think that's because often when we're talking about women's history, they have to be perfect. They have to be idolized. They have to be idols for us. And Katie, because she's so complex and she's so fluid and she's talking about rights to sex rights of your own body, rights to birth control, the freedom for women to have sex, the freedom for women not to be abused, to have a very happy, healthy sex lives that don't mean marriage.

And she wants to protect that through then an arson and bombing campaign. You know, this is this is someone that we have been taught not to who's using behavior we've been taught not to idolize. We actually are heroes, can be flawed and knowing about them and listening to their stories as they tell them first hand, I think helps change our society and our culture far more than pretending everything is perfect and that history should be comfortable. Provocative stuff, fun, I love it.

Give us the name of the book again. It's death in 10 minutes.

Kitty Marion, activist, arsonist's suffragette, lovely Edwardian, Britain's most dangerous woman.

Hey, good luck with it. Thank you, Dr.. Did you get Prabhakar? Hardbody, just a quick message at the end of this podcast, I'm currently sheltering in a small, windswept building on a piece of rock in the Bristol Channel called Lundie. I'm here to make a podcast. I'm here enduring weather that frankly is apocalyptic because I want to get some great podcast material. You guys, in return, a little tiny favor to ask if you could go to get your podcasts, if you could give it a five star rating, if you could share it, if you could give it a review.

I really appreciate that. But from the comfort of your own homes, you'll be doing me a massive favour. And more people listen to the podcast. We can do more and more ambitious things and I can spend more of my time getting pummeled. Thank you.

I've lost my Benkert and I've just been paid.

I bet someone is drawing my cash around all over town, eating in fancy restaurants with those little breadsticks, renting exotic sports cars.

Lose your card, freeze your card in seconds, no drama. Get it done in your AIB app and unfreeze it in seconds to unfreeze AIB. We back doing allied Irish banks p.l.c. is regulated by the Central Bank of Ireland.

There's no better time for your family to be with vagi. Health can get access to digital services from the comfort of your home, like our online doctors available seven days a week at no extra cost, and our urgent care facilities too. With fast member only access to our VHI Swift Care and paediatric clinics switch today. Call us SourceForge Vagi Family Health Plan Benefit Limits Apply VHI Health Care Doctor Ideas VHI. Health care is regulated by the Central Bank of Ireland and the State of Insurance DiGRA Health Insurance in Ireland.