Contemporary laws would criminalise the disruptive tactics used by suffragettes and Greenham Common protesters, repeating historical arrests. Yvette Cooper's public commemoration of suffrage contrasts with her role overseeing repressive legislation and mass arrests, exposing a modern paradox. Stunts function as deliberate performance: theatrical, provokable, precisely timed, and impossible to ignore. Organisers storyboard actions, construct narratives and marshal resources to produce calculated disruption. Suffragette tactics used seemingly destructive acts as strategic media interventions. Edwardian press relied on spectacle to drive circulation, so manufactured outrage ensured headline coverage and forced political issues into everyday conversation despite editorial vilification.
We must ask ourselves: how would the heroic suffragettes or the remarkable Greenham Common women be regarded if active today? The answer is simple: they would be locked up. Just as they were locked up then. A century ago, women chained themselves to railings, set fires, endured prison and changed the world, and we celebrate their victories without thinking too hard about their methods. Yet today's laws would criminalise them on sight.
I have been retracing these acts of protest for a new BBC Radio 4 documentary, Outrage Inc. I wanted to understand not just the anger, but the creative genius and conviction behind the stunt. Because at its best, a stunt isn't chaos. It's an art form theatre with consequences. It's designed to provoke, timed to perfection and impossible to ignore. Those who stage them aren't amateurs: they storyboard, construct narrative, marshal resources. They are producers of disruption.
Take the suffragettes. With their matchsticks, they weren't vandals they were master tacticians who understood the media economy of Edwardian Britain. By the early 1900s, papers such as the Daily Mail and Daily Express were locked in a circulation war, selling millions of copies at a penny each. Their lifeblood was advertising and their oxygen was spectacle. Respectful reports of speeches and petitions did not move papers off newsstands. Outrage did.
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