Historians v Sociologists: addressing emotions and militant feminism

---

#SpotlightOnHistoricalEmotions

The more I apply approaches that sociologists have been deliberating on for the last decade or two in order to more deeply understand the emotions of protest movements, the more I am driven to ask the question:

What is the difference between the questions that sociologists and historians ask of this topic?

I have deliberated on this in a chapter on the emotions of protest in a book on sources for emotions history, edited with Peter N. Stearns and Katie Barclay.

Put rather simply, a sociologist might ask what roles anger, shame, hope, joy etc play in feminist militancy. To motivate? Mobilise? Maintain connection? Bring about the demise of the movement?

But a historian might ask how the role that emotions plays in protest movements changes over time. Is a certain emotion more effective in one era versus another? What particular role is that emotion considered more effective for?

For example, I have been thinking about a suffragette hammer I saw on a visit to the Museum of London a while back.

A question I asked myself: Is a 1910s English suffragette’s hammer more evocative of women’s unruly protest emotions than a 1970s American feminist’s militant placard screaming against domestic violence or even a 2010s Irish pro-abortion placards reading ‘I am NOT a walking womb!’?

Left: Silver toffee hammer brooch with the inscription ‘Votes for Women’. © Museum of London

If it is, why? Is it because female anger was much more heavily frowned upon at the beginning of the century than at the end – therefore a symbol or embodiment of that female anger is more evocative of the emotional transgression? Is that emotional transgression more palpable because of the intensity and nature of the gendered emotional norms it transgressed?

Time is important. Change is important.

‘Exhibition: Generations of Reformers’, US National Library of Medicine

Historians trace, and analyse the reasons for, change over time.

Can a comparative analysis of the 1910s feminist hammer – employed as a weapon of subterfuge and destruction – and placards expressing the rage of volumes of Women’s Liberation marchers as they took to the streets of cities across the globe enlighten us about how attitudes to the relationship between gender and expressions of anger over the course of the 20th century?

This temporal dynamism opens up an inexhaustable vista of emotions history – emotions questions!

One takeaway from this brief example?

Emotions are gendered. Anger is gendered. Emotions and anger and their deployment by women and expected outcomes and responses elicited change over time.