Amnesty was designed to channel youthful and maternal energies rather than prisoners’ liberation

Evidence

The main purpose of the new organisation, Benenson contended, was to promote cooperation amongst the world’s idealists. Amnesty, he wrote in a private letter, is ‘geared to appeal to the young searching for an ideal, and to women past the prime of their life who have been, unfortunately, unable to expend in full their maternal impulses’. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 350

Categorization

• XREF: The gendering of activism as maternal impulse echoes the reader’s existing material on Victorian gendering of silence and domesticity. — connects to: Coercive behavior modification on prisoners constitutes a form of state power over mind — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1017
• CANDY: Benenson’s patrician condescension — Amnesty as outlet for idle women’s maternal impulses — is a quotable, eyebrow-raising fact.

Broader Connections

• Coercive behavior modification on prisoners constitutes a form of state power over mind #qualifies (0.75) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1017