Speeches that Changed the World

EMMELINE PANKHURST

Born Emmeline Goulden on 14 July 1858 in Manchester, England.

Her parents were politically progressive, and in 1879 she married the radical barrister Richard Marsden Pankhurst, sharing campaigns with him. She founded the Women’s Franchise League in 1889, and later the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), which undertook an increasingly militant campaign for women’s voting rights. She was first imprisoned for her actions in 1908. Undertook several speaking tours of the United States and Canada, from 1909. With the outbreak of the First World War, she began new campaigns to allow women to work and became increasingly hostile to left-wing politics. She adopted four ‘war babies’, and began a second home life with close female friends. She spent the years 1924–5 in Canada, Bermuda and France.

Died 14 June 1928 in London, while she was campaigning to become a Conservative Member of Parliament.

The campaign for british women’s right to vote made its impact felt mainly in the first two decades of the 20th century. One of its leading lights was Emmeline Pankhurst. She acquired her surname through marriage to Richard Marsden Pankhurst, a radical Manchester barrister and socialist, who had been instrumental in framing reformist legislation concerning women’s property rights. In 1889 Richard died; that same year, Emmeline founded the Women’s Franchise League, and later, in 1903, she started the influential Women’s Social and Political Union with her campaigning daughter Christabel (1880–1958).

The motto of the WSPU was ‘deeds, not words’, and its supporters embarked on demonstrations, petitions and disrupting political meetings – actions that in themselves raised eyebrows, especially when performed by middle-class women. In 1910, a hundred supporters led by Emmeline were arrested and brutally treated by police on ‘Black Friday’ after protesting at the House of Commons about the dropping of a bill that would have advanced their cause. The years that followed saw an intensification of the struggle as the government failed to enact reforms, especially in 1913 when the WSPU initiated a campaign of attacks on property – from post boxes to golf courses to politicians’ houses. Emmeline herself was arrested on several occasions from 1908 onwards – for ‘obstruction’, for leading deputations, for smashing the prime minister’s windows, for ‘conspiracy’, for ‘inciting persons to commit offences’. Always she defended herself eloquently in court, and took full part in the hunger strikes that her jailed supporters carried out.

She also made a name for herself in the United States, beginning in 1909 when she introduced herself at New York’s Carnegie Hall as a ‘hooligan’. Her activist credentials ensured large American crowds to hear her speak – and, despite the ‘deeds not words’ motto, she made hundreds of speeches during her lifetime. In 1913, she was released from a three-year prison sentence temporarily to regain her health, as part of the government’s so-called ‘Cat and Mouse’ policy to prevent hunger strikers dying in jail. Pankhurst took the opportunity to make another US trip. In Hartford, Connecticut, on 13 November, she gave a famous speech in which she presented herself ‘as a soldier who has temporarily left the field of battle’. She went on to justify her ‘revolutionary’ tactics and to characterize the struggle as a life-and-death one. Indeed, by then Emily Wilding Davison had thrown herself, fatally, in front of the king’s horse at the February 1913 Epsom Derby: the single most startling suffragette action of the period. American suffragists absorbed the lessons, and by 1916 some were themselves on hunger strike.

The First World War changed everything. The British authorities released suffragettes unconditionally, and Emmeline began a patriotic Women’s Right to Serve campaign. In June 1918, an Act of Parliament gave women over the age of 30 the right to vote (with restrictions). A Parliamentary bill giving British women equal voting rights to men became law in July 1928 – the month after Emmeline died.

I DO NOT COME HERE AS AN ADVOCATE, because whatever position the suffrage movement may occupy in the United States of America, in England it has passed beyond the realm of advocacy and it has entered into the sphere of practical politics. It has become the subject of revolution and civil war, and so tonight I am not here to advocate woman suffrage. American suffragists can do that very well for themselves. I am here as a soldier who has temporarily left the field of battle in order to explain – it seems strange it should have to be explained – what civil war is like when civil war is waged by women . . . If I were a man and I said to you, ‘I come from a country which professes to have representative institutions and yet denies me, a taxpayer, an inhabitant of the country, representative rights,’ you would at once understand that that human being, being a man, was justified in the adoption of revolutionary methods to get representative institutions. But since I am a woman it is necessary in the 20th century to explain why women have adopted revolutionary methods in order to win the rights of citizenship.

. . . Now, I want to say to you who think women cannot succeed, we have brought the government of England to this position, that it has to face this alternative; either women are to be killed or women are to have the vote. I ask American men in this meeting, what would you say if in your State you were faced with that alternative, that you must either kill them or give them their citizenship – women, many of whom you respect, women whom you know have lived useful lives, women whom you know, even if you do not know them personally, are animated with the highest motives, women who are in pursuit of liberty and the power to do useful public service? Well, there is only one answer to that alternative; there is only one way out of it, unless you are prepared to put back civilization two or three generations; you must give those women the vote. Now that is the outcome of our civil war.

‘I am here as a soldier’