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Students discuss feminist movement

On 31March 2016, in the Sociology of Law course, Professor Zheng Yongliu and students watched the movie “Suffragette” and discussed about feminist jurisprudence.

The students Cui Linlin and Wang Tongxing gave a introductory talk about the movie afterwards, which focused on male power. They presented two key theories to the class. The first theory says that the lack of women’s suffrage is attributed to the fact that men do not want to share power with women. Or as a male character in the movie puts it: “Women do not have the calmness of temperament, or the balance of mind to exercise judgment in political affairs. If we allow women to vote, it will mean the loss of social structure.” Following this theory, men divide life into public and private areas and keep themselves in public areas, which are valued higher, while women have to live in private areas and accept the roles and tasks assigned by men. This also leads to a language, logic, and structure of the law that is male-created and reinforces male values.

The second theory draws attention to the point that Maud Watts, the heroine of the movie, has refuted the dualism between men and women. Women must strive for power to change the status quo of being discriminated, she says.Just as suffragette leader Emmeline Pankhurst is depicted in the movie with her famous quote “We are fighting for a time in which every little girl born into the world will have an equal chance with her brothers.” Following this line of reasoning, women must strive for equal power and responsibilities with men to overcome the male characteristics of law. This point of view also echoes the core reading of this course, Our Lives Before the Law: Constructing a Feminist Jurisprudence  by Judith Baer.

The class mainly discussed the first issue and put forward two opposite positions during the discussion.

Position one: The reason that the suffragettes have to take the aggressive way to obtain power is that they longed for power and the peaceful ways had proven to be useless. However, one student argued that the suffragettes might hurt people who have no intention to deprive them of their power or rights during their fight with the authorities. Our response was that hurting innocent people has never been their intention  and that they actually had taken measures to avoid injuries and death.

Position two: It was Martin Luther King’s non-violent protest that crucially helped Afro-American to fight against racial segregation and discrimination and to fight for democratic rights, and finally won those rights for them. Since there were further peaceful ways to choose to strive for women’s rights, the suffragettes’ choioce of violence was unreasonable and radical.

In the end of the course, Professor Zheng Yongliu summarized that the movie “Suffragette” did not intend to rationalize or legitimate violence and that some violent acts in this movie are objective demonstrations of the history. For instance, itwas an accident that the housekeeper in the movie could have been hurt by the suffragettes’ action. It is reasonable to take some violent acts to strive for rights and fight against discrimination and oppression in a specific historical background, Professor Zheng Yongliu argued.

Article by Cui Linlin and Wang Tongxing (CESL Master’s Students from the 2015 intake)