maya’s Reviews > Death in Ten Minutes: Kitty Marion: Activist. Arsonist. Suffragette. > Status Update

Riddell discusses Kitty's legacy, relating it to the current feminist movements such as #MeToo. She also calls into question the extent of sanitisation and glamourisation. When reading this, she mentions how easy it is for her to idolise Kitty and I too idolise Kitty - but then argues how violent and dangerous the suffragettes truely were. What an interesting concept, and what a revolutionary woman Kitty was.

Kitty finds camaraderie in the birth control movement. She desperately urges people to acknowledge female sexuality. Where there was a view among suffragettes that sex subjugated women - contraception acting as a multiplier of male sexual debauchery - Kitty draws on her experience from the music hall to guide her activism. The vote isn't important if change isn't enacted.

Kitty is deported to the US, followed by pervasive anti-German sentiment. She struggled at first but found her place in the movement for birth control and sexual liberty. It is devestating that she devoted herself so wholly to the suffrage movement in England but was betrayed by the people she supported, both in England and in the US.

The name of the book is finally revealed to be a reference to a message painted on a tin canaster containing explosives, placed in Smeaton Tower - an old lighthouse. While the police preferred to represent them as no more than disruptive teenagers, they continued what was essentially a guerilla war. The use of rhetoric and war-like language makes them a threat in a masculine sense.

Love & Lies :: Kitty Marion learns about love, sex, marriage, and choice. What particularly stood out to me was her relationship with vet student Jack, and her relationship with director Robert Halford. Halford gave her a sense of comfort which was taken away the second she didn't conform to his idea of femininity and her refusal to be bought (marry his son). This is all very tragic. Kitty had very little choice...

Chapter 3 follows Kitty's newfound passion for theatre, and the horrible abuse faced by a man who thought she owed him for her job. There is an anecdote about Belle Bilton, a demonstration of female domination in a male dominated world. She was ultimately painted as a femme-fatale. Kitty's story is one of hope despite facing abuse. It was this that incited in her a 'revolutionary spirit'

Chapter 2 defines Kitty's childhood; the taste of freedom she recieved from time spent living with other family members, and abuse endured from her father. The world of theater represented freedom where it also represented sex.
This chapter made me reflect on the ongoing issue of men's anger manifesting as control. Its also quite hopeful, beginning to reframe understandings of sex's role in the feminist movement.