Violence or nonviolence?

There's an interesting record of a debate between Ted Rall and David Swanson over the uses of violence and/or nonviolence in creating change, sparked by Rall's new book "The AntiAmerican Manifesto," which I have yet to read, but I'm really excited about. It would take a long time for me to put all my thoughts on the matter down, so I'll save that for another time and just say that I think that a)it's stupid to take anything out of your toolbox before you even start, b)moral force of protests and sign will never make people voluntarily give up power; escalating direct action (which isn't *necessarily* violent) is a must, and c)violence to stop or limit greater violence is an ethical good thing, unless you have a (possibly only quasi-) religious objection to it, and even then it seems like you're just trying to keep your hands clean at the cost of others being murdered.

In the comments to that debate though I only addressed a minor point which bothered me, which I'll reproduce here:

I have a degree in history and wrote a thesis on the suffragettes. Swanson’s claim that the suffragist movement was nonviolent is false and insulting; ladies must have just been marching and asking nicely, right? I wish your response had been sharper, Ted.

The suffragist movement in the UK and US (the two examples I know the most about) had decades of women throwing acid at politicians, coming into government buildings, art museums, etc. with knives to slash portraits of people in power (now that’s a threat of violence), throwing bombs, attacking the horses pulling the prime minister’s carriage, and more. Women were arrested in droves and then organized and resisted in prison. Many were killed or permanently disabled. It was a serious goddamn fight, as is any fight where people are trying to take power *away* from those with it. That’s the difference between something like the suffragist movement and something like the movement for gay marriage. Protestations to the contrary, even homophobes know that gay people getting married doesn’t take away anything from their marriage; they just like keeping people who are different down. Women getting the right to vote really did reduce the relative power of men’s votes.

The only sad thing is that once women got the right to vote they used it to vote against their own self-interests with as much stupidity as men ever do. This quote always strikes me as an example of the hopes and missed opportunities of the time: in a conversation between Susan B. Anthony and Eugene Debs, Anthony said “give us the vote and we’ll give you socialism,” to which Debs replied “Give us socialism and we’ll give you the vote.” Ah, well, would have been nice.