Emmeline Pankhurst

British suffragist

• Born: July 14, 1858
• Birthplace: Manchester, England
• Died: June 14, 1928
• Place of death: London, England

Pankhurst fought to attain the vote for British women during the early years of the twentieth century, organizing the radical Women’s Social and Political Union into an effective tool for obtaining women’s rights.

Early Life

Emmeline Pankhurst was the third of eleven children and eldest daughter of Robert Goulden and Sophia Jane (née Craine) Goulden. Her father was the owner of a calico-printing and bleach works located outside Salford, the industrial twin city to Manchester. Pankhurst’s education was typical of a girl of her class. She attended a girls’ boarding school in Manchester and then, at the age of fifteen, was sent to Paris to attend a finishing school, the École Normale, from which she was graduated at the age of nineteen. More important than formal schooling in the development of the future political agitator was her informal education. Her father taught her to read at an early age, and in her autobiography she tells how she was inspired by reading Thomas Carlyle’s History of the French Revolution (1837). Moreover, both of her parents had been actively involved in liberal and radical reform movements, among them woman suffrage. At the age of fourteen, Pankhurst was taken to her first suffrage meeting in Manchester, then a center of the women’s emancipation movement, with an active chapter of the Manchester Women’s Suffrage Committee. One of the founders of that committee was Richard Marsden Pankhurst, a barrister and author of Great Britain’s first woman suffrage bill. They were married in 1879. Emmeline Pankhurst almost immediately became a member of the Manchester Women’s Suffrage Committee; she and her husband supported the Married Women’s Property Bill, which he had helped draft in 1882. Their home was a gathering center for political reformers; the Pankhursts entertained such individuals as James Keir Hardie (who would become a member of Parliament for the Labour Party), Annie Besant, and Sir Charles Dilke. After Prime Minister William E. Gladstone indicated his refusal to support woman suffrage as part of the general reform legislation of 1884, the Pankhursts left the Liberal Party. They became members of the Fabian Society, believing that “mild socialism” offered much more hope for the future than did Liberalism.

Five children were born to the couple, three daughters and two sons. The two boys, Henry and Frank, died early in life. The girls reached maturity and all, especially Christabel and Sylvia, associated with their mother’s cause. Emmeline Pankhurst at this time was an elegant woman, with raven black hair, an olive complexion, and expressive blue-violet eyes. She was an effective speaker, with a melodious voice, and she had the ability to command almost complete loyalty from her close acquaintances.

The Pankhursts remained in Manchester into the mid-1880’s. Richard Pankhurst was an unsuccessful candidate for the House of Commons in Manchester in 1883. When he was approached by the Liberal and Radical Association of Rotherhithe to run for the Commons from that constituency, the family moved to London, where Richard Pankhurst was again unsuccessful. This election, however, was instrumental in contributing to the outlook of Emmeline Pankhurst and her future activities. She was disturbed by the refusal of those in favor of Irish home rule to vote for her husband, who had been a vocal supporter of their cause. When Charles Stewart Parnell explained the reasons for his opposition to Liberals, Emmeline Pankhurst grudgingly recognized the correctness of a militant policy, which by constant obstruction would wear down a government and produce its defeat, a valuable political lesson that Pankhurst would later put into practice.

In 1893, the Pankhursts returned to Manchester, and she resumed her association with suffragists in that city. The death of her husband in 1898 was both an emotional and a financial blow for Pankhurst, who was in the difficult position of having to support herself and four children (the youngest, Frank, had just died).

Life’s Work

When the family returned to Manchester, Pankhurst was selected to serve in the unsalaried position of a member of the Board of the Poor Law Guardians. As she notes in her autobiography, her experiences here opened her eyes to wider issues. She had always lived in relatively comfortable surroundings, but as a Poor Law Guardian she came in contact with women’s broader needs and concluded that these needs would not be met until women gained the vote. In the past, Pankhurst had seen suffrage as a basic right that ought to be honored; from this point onward, she was convinced that it was a practical necessity. In 1898, she was appointed Registrar of Births and Deaths in Manchester, a salaried position. She held this position until 1907, when she resigned to devote herself fully to the suffrage movement.

