Sophia joined Emmeline and hundreds of other suffragettes as they stormed the House of Commons in 1910 on a day that would become known as Black Friday. It wasn’t the suffragettes’ actions that earned the moniker: Police and bystanders attacked the suffragettes for six hours; more than two dozen women reported being sexually assaulted. Sophia leaped in between a petite woman and a police officer, shouting at him to let her go. Once the police officer recognized the woman who was screaming at him, he tried to slip away into the crowd. Sophia chased after him, demanding that he tell her his badge number. He refused, but she saw it and memorized it. She wrote to the home secretary at the time, Winston Churchill, demanding the officer be taken off duty. After exchanging multiple letters, he left a note on her file: “Send no further reply to her.”
While other suffragettes were being sent to prison, Sophia took part in one demonstration after another but couldn’t seem to get herself charged with a crime, likely because of her relationship to the royal family. In 1911, Sophia was arrested after she threw her body at the prime minister’s car, carrying a banner that read “Give Women the Vote,” but no police officer wanted to be responsible for mistreating Queen Victoria’s goddaughter. Over and over, she was released without being charged, even though she was more than willing to join the other suffragettes who were going on hunger strikes in prison, risking their lives for the cause.
Sophia brought the fight for voting rights to her own home, often standing outside her Hampton Court apartment (given to her by Queen Victoria), selling copies of The Suffragette. (After seeing Sophia’s photo in the magazine, one high-ranking aristocrat wondered whether anything would be done to “stop her.”) Other suffragettes saw the potential publicity they could gain from having a princess as a member, and urged Sophia to take a more prominent role, but she refused, not wanting her privilege to further protect her or her celebrity to obscure their mission. When she was asked to speak at a glitzy suffrage fund-raiser, she agreed only after the organizers’ repeated insistence. “I will come on the 9th to the meeting with pleasure,” she wrote. “I hope you have found someone else to support the resolution, if not I will do so, but very much prefer not to and I shall only say about 5 words!” When it came to the cause to which she dedicated her life, she preferred to stay out of the spotlight and in the crowds. That’s exactly where she was in February 1918, when the Representation of the People Act was passed, giving property-owning British women over thirty the right to vote, and again in 1928, when another piece of legislation enfranchised every British citizen age twenty-one and older.
Sophia’s advocacy extended beyond suffrage. During World War I, she raised money to buy good-quality uniforms for Indian soldiers and advocated for their rights. She also volunteered as a nurse, caring for the wounded on the home front. But after the war and success in securing voting rights, when her “sister suffragettes” returned to their lives, Sophia felt lost, lonely, aimless, and in search of another cause. She struggled with depression for decades, finding another calling only after World War II broke out, when she began caring for her goddaughter (her housekeeper’s child) and three refugee children she’d taken in.
It wasn’t just Sophia’s reluctance that kept her out of the public spotlight or out of history books. The British government worked hard to keep her name out of the headlines, in order to avoid embarrassing the monarchy, and much of the British suffrage movement was led by white British women, for white British women. Still, Sophia was far from the only British Indian woman who worked to enfranchise women in the UK. And while she often went unrecognized for her activism during her life, her name now appears on a monument in Parliament Square, alongside her fellow suffragettes. The monument was unveiled in 2018, one hundred years after the first British women could vote and 108 years after Sophia and other suffragettes were harassed, beaten, and assaulted nearby.
Fraidy Reiss
Chelsea
Until recently, few people talked about the scourge of child marriage in the United States. Even fewer were actively campaigning to raise the minimum marriage age to eighteen and protect girls and women who had been child brides. Fraidy Reiss, herself a survivor of forced marriage with an abusive husband, is working to change this. Unchained At Last, the organization Fraidy founded after escaping her marriage, focuses on ending forced marriage—whether in a religious or secular context—in the United States. She considers any marriage of a minor forced because no child is of legal age to consent. She’s right.
No child should be married, and yet so many are, all over the world. Over 650 million women alive today were married before eighteen, an estimated 12 million girls every year. Wherever it happens, it is a violation of a child’s human rights and their rights to health, education, and self-determination. Girls who are married are less likely to finish school, more likely to give birth before their bodies are ready, and more likely to die prematurely, including in childbirth. Their children are more likely to be born at low birth weights and to die in the first month of life. In some countries, the majority of women were married before eighteen. In Niger, it’s more than three in four; in Bangladesh, it’s more than half.
Yet the magnitude of the child marriage crisis in parts of the world does not invalidate that it is a challenge everywhere in the world. Child brides are found across the globe, including in the United States. Child marriage is not a problem that happens in other places, to other people. In the U.S., part of what makes child marriage inevitably forced, as Fraidy often points out, is that if a child bride leaves her husband, she is considered a runaway. Many shelters will not take in minors traveling on their own—even those escaping forced marriages—because of concerns about criminal liability. In many states, children cannot enter into contracts on their own, meaning that a child bride often cannot hire her own lawyer, even to file for a divorce. It strikes me as a fundamental cruelty that a girl can be considered old enough to be forced into marriage but not old enough to decide to get a divorce.
