My Own Story by Emmeline Pankhurst: book review

My Own Story (1914, this edition 2015) is British suffragist Emmeline Pankhurst’s memoir, and inspiration for the movie Suffragette (2015) with Carey Mulligan portraying the fictitious Maud Watts who joined the suffrage movement to campaign for the right of women to vote.

Emmeline Pankhurst (1858-1928) begins with her childhood in Manchester. She was raised by parents who both supported the anti-slavery and civil rights movement in America, and married to barrister Richard Pankhurst in 1879, also an advocate for women’s rights.

Her influencing emotions were her admiration for heroic sacrifice for a cause and a ‘gentler spirit that repairs the ravages of war’ but always aware that ‘justice and judgement lie often a world apart.’ She was conscious from the beginning that men played a crucial role in political equality: ‘These men did not wait until the movement became popular … [and] suffered in popularity for their feminist views … financially, some politically. Yet they never wavered.’

Although she had been advocating poitical equality since she was 14, it was after her husband’s death in 1898, with five children, that she raised her level of effort – primarily due to the involvement of her two eldest daughters, Christabel and Sylvia, in 1902 when they were about 20 years old.

She established the voluntary Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) in 1902, which underwent ‘phenomenal growth’ due to its base in London and its single focus. WSPU had one (and only one) clear defining role: to get women the vote. This was not about any other form of equality, nor about the right to stand for elected positions in politics. ‘We threw away all our conventional notions of what was ‘ladylike’ and ‘good form’ and we applied to our methods the one test question, Will it help?’ In the first year, from a family group, WPSU had branches across the country, permanent headquarters in London, financial backing, and a suffrage committee in the House of Commons.

But women could not get their bill into Parliament. This is England during the time of King Edward VII (1841-1910) and King George V (1865-1936), when Winston Churchill had joined the Conservative Party and Herbert Henry Asquith was Prime Minister. WPSU’s battle was not with men, and not with the members of Parliament, but with the government.

The memoir ends on 11 June 1914, with Home Secretary Reginald McKenna’s speech to the House of Commons, on the eve of the first World War, on how to end women’s militancy. Four methods were put forth: let them die (in prison and hunger strikes), deport them (to Australia and other penal colonies), treat them as lunatics (but the medical profession refused to certify them as insane), or give them the franchise (the right to vote in public elections).

She concludes that ‘our battles are practically over, we confidently believe.’ She does not state this, but it was not until 1920 – six years after she wrote her memoir – that British women, over the age of 30, received the right to vote, and 1928 (18 days after Pankhurst died) when all women of voting age (from 21) could vote. Nor does she mention that New Zealand granted women the right to vote in 1893, the first country to do so on a national level, followed by Australia (1902), Finland (1906), Norway (1913), Denmark and Iceland (1915), Canada, Russia, Germany, and Poland (1917-1918), and USA and Armenia in 1920. Britain lagged behind, and it was a tough, violent battle to get the vote.

This book is not a history of the suffragette movement in the United Kingdom. This is not a negative rant with anger and bitterness. This is an easy to understand, calm, and rational account of Pankhurst’s early influences and leadership decisions. Throughout the text Pankhurst begins paragraphs with statements such as ‘This is how it set the cause back’ and adds her own questions such as ‘What good did it do?’ Of the three sections, the first two are exceptional.

Criticised for her militant tactics, this is her story – of what, how, and why she deployed militancy – mostly without success, but always relentlessly (I lost count of the number of times Emmeline and her daughters were arrested and imprisoned or on hunger strike). Her critics question whether her tactics helped the cause or hindered it – and she answers these questions.

MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author of:- The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).