Agitation for women’s political rights had emerged in the middle of the nineteenth century, with two contrasting approaches manifesting themselves rather early. The more moderate approach was that of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, established and led by Lydia Becker in 1867, during the period of the second Reform Bill. This group was willing to work with and cooperate with the establishment in the attainment of woman suffrage. The Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), founded and led by Pankhurst and her eldest daughter, Christabel, followed a radical line in the attainment of its aim. The WSPU was organized while Pankhurst was still associated with the Independent Labour Party. Indeed, one of the goals in the formation of the Union was to assist women industrial workers. The goal of the WSPU, like that of other suffrage associations, was “to secure for women the parliamentary vote as it is or may be granted to men.” Completely independent of any and all established political parties, it opposed any government that was in power and in elections opposed all government candidates. In these tactics the clear influence of Parnell can be seen. To attain its goals, the Union sought to utilize all means available to educate the public, including public meetings, demonstrations, debates, and distribution of literature.

Attacks on the government and its ministers at elections became a basic tactic of the WSPU. The nature of the constitution before World War I played right into the hands of the suffragists; a member of Parliament accepting an appointment as a minister had to resign his seat in the Commons and stand for election. Pankhurst and her followers could thus be more selective in their agitation and concentrate their efforts on the ministers. The heckling of ministers began in 1905, when Sir Edward Grey was queried about his stance on the vote. When no answer was forthcoming and the question was repeated, the questioners (including Christabel Pankhurst) were forcibly ejected from the hall; a subsequent protest meeting in the street outside resulted in arrest and imprisonment for Christabel Pankhurst. It soon became clear that the publicity resulting from militancy gained for the WSPU far more news coverage than years of peaceful agitation would have gained. Militancy paid off.

Early militancy was characterized by confrontations with the police, but without damage to property. Generally, at the opening of each parliament, a Women’s parliament would meet in nearby Caxton Hall, followed by a procession to Westminster to present (always unsuccessfully) a petition to the prime minister. Clashes with the police, arrests, and court trials followed, all of which added to coverage of the cause in the newspapers. A second phase of militancy started in the summer of 1909, with attacks on property; the first target was the official residence of the prime minister. The purpose of this violence was twofold: to lodge a symbolic protest against the government and to shorten the struggle with the police and thus lessen the possibility of violence being committed against women. Militant tactics were escalated; soon, any form of violence or destruction short of injury to persons was acceptable to the group.

Members of the WSPU allowed themselves to be imprisoned to attract the notice of newspapers. If given the choice of a fine or incarceration, the women chose jail, where they would engage in hunger strikes. Pankhurst herself refused food (and later food and drink) when sentenced to Holloway for her part in public demonstrations. Pankhurst insisted that women be treated equally with men who had been jailed under similar circumstances; men had been treated as political prisoners, while women were categorized as common criminals. Since the government did not want to create martyrs, women were released from prison well before they had served their full time. This policy was legislated in the so-called Cat and Mouse Act of 1913, allowing the temporary release of prisoners who were not well with the threat of being arrested and incarcerated again if their health improved or if they made any trouble for the authorities. The process arrest, hunger strike, release, and possible rearrest kept the women’s movement in the public’s eye. Pankhurst and her organization made the most of it. There were, however, indications that the militancy of the WSPU and the dictatorial leadership of Pankhurst had become counterproductive by the beginning of 1914 and that support was weakening.

The outbreak of war in Europe in 1914 brought an end to active agitation for women’s rights. For the entire period of the war, Pankhurst devoted herself to patriotic endeavors, perhaps inspired by the ardent anti-German feelings that were a legacy of her Parisian schooling. She recruited women to work in munitions factories, and in 1916, when the issue of woman suffrage became prominent, she took no part in the agitation. Two years later, the movement gained a partial victory as women were allowed to vote at the age of thirty. Soon after the war, Pankhurst visited Canada, but she returned to England in 1926 and joined the Conservative Party. She was adopted by that party as a candidate for Parliament to present Whitechapel, but she was defeated. Pankhurst died in London, on June 14, 1928, shortly after women had gained the vote on a par with men.