From 2000 to 2015, an estimated two hundred thousand children were married in the United States. While many were sixteen or seventeen, some were as young as eleven or twelve. While a few were boys, and some marriages occurred between two minors, the overwhelming majority of child marriages involved girls married to adult men. No child—not an eleven-year-old or a seventeen-year-old—should be married. That this is still being debated—and not a practice being eliminated—is something I find unconscionable.
Fraidy never shies away from a debate or a demonstration. Her courage is particularly tangible when she shares her own story of how she wasn’t told she had other options in her community, to not marry, to set her own course in life. And, as she would come to painfully know, no laws, religious or secular, were there for her or for minors forced into marriage. (She was nineteen on her wedding day.) She had no recourse in her Orthodox Judaism—only her husband could have divorced her, not the other way around. Even though it meant leaving her community, she decided to leave her violent, abusive husband. To do that, she developed a five-year plan that included going to college at Rutgers (where she graduated as valedictorian) and getting a job. Having financial independence enabled her to finally escape and take her children with her. Years later, most of her family continues to shun her. But Fraidy has never doubted that she made the right choices: to leave her forced marriage, help other women leave theirs, and work toward ensuring that one day, only women, not girls, are married in the United States.
Until 2018, and before Fraidy started her work to advocate for raising the minimum marriage age, no state had a no-exceptions ban on child marriage. Still today, many states have no minimum age for marriage, and others have abysmally low ages—including twelve or fourteen—even if they also require parental consent or a court to agree. But when parents are the ones doing the coercing, their consent offers scant to no protection for children. Why is this still so wrenchingly true in the twenty-first century? Partly because of the legacy of stigma around unwed
mothers, partly because of a failure to appreciate how devastating child marriage is for girls, partly because of deference to conservative religious forces, and all wrapped up, I’d argue, in the tyranny of sexism. Thankfully, in 2018, in large part because of Fraidy’s efforts, Delaware became the first state to ban child marriage without exception, and New Jersey followed a few months later. That means no parents can choose marriage for their child and no child can be forced into marriage. Fraidy worked on those two bills for years.
There is no federal law prohibiting child marriage, largely because marriage is governed at the state level. What the federal government could do is institute a federal minimum age for foreign spouses. This still hasn’t happened, though it is an area Fraidy is advocating for while simultaneously working across multiple states to persuade legislators to ensure that no child is married before adulthood. Fraidy knows deeply that while we need to change laws, we also need to change our culture so that we value our girls and so that no parent, no person, thinks it is acceptable for a child to marry. This is why she leads “chain-ins,” where people are dressed in bridal gowns with tape over their mouths and their wrists chained together. These events send a powerful signal that child marriage takes away a girl’s voice and agency. Until we confront and end this shameful practice, girls will be forced into marriage when they should be focused on school, their friends, and their own dreams for their lives.
Manal al-Sharif
Hillary
In Saudi Arabia in 2011, it wasn’t technically illegal for women to drive, but it was forbidden by Saudi custom, and that ban was enforced by the Saudi religious police. So even though Manal al-Sharif was thirty-two years old, and even though she had a car and knew how to drive, she couldn’t. “Saudi women rely on drivers, usually foreign men, some of whom have never taken a driving test or had any kind of professional instruction to ferry them from place to place,” she would later explain. “We are at their mercy.”
One evening, she found herself walking along the side of the road, trying and failing to find a taxi to take her home after a doctor’s appointment. Men harassed her from their cars; one followed her for so long she was scared for her safety. “Why do I have to be humiliated?” she started asking herself. “Why can’t I drive when I have a car and a license? Why do I have to ask my colleagues to give me a ride, or my brother, or look for a driver to drive my own car?” Simply raising those questions was an act of defiance.
In school in the 1980s, Manal had been, as she put it, “brought up to follow the rules and listen to the man.” At twenty-five, she got married, then had a son. Her husband was controlling and violent; after he beat her, she got a divorce. She went back to work as a cybersecurity engineer, and was sent by her employer to the United States, where she saw what seemed like a different world. She could open a bank account, go where she wanted, and get behind the wheel of a car. She learned the rules of the road and got her driver’s license. For Manal, driving was a path to economic opportunity. It made it possible for her to shop for groceries, run errands, and go to the doctor. She longed to have that same freedom in her own country.
“Exercise your rights. Never take them for granted. That’s the day they’re taken away from you. Living in a democracy is not a privilege. Living in a democracy is a huge responsibility. If you have a voice, honor it and use it.”
