When you see news reports on the effectiveness of self-defense programs for empowering women and preventing assaults, you’ll often see people posting criticisms that we really ought to be “teaching men not to rape.” The comments typically go something like this: How about we teach MEN not to rape women? Women cannot prevent rape. Women are sick of well-meaning advice, which only makes us live in fear and limit where we feel safe to go in public. We resent the implication that we have some kind of obligation to become self-defense experts so that we are not victimized by men.

This refrain by women (and Kurt Cobain, too), who consider themselves progressive, is, however, an example of what Lauren Berlant famously called “cruel optimism.” Cruel optimism is wanting something that is not very likely to happen. Like when a woman, influenced by a romance-novel fantasy, keeps on hoping that her man will become a prince even though he is an abusive jerk. Or like when you use Twitter hoping to have constructive intellectual dialogue.

Berlant describes cruel optimism as a relation that exists “when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing” (Berlant 2011, p. 1). So the optimism comes from the the way in which one’s plan for the future is tied to one’s identity, even though one’s attachment to the desired outcome may take place in conditions that make realizing one’s desire, as our 1970s magic 8 ball would say, not likely. The cruelty comes from being attached to an object, outcome, or scene of desire when this attachment is against one’s interests or undermines the aim that brought you to it in the first place.

There is a fantasy of men having one big collective ah-ha moment where they finally learn not to rape. Yes, it ought to be the case that nobody rapes, or steals, or cheats, or murders, or embezzles, or, according to some of our students on course evaluations, pairs a striped sweater with a flowered skirt, but the continued pursuit of this as the ideal fantasy–to the point of dismissing strategies that are shown empirically to work–is how feminists exhibit cruel optimism.

In the end, as we review in a commentary for the journal Sex Roles (free access can be found here), women’s self-defense (doing it in the moment as well as training to practice the techniques) is effective in preventing and thwarting assaults without resulting in victim blaming or restricting women’s freedoms. Let’s let data, not cruel optimism, steer the sexual assault prevention movement.

As the United States celebrates the 100-year anniversary of women’s right to vote, let’s remember the bad-ass women who fought for this right–literally fought, like with jui-jitsu and stuff.  And so we thank Dr. Wendy L. Rouse, author of the groundbreaking historical book, Her Own Hero: The Origins of the Women’s Self-Defense Movement, for this guest blog post.  

Boxing, Jiu-Jitsu and Suffragist Self-Defense

The year 2020 marks the centennial of the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in the United States, which declared that a citizen could not be denied the right to vote based on sex. As the anniversary approaches and historians begin to reexamine the traditional narrative of women’s suffrage history, new details emerge revealing just how contentious the campaign for the vote really was. 

You already know that suffragists petitioned, lobbied, rallied, marched, and picketed. You also already know that militant suffragists endured arrest, imprisonment, hunger strikes, and force-feeding. But did you know that radical suffragists took up boxing and jiu-jitsu to physically prepare for the political battle for the vote?

Suffragists were fighting for much more than the vote. They hoped the vote would empower women to break away from the confinement of the domestic sphere, eliminate gender-based discrimination in education and employment, and protect them against violence. But women were told that they did not need the vote because their brothers, fathers, and husbands would protect them. Suffragists, however, challenged this myth of the natural protector, citing cases of child abuse, domestic violence, and sexual assault to arguing to the contrary that men were frequently the perpetrators of violence against women and children. 

Women’s experiences advocating for the vote, both in the United States and across the Atlantic in Great Britain, only further seemed to prove their point. The British suffragists of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) experienced brutal incidents of violence in their encounters with anti-suffrage men and the police. They organized deputations and marches demanding their right to be heard. Nicknamed “suffragettes” by a mocking press, WSPU members adopted the name as a badge of pride. The suffragettes faced unruly mobs of men who heckled and assaulted them on the streets. Rather than coming to their aid, police officers assaulted and arrested the women. Bloodied and bruised in violent clashes with anti-suffrage mobs and the police, suffragists were affirmed in their conclusion that they could not rely on men to protect them. 

In this violent context, self-defense training took on explicit political meaning. In 1909, jiu-jitsu expert Edith Garrud began teaching a course that she called “ju-jutsu for suffragette self-defence.” Garrud also specially trained a group of suffragette women to serve as the “bodyguard” for WSPU leaders. But after discovering that detectives were spying on them, the bodyguard was eventually forced to train in secret, hiding from the police, and changing their meeting locations to avoid discovery. By 1913, the WSPU leaders were recommending that all suffragists train in self-defense. Sylvia Pankhurst, addressing a suffragist meeting insisted: “We have not yet made ourselves a match for the police, and we have got to do it. The police know jiu-jitsu. I advise you to learn jiu-jitsu.”

