Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/02/12/suffragetto-an-early-20th-cen.html
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Can you dress up the cops in tiny riot gear and gas-grenade launchers?
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100 years ago I doubt the cops would club affluent white women in public.
Now the sexes can expect to receive equal police brutality.
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Given the fate of the Landlord’s Game from the same time period, I shudder to think about how this would have been modified by sexists to suit their regressive agenda.
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Accounts of “Black Friday” in 1910 suggest police were quite ready to assault white women in public in front of the House of Commons in London:
“But the reality of the violence of this ‘Black Friday’ seems to have been quite different than the Times report. As historian Katherine Connolly writes, ‘For six hours women were batoned, beaten, punched, thrown to the ground, kicked on the floor and had their faces rubbed against railings in full view of the House of Commons. There were also widespread reports of police sexually abusing the demonstrators. They repeatedly pinched and twisted their breasts, lifted their skirts, groping and assaulting the women for hours.’”
Broader of the 1910 “Black Friday” in from Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Friday_(1910)
I suspect this day (and perhaps others like it) may have been the inspiration for the board game.
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Reminds me of Up Against The Wall, Motherfucker!, a board game simulation of the 1968 Columbia University student riots, which pits the anti-war student Radicals against the establishment Administration.
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One thing that struck me about re-watching Mary Poppins as an adult is that pretty much everyone treats Mrs. Banks’ suffragette campaign as a joke except for the Chimney Sweeps’ Union, who clearly also have a strained relationship with the constabulary (judging by Dick Van Dyke’s nervous demeanor during the one-man-band bit early in the film).
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I was just reading the rules. It’s a symmetrical game much like checkers with a few key differences. Just like checkers you can jump over an opposing piece to capture it. When the police capture a suffragette, she is “arrested” and moved off the board to the prison. But when the suffragettes capture a police unit, he is “disabled” and moved to the hospital. What jumped out at me is that it specifies that suffragettes can disable police through jiu jitsu.
Were English suffragettes studying jiu jitsu in the early 1900’s to use in combat against police?
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I don’t think it would’ve been Jiu-Jitsu, but given the climate and how heated the Suffragette demonstrations got (see above) I wouldn’t be surprised if there weren’t some groups of them who did self-defense training.
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I just thought it was interesting that the rules, written in that era, specifically mentioned “jiu jitsu”.
The have been edited for clarity, but it would be shocking to me for someone to edit that in, so I assume it was part of the original text.
Of course they could have been unaware that jiu-jitsu is a specific martial art and just used it to mean self-defense generally. I’m sure we’ll never know.
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Oh! I completely missed that. That is oddly specific: Wikipedia says that Jiu-Jitsu was only introduced to the west 10 years before the game was made, so maybe it was just in the public consciousness at the time?
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Kinda looks like it.
https://www.google.com/search?q=Were+English+suffragettes+studying+jiu+jitsu+in+the+early+1900’s
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This game wouldn’t exist if they hadn’t.
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@tekk @anon50609448 This amused me:
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While this is a fictionalized retelling, it’s a good one.
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Well I know what I am bringing to the next board game day at the library!
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Easier to get a hold of, more relevant and a better experience all around:
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Amazing.
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