Women, Guns…
and Self-Defence.
In early 20th-century Britain, middle-class women took up jujitsu, adapted everyday objects like umbrellas into tools of self-defence, but also acquired gun models marketed especially to women. Historian Emelyne Godfrey explores how these strategies emerged as responses to growing anxieties around urban safety and women’s autonomy (2010). These forms of everyday self-defence speak directly to the themes explored in the ERC EU-GUNS project, which investigates how ordinary people dealt with the questions of protection, legality, and control between 1870 and 1970.
[Source: A.W. Gamage Ltd.: General Catalogue 1911]
