Violence is a morally acceptable response to being oppressed and controlled; women were not given a fair stake in society, and therefore it would be unreasonable to expect them to be bound by its laws.
The suffragists arguably achieved a great deal more, without them the measures of the suffragettes would likely have set women’s rights back further.
I don't agree that the suffragists are forgotten. Beyond that though, I'd say that lots of successful liberation movements have had multiple wings with different methods.
I think the point is that they weren't "forgotten" but deliberately repackaged. And this action is going on today. Scroll down to the dead posts. There's one that gives a very factual account of how some suffragettes joined up with the Fascist movement in the 1930s. They were probably rooting for Hitler. Yet, someone quickly down voted that factoid out of the main stream.
What about modern non-wealthy? They neither get a fair stake in society nor even a voice that matters. Voting pretty much doesn't work. How much the issue is supported by non-wealthy voters has no bearing on the laws that are going to be written that affect it.
And by non-wealthy I pretty much mean anyone that has to work to live, regardless of whether they can find the job or not.
Voting not being effective is quite a long way from voting not being allowed at all.
However, if we get to the point when control over their own lives is denied to people, it won't be unreasonable for them to resist. We've had slave revolutions before, and they weren't morally wrong.
> Voting not being effective is quite a long way from voting not being allowed at all
I disagree pretty strongly.
If the system is rigged in such a way that you mostly get the same outcomes no matter how people vote, that is only a razor thin line away from not being allowed to vote at all
I think it's an easy edge to tip over, but I'd stress that there is a difference between 'voting but having an unpopular stance' and 'denied basic rights'. There isn't a major political party that represents my views currently, for example, but it would be premature for me to start shooting because this is not (yet and hopefully ever) the same as my voice being explicitly ignored.
1. It feels like you're trying to walk me into some imagined rhetorical trap; if that's the case, feel free to speed up.
2. It's completely possible that justified violence could happen in the US; it would, as anywhere, depend on what violence by who for what reason, but there's nothing that makes the US special in this regard. In the past, on multiple occasions (resistance to slavery, for example), political violence in the cause of freedom has occurred, and I don't think that was immoral.
Is it though? If a ward of the state who is trying to drive a stolen car because they force him to bath at the flatshare he lifes at riots against the police arresting him, is that absolute answer a good fit to a gradient question? Or a expression of the problem?
> or detonated a bomb at Holloway Prison that covered sleeping children in shards of glass
They attempted to bomb a prison notorious for holding and torturing women. Some windows were broken in nearby houses [1], and I don't think there are any reports of actual injuries to the children.
Significantly worse collateral damage is accepted daily for far weaker reasons; broken glass from windows is something that wouldn't even be mentioned in any other context. Recently, the US dropped a bomb on a school directly--if the suffragettes should be castigated for the windows, what do you think of that country?
Yet they are all but forgotten.