Uprisings led by women
A protest is a statement or action taken part to express disapproval of or object an authority, most commonly led in order to influence public opinion or government policy.
[1][2]: 21 [3] Studies of contemporary hunter-gatherers show that their strong sense of moral community is maintained by autonomous individuals who constantly resist any form of personal domination.
[4] Chris Knight, and other anthropologists influenced by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, have theorised that these uprisings were led by women looking for collective support to ease their childcare burdens.
(Mary Douglas, Robin Dunbar, David Lewis-Williams, Caroline Humphrey, Marilyn Strathern, Clive Gamble, Keith Hart and Chris Stringer have all made favourable comments about Knight's work.
[9][10][11]) Boudica was a queen of the British Celtic Iceni tribe who led an uprising against the conquering forces of the Roman Empire in AD 60 or 61.
[12] E. P. Thompson's classic article "The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the 18th Century" emphasised women's role in many food riots.
These riots of revolution and resistance opened up opportunities for women to take political action as social and economic influencers, and not just as a republican's wife or a mother.
Another reason for their participation is due to the fact that food riots typically started in market places near shops and mills, which is where women gathered the most.
[18] Women also conducted nearly a third of food riots during the American Revolution[19][20][21][22][23] despite the fact that they were excluded from the vote, unqualified to serve as jurors at courts and law, and were essentially politically disabled by their dependent status.
The crowd then forced the King to return to Paris where, three years later, women were again major participants in the demonstrations that led to the abolition of the monarchy.
Working class women also faced this dilemma, but because they were already suppressed, the good of what they could achieve outweighed the loss of family pride and/or fortune.
Motion en Faveur du Sexe and Discours préliminaire de la pauvre Javotte focused on dowries and marriage.
Another booklet, Griefs et plaintes des femmes mal mariées, criticised marriage laws that entailed women submitting to men, and demanded the legalization of divorce.
Strategies used by protestors included mass demonstrations, arson, widespread window breaking and attempts to storm both Parliament and Buckingham Palace.
The German authorities reported that union leaders were doing 'everything possible to prevent such disturbances and strikes over food provisions, but ... it is the countless female workers who constantly agitate and stir things up.'
[49] Karl Marx had recognized that "great social revolutions are impossible without the feminine ferment"[50][51] and, in 1917, it was Petrograd's (Saint Petersburg) female workers who spread the idea of a general strike on 8 March, International Women's Day.
As Leon Trotsky later wrote, the women took hold of the soldiers' rifles and 'beseeched almost commanded: "put down your bayonets and join us"', and, within five days, the centuries-old Tsarist regime had collapsed.
[57] Later, during Joseph Stalin's program of breakneck industrialization and forced collectivization, women were again at the forefront of the workers' strikes and peasant protests that resisted this brutal policy.
Stormé DeLarverie, a biracial butch lesbian activist, is credited with inciting the Stonewall uprising in New York City in 1969, a major turning point in the 1960s–1970s gay liberation movement.
In the British Isles, women's protests and leadership were significant during The Troubles in Northern Ireland, during the Grunwick dispute and during the miners' strike.
[67][68] For decades, Iranian women struggled with basic human rights and oppression due to traditional religious affiliations and political attributes.
Their Islamic beliefs regarding gender equality concealed by higher power authorities and the domination of man towards Iranian women.
This is when young women and activists started pushing against the Islamic ideologies, for instance, the processes of getting a divorce or wearing clothes that were considered "revealing" by the authoritarian rule.
The call for "Women, Life, Freedom" as become their signature chant and continues today, with heavy costs in lives of children, youths, adults and pensioners, in the cities and in the more mountainous, especially the Kurdish regions of Iran.
[72] Civil unrest and protests against the government of Iran associated with the death in police custody of Mahsa Amini began on 16 September 2022 and are ongoing as of December 2022.
The Guidance Patrol alleged that Amini was wearing her hijab improperly, and according to eyewitnesses, she had been severely beaten by officers, an assertion denied by Iranian authorities.
[74] As the protests spread from Amini's hometown of Saqqez to other cities in the province of Kurdistan and throughout the country, the government responded with widespread Internet blackouts, nationwide restrictions on social media usage,[75][76] tear gas and gunfire.
[77][78][79] Although the protests have not been as deadly as those in 2019 (when more than 1,500 were killed),[80] they have been "nationwide, spread across social classes, universities, the streets [and] schools", and called the "biggest challenge" to the government of Iran since the Islamic Revolution in 1979.
[81] as of 27 December 2022[update] at least 476 people, including 64 minors, had been killed as a result of the government's intervention in the protests;[a] an estimated 18,480 have been arrested[b] throughout at least 134 cities and towns, and at 132 universities.
[c][83][84] Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei dismissed the widespread unrest not only as "riots" but also as a "hybrid war" caused by foreign states and dissidents abroad.