“Ju-Jutsu for Suffragette Self-Defence.” Women’s Franchise 2, no. 53 (July 1, 1909): 667.

“If You Want to Earn Some Time, Throw a Policeman!” Sketch. July 6, 1910, 425.

British suffragettes and their radical tactics inspired American suffragists. Several American women traveled to the United Kingdom to join the WSPU and participate in the protests. Zelie Emerson, a young woman from Michigan, was inspired to join the cause after hearing Sylvia Pankhurst speak about the WSPU in Chicago. Emerson experienced multiple violent confrontations with the London police. On two separate occasions, the police fractured her skull with their batons. Emerson protested her arrest and imprisonment at Holloway through hunger, thirst, and sleep strikes. Upon her release from jail, Emerson helped organize Sylvia Pankhurst’s East End People’s Army which drilled in “the use of clubs, fists, and jiu-jitsu” explicitly to protect suffragettes against the brutality of anti-suffragists and the police. 

“Suffragists Take up Jiu-Jitsu.” San Francisco Examiner. May 2, 1909, 44.

Suffragists in the United States never organized a bodyguard or a People’s Army. Instead, the militant tactics of the WSPU sparked intense debate among American suffragists. Most mainstream American suffrage organizations insisted that such militancy was unnecessary in the American political landscape and refused to publicly endorse such tactics. Individual suffragists, however, recognized the value of women’s self-defense training in this context. Sofia Loebinger, a leader of a suffragist group in New York, expressed admiration for the actions of the English suffragettes who practiced jiu-jitsu insisting that: “Strong situations need strong women.” She admitted that although it might not assist American women directly in achieving the right to vote: “boxing would be a good thing for women if only to teach them to concentrate their minds on one thing at a time. The ballot, for instance.” Recognizing the transformative potential of physical training in strengthening women for their political fight, Loebinger hoped that American suffragists would design self-defense courses modeled after the British example.

Although suffragists in the United States experienced much less physical violence than the British suffragettes, their personal experiences with harassment and assault challenged them to reconsider their views about women’s right to use force when necessary. American suffragists who took to the streets to demand their rights endured verbal, physical, and sexual assault from anti-suffrage men and the police. The 1913 suffrage parade in Washington, D.C. ended in chaos as spectators pushed their way into the streets, blocking the path of the floats and marchers. Anti-suffrage men hurled insults at the shouting that the women should have “stayed at home where they belonged.” Women and children endured sexual harassment from observers who made lewd comments to them as they marched by. Marchers reported being pushed grabbed, pinched, tripped, and shoved by male spectators. Over one hundred suffragists were sent to the hospital to seek medical treatment for their injuries. A Congressional investigating committee appointed to investigate the incident, chastised the police for failing to stop the violence and egging on the assailants. 

Greeley-Smith, Nixola. “Suffragettes Will Cultivate Muscles and Fight Like Amazons for Her Ballot.” Evening World (New York, NY). April 11, 1911, 3.

Shortly thereafter, local suffrage organizations and women’s clubs began organizing private boxing and jiu-jitsu classes for their members. These classes were mostly held in secret to avoid attracting negative attention. In March 1913, two weeks after the violent Washington D.C. suffrage parade, a group of suffragists in St. Louis determined to study boxing to better protect themselves in their fight for women’s rights. They hired a prize-fighter to instruct them and began quietly training at a local gymnasium owned and operated by a German immigrant woman named Louise Bodecker. A local reporter broke the story describing boxing as the latest fad among suffragists. The boxing instructor confirmed the existence of the class but refused to provide any more detail. The fighting suffragists likewise declined to be interviewed and chose to keep their identities anonymous. 

Suffragists in Badger, Washington, were similarly motivated by recent incidents of violence against suffragists to take up lessons in boxing. A boxing academy “for suffragettes only” opened sometime in the summer of 1913. A visitor to the boxing club noted the ferocity of the women’s abilities, commenting, “The suffragettes take as kindly and naturally to the art of self-defense as a duck does to water.” The use of the term “suffragettes” in referring to these American women suggests that the author clearly associated these suffragists and their actions with the radical suffragettes of Britain.

“Boxing Lessons Now Fad of Suffragists,” Leavenworth Times (Leavenworth, Kansas), March 20, 1913, 3.

Women’s self-defense courses became increasingly more common in the United States as women recognized the political implications of their physical empowerment. In 1917, suffragist Louise Le Noir Thomas reflecting on the trend of women’s self-defense classes attributed it to the larger “feminist rebellion” that was occurring in women’s lives as a result of the suffrage fight. She insisted that women would no longer “be called the ‘weaker sex.’” By training in self-defense a woman was boldly declaring that it was “not unwomanly to protect herself.” 

