Trolls Vs Emily Davison One Hundred Years On.

Down at the badger sett, consoling the badgers on their loss in the Emblem of Britain vote against the hedgehogs, which one or two of them seemed to have taken quite personally, I got to thinking about the excitement surrounding the new female face on our ten pound note.

I believe the Bank of England missed a trick on the choice of this new face; nothing at all against Jane Austen, a very worthy nominee, I am sure, but when one sees the amount of aggravation this has caused replacing Darwin with Austen, one cannot help but think that Emily Davison should have been the bank’s first choice, simply because she tackled these bigoted, misogynistic trolls head on and she did it with others at a time when women, much to our disgrace as an Empire, were treated very much as second class citizens.  It is a hundred years since Emily Davison’s demise and how fitting this would have been to commemorate a life that really did change women’s lives throughout our land and the world.  Although the undoubted brilliance of Jane Austen is without question, up until the birth of Emily Davison, over half of the women in the United Kingdom could not read; it was deemed not really necessary for working class women to be overly educated.  They were merely looked upon as child bearing machines to produce cannon fodder for the Great British war machine. Women were sometimes killed in domestic violence issues, but as long as the perpetrator could prove some kind of provocation and it being an accidental incident, very often went completely unpunished. What is not always known is that Davison did more for the cause than acting as a martyr in her failed attempt at flying the flag for women on the King’s horse, resulting in her death, as she served more time than most in prison for her acts in the movement. She gave her life fighting perhaps the biggest troll of them all: the British Establishment. A more fitting face for the rights of women in this country and across the world, the Bank of England could not have found a more rightful face for their note. 

The face that changed so many women's lives in the UK as well as the world.
(Image from:
 http://i1.chroniclelive.co.uk/incoming/article4027690.ece/ALTERNATES/s2197/Emily-DavisonJPG-4027690.jpg)