One of the more disturbing newsreels of the early twentieth century—now, like the Zapruder film, easily found on the Web—shows Emily Davison, a militant English suffragist maddened by the injustices she felt had been done to women, throwing herself in protest in front of the king’s horse at the Epsom Derby on June 4, 1913. In nine jerky seconds you see it all: a somersaulting horse, a woman down and lying motionless, men in boaters running onto the track. Jockey and horse survived; Davison, struck in the head, died without regaining consciousness. Fellow suffragists saw her death as a martyrdom. Davison, wrote Emmeline Pankhurst, no doubt believed that through her grotesque self-sacrifice she might “put an end to the intolerable torture of women.”
Like watching Davison’s suicide, perusing old Atlantic essays on the century-long female struggle for equal rights can provoke mixed feelings—especially in the erstwhile feminist. On the one hand, one is grateful for the fearlessness with which various Atlantic writers, male and female, have argued over the years on behalf of women’s rights. It’s hard not to rejoice at Samuel McChord Crothers’s eloquent defense of women’s suffrage, or Virginia Woolf’s surprisingly passionate assault on the exploitation of female domestic labor. My favorite blast from the feminist past here is the ferocious “Desperate Housewives,” in which Nora Johnson, two years before Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique, decries the exhausting work of child care as “the simple, nerve-wracking, mindless, battering-ram process of trying to teach a savage to use a fork.”