“It’s not possible to imagine women winning the vote without the suffragettes,” says Ms Connelly,
“The militant organising, particularly of working class women, pointed to the possibility of a movement that would grow and could potentially become an enormous mass movement.”
via 100 Women: Suffragists or suffragettes – who won women the vote? – BBC News
In 1996, legal scholar Carrie Menkel-Meadow wrote that oppositional presentation of facts — that is, the adversarial system as taught through the Socratic method — may not be the best way to arrive at the truth. “Polarized debate,” she wrote, “simply distorts the truth, leaves out important information, simplifies complexity, and obfuscates rather than clarifies.” Menkel-Meadow explained that “truth is illusive, partial, interpretable, dependent on the characteristics of the knowers as well as the known, and, most importantly, complex.” Likewise, criminal justice scholar Katherine van Wormer lamented in 2009 that the adversarial system hearkens back to “primitive practices related to combat”; Australian professor and former attorney Kate Galloway called it a “performance piece.” Restorative justice, by contrast, has been called humanistic.
via The Inherent Feminism of Restorative Justice – All Rise – Medium
Of course, there are the opponents with laws-are-laws arguments; “Instinctively I can see where that campaign is coming from so I will take a look and see if there is a proposal that I can take more seriously,” home secretary Amber Rudd told Good Morning Britain. “But in terms of pardoning for arson, for violence like that … that is a little trickier.”
But there are other objections, too. Before the announcement, historian Fern Riddell—who’s got an intriguing book out in April about the radical activist Kitty Marion—wrote a piece for the Guardian about how the women’s suffrage movement in Britain encompassed both peaceful protests and more controversial direct action
via Does Pardoning Britain’s Suffragettes for Lawbreaking Really Honor Their Efforts?
An interesting look at the work of people standing up for social and civil equality in countries where human rights are threatened or challenged.
via The women who risk their lives for others’ rights – BBC News