—MANAL AL-SHARIF
Back in Saudi Arabia, Manal al-Sharif captured the world’s attention in May 2011 with a brave act of civil disobedience: She filmed herself driving and posted the video on YouTube and Facebook. In twenty-four hours, the video had 700,000 views. But then, at two a.m., the secret police showed up at her house while her five-year-old son slept. They arrested her, and charged her with “driving while female.” She was held in a cockroach-infested jail for nine days. After a massive outcry in Saudi Arabia and around the world, she was released on the condition that she refrain from driving or speaking to the media. Instead, at the height of the Arab Spring protests, she launched the Women2Drive campaign, organizing others to join her in a day of action.
Manal was condemned for her activism; some even suggested she was a foreign spy. Her brother, who had been in the passenger seat while she filmed herself driving, was subjected to so much harassment that his family was forced to leave the country. Manal was pressured to resign from her job. She lost custody of her son and left Saudi Arabia. But she refused to be silenced.
As secretary of state, I was moved by Manal’s courage, and the courage of the women who stood with her. At a press conference in June 2011, I publicly declared the United States’ support for lifting the ban in Saudi Arabia. “What these women are doing is brave and what they are seeking is right,” I said. “We have raised this issue at the highest level of the Saudi government. We’ve made clear our views that women everywhere, including women in the Kingdom, have the right to make decisions about their lives and their futures.” When another group of women protested the ban again on October 26, 2013, some opponents of lifting the ban pointed to the date—my birthday—as evidence that the protests had been organized by the United States. They hadn’t, of course. This was not about the United States; it was about the women of Saudi Arabia.
In 2017, Manal wrote a book about her journey to become what she called an “accidental activist”: Daring to Drive: A Saudi Woman’s Awakening. In 2018, in part because of Manal’s persistence, Saudi Arabia lifted the “unofficial” ban on women drivers. When Manal heard the news, she cried tears of joy. “Saudi women will be free not only to drive their own cars but also to be the drivers of their own lives,” she said at the time. Then she learned she couldn’t go home to celebrate the victory; women activists were being detained and imprisoned with little to no explanation. “The recent arrests dilute and tarnish the progress that has been made in lifting the ban,” she wrote in the Washington Post. “The activists were arrested despite their love for Saudi Arabia—for in an absolute monarchy, dissidents are the true patriots.”
There is still a long road ahead, but Manal’s willingness to risk so much to demand freedom and opportunity should inspire women everywhere.
Nadia Murad
Hillary
When Nadia Murad was a teenager, she wanted to be a teacher or open a beauty salon. At her family’s home in Kocho, Iraq, she kept a photo album with pictures of hairstyles and makeup that inspired her. When she wasn’t at school or dreaming about her future, she was helping her family on their farm and spending time with the other women in her village.
That changed in an instant in August 2014, when the Islamic State attacked her community. Hundreds were killed simply for practicing their religion, Yazidism. Her mother was one of eighty older women executed and left in an unmarked grave. Six of her brothers were among the six hundred Yazidi men murdered that day. Nadia was separated from her family and taken captive. She was sold by ISIS into sex slavery, where she was brutally raped, beaten, and sold again.
“I assumed that Hajji Amr had left me alone in the house with the door unlocked and no guards not because he had forgotten. He wasn’t stupid. He did that because he thought at this point, having been abused for so long and being so weak from sickness and hunger, I wouldn’t think of trying to escape. They thought they had me forever. They are wrong, I thought.”
—NADIA MURAD
After three months of living in a nightmare, and a thwarted escape attempt that resulted in horrific punishment, Nadia found an unlocked door in the house where she was being held. Risking her life, knowing the torture that awaited her if she got caught, she fled. She made her way to a family who helped her to a refugee camp. She had freed herself.
In 2015, she spoke at a UN forum on minority issues, the first time she would tell her story in front of an audience. That same year she was asked to speak to the UN Security Council on human trafficking. “I wanted to talk about everything,” she said. “The children who died of dehydration fleeing ISIS, the families still stranded on the mountain, the t
housands of women and children who remained in captivity, and what my brothers saw at the site of the massacre.” And that’s what she did. “Deciding to be honest was one of the hardest decisions I have ever made, and also the most important,” she said later.
In 2016, Nadia was appointed UN goodwill ambassador for the dignity of survivors of human trafficking. She is currently working with human rights lawyer Amal Clooney to bring ISIS to justice before the International Criminal Court. Amal and Nadia were in the audience, sitting side by side, when the UN Security Council unanimously adopted a resolution to create an investigation team to build a case against ISIS. In 2017, she published her courageous memoir, The Last Girl: My Story of Captivity, and My Fight Against the Islamic State.
The dedication page of Nadia’s memoir reads: “This book is written for every Yazidi.” Nadia knew that even though she was able to escape, others were not. She has dedicated her life to fighting on behalf of those who remain captive. Nadia’s work is especially close to my heart because I have worked for decades against human trafficking—as first lady, as a U.S. senator, as secretary of state, and now, as a private citizen. Her story underscores the importance of human rights, the rule of law, due process, judicial systems, and international organizations in holding people accountable and serving as places of recourse for the Nadias of the world.
The Book of Gutsy Women Page 40