Significance

Emmeline Pankhurst’s career illustrates one kind of response by individuals to social and political injustice. Seeking to remedy a situation that they had come to regard as intolerable, Pankhurst and her followers initially sought reform through normal channels. When these channels were exhausted, Pankhurst and her organization took a militant stance, and like other social movements, such as the Irish home rule movement, turned to violence and obstruction. The suffrage movement also had more than a merely superficial resemblance to the Civil Rights movement in the United States. Both women and blacks were clearly identified physically and emerged from a condition in which they were regarded as inferior beings. In both, attempts to persuade peacefully evolved into violent agitation. Ultimately, both movements were incorporated into the mainstream culture.

Interestingly, Pankhurst’s tactics were those utilized by the Liberals and the Chartists to promote parliamentary reform in the nineteenth century. When persuasion failed, unrepresented men used violence, initially window breaking and then arson, in the pursuit of their goals; the destruction in Bristol in support of the Reform Bill of 1832 well illustrates this trend. Pankhurst may have taken a perverse pleasure in using the same tactics that the detested Liberal Party had countenanced earlier.

Pankhurst’s most productive years fall into a brief time span a decade only the years between the founding of the WSPU and the outbreak of World War I. While the first forty-five years of her life were significant in the formation of her attitudes, her leadership of the radical suffragists who alternately challenged, amused, frustrated, and disgusted the British establishment before 1914 represents Pankhurst’s true heroic impact on Great Britain.

Bibliography

Bartley, Paula. Emmeline Pankhurst. New York: Routledge, 2002. A biography based on newly acquired archival materials that chronicles Pankhurst’s life and career.

Dangerfield, George. The Strange Death of Liberal England, 1910-1914. 1935. Reprint. New York: Capricorn Books, 1961. Dangerfield’s classic study associates what he calls an increasing irrationalism on the part of the suffragists and their opposition with the general breakdown of the Liberal consensus.

Harrison, Brian. Separate Spheres: The Opposition to Women’s Suffrage in Britain. New York: Holmes and Meier, 1978. Although clearly sympathetic to the women’s cause, the author studies the roots and the nature of the ideological and political opposition to women’s suffrage, which produced a National League Opposing Women’s Suffrage with a greater membership in 1914 than the WSPU.

Mackenzie, Midge. Shoulder to Shoulder: A Documentary. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1975. Gives a flavor of the time and the movement with judicious selections from the writings of the participants. More than three hundred illustrations contribute to the usefulness of this volume.

Pankhurst, E. Sylvia. The Life of Emmeline Pankhurst. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1936. A largely uncritical biography by Pankhurst’s second daughter, as much an autobiography of the author as it is a study of the mother.

Pankhurst, Emmeline. My Own Story. New York: Hearst’s International Library, 1914. Reprint. London: Virago Press, 1979. A propagandistic autobiography written for the third of Pankhurst’s visits to the United States to explain to Americans the cause of the suffragists.

Purvis, June. Emmeline Pankhurst: A Biography. New York: Routledge, 2002. Detailed account of Pankhurst’s suffragist activities, in which Purvis argues that Pankhurst’s radical leadership changed the public perception of women and won women the right to vote.

Rosen, Andrew. Rise Up, Women: The Militant Campaign of the Women’s Social and Political Union, 1903-1914. Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974. A highly detailed chronological account of the suffrage campaign, emphasizing the anger, frustration, and prejudices on both sides of the question.

Rover, Constance. Women’s Suffrage and Party Politics in Britain, 1866-1914. Toronto, Ont.: University of Toronto Press, 1967. A carefully documented analysis of the political campaign to gain the vote for women and the obstacles overcome in this endeavor, emphasizing the lack of total commitment in either party and the suspicion of Liberals and Tories over potential women’s voting patterns.