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).
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