The Agitator EMMELINE PANKHURST

Not even the noisiest proponents of women’s proper place back in the home could seriously suggest today that women should not have the vote. Yet “the mother half of the human family,” in Emmeline Pankhurst’s phrase, was fully enfranchised only in this century. In Britain, so proud to claim “the Mother of Parliaments,” universal suffrage–including women’s–was granted only in the year of her death, 1928. Mrs. Pankhurst was born a Victorian Englishwoman, but she shaped an idea of women for our time; she shook society into a new pattern from which there could be no going back.

The struggle to get votes for women, led by Mrs. Pankhurst and her daughter Christabel at the head of the militant suffragists, convulsed Britain from 1905 to 1914. The opposition the Liberal government put up looks incomprehensible today, and it provoked, among all classes and conditions of women, furious and passionate protests. The response of the police, the courts and sometimes the crowds of suffragist opponents still makes shocking reading. Women were battered in demonstrations and, on hunger strikes, brutally force-fed in prison. When these measures risked taking lives, the infamous Cat & Mouse Act was passed so that a dangerously weakened hunger striker would be released and then rearrested when strong enough to continue her sentence. Under its terms, Mrs. Pankhurst, age 54 in 1912, went to prison 12 times that year. No wonder she railed, “The militancy of men, through all the centuries, has drenched the world with blood. The militancy of women has harmed no human life save the lives of those who fought the battle of righteousness.”

Mrs. Pankhurst’s father was a Manchester manufacturer with radical sympathies. When she was small, she was consuming Uncle Tom’s Cabin, John Bunyan and abolitionist materials; her earliest memories included hearing Elizabeth Cady Stanton speak. Her father was keen on amateur theatricals in the home; his daughter later enthralled the suffragists with her oratory and her voice. The young Rebecca West described hearing Mrs. Pankhurst in full cry: “Trembling like a reed, she lifted up her hoarse, sweet voice on the platform, but the reed was of steel and it was tremendous.”

Richard Pankhurst, whom she married in 1879, when she was 20 and he was 40, was a brilliant lawyer, selflessly dedicated to reform, who drafted pioneering legislation granting women independent control of their finances. Emmeline bore five children but lost two sons, and when Richard died suddenly in 1898, she was left to bring up her children alone, with no private means.

The surviving Pankhurst women formed an intrepid, determined, powerfully gifted band. In 1903 they founded the Women’s Social and Political Union. It was, Emmeline Pankhurst wrote later, “simply a suffrage army in the field.” The charismatic, dictatorial eldest daughter Christabel emerged in her teens as the W.S.P.U.’s strategist and an indomitable activist, with nerves of tungsten. Mrs. Pankhurst’s second daughter Sylvia, the artist, pioneered the corporate logo: as designer and scene painter of the W.S.P.U., she created banners, costumes and badges in the suffragist livery of white, purple and green. Though the family split later over policy, their combined talents powered from the beginning an astonishingly versatile tactical machine.

The W.S.P.U. adopted a French Revolutionary sense of crowd management, public spectacle and symbolic ceremony. They would greet one of their number on release from prison and draw her triumphantly in a flower-decked wagon through the streets, and they staged elaborate allegorical pageants and torchlight processions, with Mrs. Pankhurst proudly walking at their head (if she wasn’t in jail). Her example was followed internationally: the U.S. suffragist Alice Paul, who had taken part in suffragist agitation when she was a student at the London School of Economics, imported Pankhurst militancy to the U.S., leading a march 5,000 strong in 1910.

The political leaders of Edwardian Britain were utterly confounded by the energy and violence of this female rebellion, by the barrage of mockery, interruptions and demands the suffragists hurled and, later, by the sight of viragoes in silk petticoats, matrons with hammers, ladies with stones in their kid gloves, mothers and mill girls unbowed before the forces of judges, policemen and prison wardens. Many suffragists in Britain and the U.S. argued that the Pankhursts’ violence–arson, window smashing, picture slashing and hunger strikes–was counterproductive to the cause and fueled misogynistic views of female hysteria. Though the question remains open, the historical record shows shameless government procrastination, broken pledges and obstruction long before the suffragists abandoned heckling for acting up.

Mrs. Pankhurst took the suffragist thinking far and wide: she even managed to slip in a lecture tour of the U.S. between spells of a Cat & Mouse jail sentence. In her tireless public speaking, suffrage meant more than equality with men. While she was bent on sweeping away the limits of gender, she envisioned society transformed by feminine energies, above all by chastity, far surpassing the male’s. In this, she is the foremother of the separatist wing of feminism today: the battle for the vote was for her a battle for the bedroom. She wrote, “We want to help women…We want to gain for them all the rights and protection that laws can give them. And, above all, we want the good influence of women to tell to its greatest extent in the social and moral questions of the time. But we cannot do this unless we have the vote and are recognised as citizens and voices to be listened to.” Her plea to the court in 1912 ringingly concluded, “We are here, not because we are lawbreakers; we are here in our efforts to become lawmakers.”

It is hard today not to sigh at the ardor of her hope in what voting could achieve, not to be amazed at the confidence she showed in political reform. But heroism looks to the future, and heroes hold to their faith. Joan of Arc was the suffragists’ mascot, Boadicea their goddess, and Mrs. Pankhurst the true inheritor of the armed maidens of heroic legend.

Marina Warner’s latest book is No Go the Bogeyman: Scaring, Lulling and Making Mock