Suffragette - Amelioration

Watched a movie called 'Suffragette', starring Carry Mulligan and Helena Bonham Carter, and Meryl Streep making a cameo appearance. It was about women who stood up to fight for their social rights equal to men, set in England in 1912, when the Suffragette movement was at its height.

The characters are fictional, but the historical backgrounds and incedents, the movement of the suffragettes are faithful to what is recorded in the history. I enjoyed the movie very much, and it was hard to believe that all this happened only a hundred years ago, but was not told in detail until recently.

My first encounter with the word 'suffragette' was in the musical movie 'Mary Poppins'. The mother of the family is a suffragette, and she goes to rallies and demonstrations, all secret to her husband. She sings a number in the movie 'Sister Suffragette'. It is a delightfully cheerful song, and my impression towards the word 'suffragette' remained very neutral.

However, the movie 'Suffragette' changed my impression completely. Women were fighters, soldiers, and they had pride to be a suffragette.

The term 'suffragette' was first made and used in Daily Mail in 1906, when the suffragette movement started to become more intense and active. The etymology of the word mentioned in the OED is as below.

suffragette
etymology
SUFFRAGE (n) + ETTE (suffix)
A female supporter of the cause of women's political enfranchisement, especially one of a violent or a 'militant' type.

What interests me is the suffix -ETTE. It is a diminutive suffix. It also does refer to something feminine, but I suspect that the newspaper made the word 'suffragette' with the diminutive tone in it.
'OK, the ladies are trying hard and fighting for their rights, aren't they? Let us see how well they can do it without the help of us men...'
kind of tone.

In early 20th century widely read literary and scientific periodical 'Anthenaeum', the word is clearly used in a diminutive, negative tone.

1907 Athenaeum 28 Sept 358/2
[Aristophanes] who represented Cleon, as noisy, Euripides as sentimental, Socrates as pedantic, and women as 'suffragettes'

The word may have started with a negative tone, but watching the movie 'Suffragette', it was used not negatively but powerfully, full of pride and vigor.

This seems an opposite process to pejoration that the word had undergone - it started as negative, but gained positive, if not, neutral tone. This process is called 'amelioration'.

Like women who fought to earn their rights, the word that represented them also earned its present status.