Thomas, Louise Le Noir. “How a Woman Can Protect Herself,” Ogden Standard (Ogden, UT). Magazine Section. April 14, 1917, 1.

Suffragists like Thomas believed that a woman who studied self-defense represented the ideal modern New Woman: both politically and physically empowered. Suffragists understood that winning the vote was an essential first step to their quest for liberation. They also increasingly recognized that women’s political oppression was directly linked to their physical subjugation. Radical suffragists who advocated boxing and jiu-jitsu insisted that a woman has the right and ability to defend herself and self-defense therefore became an important symbol of a woman’s total liberation.

Wendy Rouse is an Associate Professor of History at San Jose State University. Her research examines the history of women and children in the Progressive Era. Her most recent book, Her Own Hero: The Origins of the Women’s Self-Defense Movement, explores links the history of women’s self-defense with the campaign for the vote in the early twentieth century.

An Open Letter to Our Many Friends in the Blogosphere (but not including the guys who keep sending us dick pics):

• Must be between 200 and 1,000 words in length
• Contributor must be academic (sorry, we love non-academics and self-defense practitioners but the point of our blog is the scholarship on self-defense)
• Must be rooted in, or about, the scholarship on self-defense applied to a current issue
• Must not violate copyright
• Must not be published elsewhere, although we are OK with simultaneous posts (e.g., published here and published on your own blog on same date)
• Humor and creativity are encouraged!
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How to submit:  Send submissions by email to seejanefightback@gmail.com. We promise to get back to you within 30 days.

We can’t wait to hear from you!

Jill & Martha, aka SJFB 1.0

Ask any feminist if men have power because they are bigger and stronger than women and you’ll get an answer that things are far more complex than this, gender is socially constructed and institutionally maintained, and that sex inequality determines how we see our biology rather than our biology being the cause of the inequality.

And yet, when we start talking about training women to fight off sexual assailants, feminists are often the first to object.  We have witnessed multiple instances of this objection and we have offered multiple possible explanations for it.  Here’s one more, rooted in a style of handling power.

The feminist literature is full of discussions of power as dominating or controlling another person.  A subset of the feminist literature discusses power as a form of empowerment (eg., finding your power, empowering yourself to exert more control over yourself or your circumstances).  This view frames power positively as competence.  For instance, ecofeminist Starhawk frames power as a positive energy that “emerges from within.”

Those with institutional authority and privilege can exert their will using power as a physical or economic force.  This is primary power.  This is the power women talk about seeing/feeling/fearing when a man pulls his pants off.  There’s a thinly veiled threat that rape or murder could be next.  There are other ways to exert one’s will, of course.  Nietzsche calls this secondary power.  This is the power that someone lower on the food chain has to exert their will in certain circumstances, such as when a woman student comes on to a male professor with the office door closed only to say he harassed her, knowing that his untenured butt would get fired.

If women are more comfortable using secondary power, then our advocacy of physical and verbal resistance just smacks too much of primary power for feminists’ taste.  These same feminists often prove themselves to be very comfortable with secondary power plays– for example, encouraging women to file Title IX complaints, investigating people, etc, etc.  These are all ways feminists are completely comfortable seeing men go down.  If I were a man, I’d much prefer to have had the temporary pain of my testicles twisted than to have lost my job or chance to finish my education.

If we take the claim, made by many in the gay rights and feminist movements over the years, that sexuality ought to be democratized, then we must rethink some of the popular positions on issues like dating, hooking up, and resistance to sexual assault.  We must demand not simply respectability but responsibility. As R.W. Connell noted in an essay back in 1995, while the AIDS epidemic spawned a kind of collective responsibility in sexual practice in the gay community, this project of responsibility was not adopted in the heterosexual community.  As a way to illustrate how conventional, hegemonic heterosexuality can absorb some aspects of feminist radicalism without really changing the power structure, Connell points out the 1975 best selling book, The Total Woman, by Evangelical Christian Marabel Morgan. Morgan advised women to employ the pro-sex ethos of the time–for example, by wearing make-up and sexy outfits–to please husbands under whose total authority they lived.  As Connell put it, “The wife becomes an erotic doormat.”   

If we want to democratize heterosexual relations, it will take more than just pole dancing at parties and being willing to hookup in one-night stands, often while drinking and drugging.  It will take a willingness to set boundaries, deciding what you are OK and not OK with, and fighting back–in the moment–when/if you have to.  Otherwise, college women on the hookup scene today are a contemporary version of the Total Woman–using eroticism to reinforce men’s power and control rather than to contest it. 

