Buckingham Palace, London, UK
(Topical Press / Getty)
Police officer Superintendent Rolfe arrests and physically removes Emmeline Pankhurst from outside the King’s residence of Buckingham Palace, London, before being taken to Holloway jail. Pankhurst’s intention on this occasion was to submit a petition to the King. According to a report in The Suffragette newspaper, she cried out from her transport to the jail, ‘Arrested at the gates of the palace. Tell the King!’
This was neither the first nor last time that Pankhurst was jailed as part of the campaign to provide the vote to women. The first occasion was in February 1908, for attempting to submit a protest resolution to the prime minister in parliament. She was sentenced to six weeks imprisonment. In total, she was placed under arrest seven times before suffrage was approved in 1918.
While some women over thirty were given the vote in Britain in 1918, it would be another ten years before all British women were allowed to vote. A fortnight after this picture was taken, Superintendent Rolfe died of heart failure.
‘When I was in my prison cell, I remembered how I had seen men laugh at the idea of women going to prison. A thought came to me in my cell and it was this: that to men, women are not human beings like themselves. Some men think we are superhuman. Other men think us subhuman. We are neither superhuman nor subhuman. We are just human beings like yourselves.’
‘Why We Are Militant’, a speech delivered by Mrs. Pankhurst in New York City, October 21, 1913
