THE
SUFFRAGETTE
MOVEMENT
AN INTIMATE ACCOUNT
OF PERSONS AND IDEALS
With an Introduction by
Dr Richard Pankhurst
By
E. SYLVIA PANKHURST
First published in 1931
This edition published by Read Books Ltd.
Copyright 2019 Read Books Ltd.
This book is copyright and may not be
reproduced or copied in any way without
the express permission of the publisher in writing
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available
from the British Library
To my son
Richard Keir Pethick Pankhurst
This record of struggle is dedicated
in the cherished hope that he may give his service to the collective work of humanity
Contents
Sylvia Pankhurst
Designing a part of the decorations
of the Prince's Skating Rink
"This history of the Women's Suffrage agitation is written at a time when the question is in the very forefront of British politics. What the immediate future holds for those women who are most actively engaged in fighting for their political freedom no one can foretell, but one thing is certain: complete victory for their cause is not far distant.
When the long struggle for the enfranchisement of women is over, those who read the history of the movement will wonder at the blindness that led the Government of the day to obstinately resist so simple and obvious a measure of justice.
The men and women of the coming time will, I am persuaded, be filled with admiration for the patient work of the early pioneers and the heroic determination and persistence in spite of coercion, repression, misrepresentation, and insult of those who fought the later militant fight.
Perhaps the women born in the happier days that are to come, while rejoicing in the inheritance that we of to-day are preparing for them, may sometimes wish that they could have lived in the heroic days of stress and struggle and have shared with us the joy of battle, the exaltation that comes of sacrifice of self for great objects and the prophetic vision that assures us of the certain triumph of this twentieth-century fight for human emancipation."
E. Sylvia Pankhurst.
4, Clement's Inn, W. C., London.
January, 1911.
PREFACE
I GRATEFULLY render thanks to all who have assisted me in preparing this book, and especially to Mr. R. G. Longman for his sympathetic understanding of the authors aims and difficulties in a work at once so intimate and so composite.
I have essayed to describe events and experiences as one felt them; to estimate character and intention in the mellowing light of intervening years. My desire has been to introduce the actors in the drama as living beings; to show the striving, suffering, hugely hopeful human entity behind the pageantry, the rhetoric and the turbulence. In this effort I have often been thrown back upon my own experience. I have given it frankly, knowing that I could thus describe with greater poignancy and vigour the general experience of those who cherished and toiled for the same cause and encountered the same ordeals.
No history, whether of movements or of persons, can be truly expressed apart from the social and economic conditions and thought currents of its time. I have endeavoured to convey these not through the medium of statistics or argument, but by incidents in the moving course of life.
The book is largely made up of memories. In the earlier chapters, the key and the basis of those which follow, I have paid tribute to pioneers whose labours made later achievements possible. Their story is dear to me for its tender recollections and for the spirit of earnest public service which animated their work.The many deeds of devotion and heroism chronicled in the later pages are greatly outnumbered by those I have been compelled, most reluctantly, to omit.
E. Sylvia Pankhurst.
INTRODUCTION
My mother Sylvia Pankhurst, who dedicated this book to me close on half a century ago, wrote as an active participant in the events she describes. Her work is thus both history and autobiography. At one level it is a chronicle of how the women of Britain won the vote; at another it tells the story of her own imprisonment, hunger, thirst and sleep strikesand the manner in which she, and so many other women militants, were forcibly fed by the Liberal Government of the day.
More fundamentally the book shows how the advocates of womens suffrage became increasingly polarized into two mutually antagonistic factions, the Womens Social and Political Union led by her mother Emmeline and her sister Christabel, which was essentially conservative, and Sylvias East London Federation of the Suffragettes which stood on the far left of the political spectrum. For her part she followed the tradition, as she saw it, of her father Dr. Richard Marsden Pankhurst, a Manchester lawyer and disciple of John Stuart Mill, who had been an early member of the Independent Labour Party, and who, as she later wrote, was earnestly immersed in all the advanced movements of his time. Characteristic of her attitude to the vote are the final words of this book where, after relating how the government at last granted womens suffrage, she exclaims: Great is the work which remains to be accomplished!
The difference of approach within the suffragette ranks became even more marked during World War I when Emmeline and Christabel gave their full patriotic support to the war against the Kaiser, and in defence of gallant little Belgium, whereas Sylvia, then a pacifist and opponent of the war, devoted her energies to social work in the East Endand changed the name of the weekly newspaper she edited, significantly enough, from the Womans Dreadnought to the Workers Dreadnought.
During the first years of the war she established the Mothers Arms, a maternity clinic and Montessori school, and four other clinics, two cost-price restaurants, and a co-operative toy factory designed to provide work for persons unemployed on account of the conflict. She also founded the League of Rights for Soldiers and Sailors Wives and Relatives, to work for better pensions and allowances, and became Honorary Secretary of the National Labour Council for Adult Suffrage. In her subsequent record of those days, The Home Front, she tells of the suffering the war brought to the East End, and enquires:
Must these things be? Can we not free humanity from the enslaving burden of war preparedness which leads to war? Must the see world yet another blood bath, yet more slaughter and sacrifice for vain, ignoble objects? Shall we not take the way of human solidarity and mutual aid at long last? I believe that humanity is advancing towards the establishment of the United States of the World, consolidated in a free Socialism, wherein all shall co-operate gladly, giving to the common stock according to their abilities and in receiving from its abundance according to their needs.