Clearly, there is something appealing about the idea of empowerment, being powerful, resisting sexism, and fighting.  These seem to define feminist empowerment today.  The only problem is that none of these books is actually about learning how to fight. 

Looking for an empowerment self-defense course?  These links might help:

ESD Global

Prepare/IMPACT Personal Safety

No Means No Worldwide

Wishing you all an empowered and impactful holiday season and New Year,

Martha and Jill

In their article “Stop Raising Awareness Already!” in the Spring 2017 Stanford Social Innovation Review, Ann Christiano and Annie Neimand argue that organizations all too frequently attempt to raise awareness about their issue, as if awareness automatically translates into action for change.  Instead, they argue, organizations must communicate more strategically with their public audiences, giving people concrete calls to action. 

Christiano and Neimand explain that there are four specific risks to doing awareness campaigns the wrong way.   Done improperly, awareness campaigns can: (1) lead to no action; (2) reach the wrong audience; (3) create harm; and  (4) generate a backlash. 

As an example of how well-intentioned campaigns can result in no action, the authors cite the CDC’s very witty “Zombie Apocalypse” campaign, which went viral but led to no measurable increase in people’s actually taking the recommended steps for disaster preparation.  As an example of a creative and popular campaign that may have actually created harm, the authors cite the “Dumb Ways to Die” music video, which was created to encourage safety and decrease the deaths around trains in Australia.  Sadly, the sweet-sounding song and cartoon video make death seem less horrifying and, importantly, did not take into account the research that shows that such imagery can actually increase suicide among those already contemplating it.  As the authors put it, “Unfortunately, it is uncommon for practitioners to conduct a review of academic literature as part of the early stages of any effort. . . . The gulf between scholarship that could help practitioners avoid harm, reduce risk, or increase the effectiveness of their efforts and practice is common and wide.”

This is all particularly interesting to us since we created See Jane Fight Back because we were tired of the uphill battle it had been raising awareness about the importance and effectiveness of women’s self-defense training.   We have not felt particularly successful in getting women’s self-defense training to be an accepted part of the rape prevention discourse.

So let’s consider awareness campaigns for sexual assault prevention.  These often lead to no action (other than after-the-fact reporting) or they create harm when, by not mentioning the research showing how effective active resistance can be, they rob women of the knowledge and skills to thwart an attacker and position women as damsels in distress who must rely on men’s good intentions.  And the backlash is rampant, such as when Nina Sanchez, who won the Miss USA title in 2014, advocated self-defense training for girls and women as a rape prevention strategy.

When we look at the sexual assault prevention campaigns, it is obvious that those campaigns have not conducted a review of the academic literature.  We have been a broken record, trying to tell people about the scholarship showing how effective self-defense is.  Which leads us to examine our own campaign.

How effective is our campaign to advocate self-defense?  To do well, it must move people to learn the empowering tactics of verbal and physical resistance to sexual assault and/or move policy makers to provide such training. 

According to Christiano and Neimand, a successful public interest communications campaign contains four elements: (1) targeting your audience as narrowly as possible; (2) creating compelling messages with clear calls to action; (3) developing a theory of change; and (4) using the right messenger. 

So here are our questions:

Have we targeted our audience properly?  Do we have an audience, or instead, audiences?  Women and girls are a diverse group – to target our audience narrowly, as Christiano and Neimand suggest, we may need different messages, theories, and messengers.

What about the message–if we came up with a compelling message with a clear call to action, what would it be?  Having a clear call to action is no guarantee of success, as we learned from the CDC’s Zombie Apocalypse campaign, which made it crystal clear that you ought to make an emergency kit. But having a clear call is one of the four necessary elements of a successful public interest communication campaign.  

What about our theory of change–do we need to rethink that?  We’ve been thinking that as more women feel that pleasurable sensation of empowerment as they develop an efficacious relationship with their own potential for setting boundaries, they will be more likely to set boundaries and men, recognizing that more and more women in their midst are setting strong limits, will be less likely to see women as easy targets to prey on.   The data suggest this is true, but perhaps, with the goal of raising awareness, this isn’t the theory that compels women and girls to embrace self-defense.

And finally, we are thinking that the self-defense advocacy movement needs the “right messenger”– perhaps a cool woman to whom girls and young women would listen. Lady Gaga? Beyonce? Pink? Laverne Cox?  Serena Williams?  Who do you think our messenger should be?

These are the questions we must answer if we want the research on self-defense to wind up making a real difference to prevent sexual assault.  Tell us what you think in the comments section!