Fights for Rights : A Case Study of Two Vigilante Women's Movements: The Suffragettes and The Gulabi Gang

Abstract: This thesis is a comparative case study of the Suffragette movement and the Gulabi Gang, two women’s movements using violence as a political strategy to fight patriarchal structures. Studying vigilante women’s movements is important as the current literature on the relationship between women and violence is deficient, focusing on women as victims of violence but neglecting the idea of women as contributors to violence. This study therefore aims to challenge the idea of female pacifism and to acknowledge women as rational, and sometimes violent, actors. This will be done by comparing the Suffragette movement and the Gulabi Gang, two most-different cases of vigilante women’s movements, with the purpose to find the motivations behind their strategic choice of violence. The study is of an explorative kind, aiming to contribute to the existing theories of vigilantism with why some women’s groups have felt compelled to step outside of traditional stereotypes and norms attributed to women to achieve their goals. The result shows that the existing theories explaining the motivations to vigilante actions coincide with the Suffragettes and the Gulabi Gang. They are however also proven to not adequately explain why some women’s movements use violence. This study therefore contributes, to the existing theories, with the conclusion that women’s movements use violence, generally seen as a masculine strategy, to shock and surprise the people and the decision-makers. The use of violence, in other words, creates a disturbance in the societal structures as a result of women generally being unexpected to use such strategies. It furthermore creates opportunities for the groups to increase the attention devoted to them in ways that would not have been possible if the groups would use more feminine strategies.