Hidden behind the walls of a fight studio in London are a group of women struggling to use their fighting techniques to gain the right to vote. Armed with their skirts, their wits, and Suffrajitsu, the women work together to break up sessions of Parliament that attempt to continue to ban the right to vote for women. The women run into difficulties when a large group of police swarm the stage at rally. Part one promises daring rescues in part #2.
Comixology describes the characters this way:
• Persephone Wright, a “fallen woman” who will protect those she loves at all costs
• “Flossie” Le Mar, a rough-diamond adventuress from New Zealand
• Katie “Sandwina” Brumbach, a fiercely loyal Austrian wrestler and strongwoman
• Toupie Lowther, a cunning, cross-dressing woman of means
• Judith Lee, a proud Anglo-Chinese socialite and amateur detective
• Kitty Marshall, a quick-witted teenager who keeps her radicalism secret from her wealthy family
• Miss Sanderson, an enigmatic “governess” with an appetite for violence
Street-fighting suffragettes. This is what Mary Poppins was missing. Flossie is perhaps my favorite character, mostly because of how much she eyes everything English as eyeroll worthy.
Every once in a while I stumble upon something like this. I really want to like Suffrajitsu, and in fact most of it I quite enjoy. Women fighting the system while wearing petticoats is amusing, but they become deadly when they switch to bloomers. The issue stands however, that I’m not sure how far the vote would have come for women if they perpetually were attacking Parliament during the time period. I do love the fact that they are able to take a stand against their male counterparts when violence has been dealt towards them. To put it bluntly, I’m torn on Suffrajitsu: Mrs. Pankhurt’s Amazons. I’m looking forward to the next issue to see where this goes.
Suffrajitsu: Mrs. Pankhurt’s Amazons #1 is now available on Comixology.
Strange but true: most of the story is based on real history. The radical English suffragettes really did resort to violence against property, including arson and even bombing attacks on unoccupied buildings, along with mass vandalism and other forms of extreme protest. There were also riots between pro- and anti-suffrage supporters, most infamously the 1910 “Black Friday” riot in central London.
The WSPU (Mrs. Pankhurst’s organization) really did create a secret bodyguard society of martial arts-trained women, who fought with the police when they tried to re-arrest suffragettes who were fugitives under the Cat and Mouse Act. By that time, the conflict between the government and the suffragettes were routinely being compared to a state of civil war.
Historians argue about whether the Pankhursts’ extremely militant tactics delayed the granting of women’s suffrage, but the fact is that women had already been “politely” agitating for the vote for about four decades, with no results. The Pankhursts put the cause back on the front pages during the pre-WW1 years and then organized women to support the government during the War by doing “men’s work”, and limited suffrage was granted soon after the War ended in the 1918.