On a day in 1910 known as “Black Friday”, the Metropolitan Police violently suppressed a peaceful suffragette march on parliament.
Swap the corseted waists and Edwardian tailored skirts for fleeces and jeans and the sepia images of that day are eerily reminiscent of the police response to last Saturday’s Reclaim the Streets demonstration.
Following the police brutality on Black Friday, suffragette Saul Solomon wrote to home secretary Winston Churchill recounting a “relentless engine of physical force by the Metropolitan Police”.
Fast forward a century and we see the same strong-arm police tactics and female protesters being grabbed, pushed and wrestled to the ground, their faces etched with a fusion of defiance and fear.
This display of police intimidation was all the more sickening given the women were protesting against male violence following the murder of Sarah Everard.
Last Saturday, the same police force which had so aggressively kettled protesters formed a guard around a Churchill statue, with orders to “protect it at all costs”.
Churchill was not only a war-mongering racist but a misogynist who denounced the women’s suffragette movement as “only the small edge of the wedge”.
He said: “If we allow women to vote, it will mean the loss of social structure and the rise of every liberal cause under the sun. Women are well-represented by their fathers, brothers and husbands.”
It’s not a stretch to imagine similarly sexist thinking in the thuggish police officers terrorising women last weekend.
Today, Britain’s women are franchised but to walk the streets safely after dark they may well have to be “chaperoned” by men like their “fathers, brothers and husbands”.
In her Churchill letter, Saul berated police as “irresponsible, obedient tools of the government” and said the violence “lies upon the shoulders of those who hold this national force at their disposal”.
We now have a female Met chief in Cressida Dick but if a matriarch is aligned to patriarchal thinking, the result is still gender inequality.
Suffragettes were discredited as “militant”, in the same way Home Secretary Priti Patel was sure to sully the Reclaim march as “hijacked by extremists”.
She said undermining faith in the police would ultimately fail victims but all confidence evaporated when officers failed in their civic duty to protect and not abuse women.
The protesters were corralled like rats in a corner and it’s little wonder they reacted with fury and panic.
If the event was breaching social distancing, all that was needed was a civilised approach from police.
Police Scotland is far from perfect but it is telling that there was no such melee at the Glasgow vigil for Sarah.
Reclaim the Night began in 1977 after women in Leeds took to the streets to protest against the police who told them to self-curfew over the Yorkshire Ripper murders.
More than 40 years on, women still have to adapt their lives in fear of widespread violence – from day-to-day harassment in the street to sexual assault, rape and murder.
Women are still infantilised bythe normalisation of male violence, their movements restricted like children told not to play alone after dark.
Patel is introducing a draconian new policing Bill, increasing the powers of forces and giving the Home Secretary carte blanche over whether demonstrations can go ahead.
But it does nothing to help women feel safer on the London streets where Sarah was taken.
It is difficult to stop a tiny minority of men murdering women but there is so much we could do to change cultural attitudes, which are at the heart of why women are harassed and brutalised.
A police force which respects and protects, rather than brutalises women, is a key tenet in a civilised society with gender parity.
Moira is gone but her life won't be forgotten
The family of Sarah Everard now find themselves thrown into the same pit of grief as those who have lost women to male violence.
Yesterday, Bea, the mother of Moira Jones, pictured left, who was murdered in a Glasgow park in 2008, issued a statement of support to Sarah’s family. And she reminded us all that in the swirl of outrage and debate, we must remember the women whose lives were stolen.
I interviewed Bea in her home in 2010 and will never forget her unfathomable sorrow and the permeating love when she spoke of her daughter.
When the media furore has settled and the national anger dissipated, what is left behind after these murders are lives hollowed out by loss.
Moira was randomly abducted yards from her home and forced into nearby Queen’s Park, where she was raped and beaten to death.
Bea said yesterday that she had been moved by the fresh messages of support for her “darling girl”, which were tied to the park gates.
Bea set up a charity, The Moira Fund, which has now helped more than 1000 bereaved families.
Moira and Sarah are defined not by how they died but how they lived and the legacy of love they left behind.
