Vintage Feminism: classic feminist texts in short form
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY JESS PHILLIPS
Soldier, criminal, militant, hooligan, revolutionary: these labels Emmeline Pankhurst took up and wore proudly in her long struggle for women’s suffrage. This shortened edition of her autobiography tells the inside story of this struggle: the tireless campaigning, the betrayals by men in power, the relentless round of arrests and hunger strikes, the horror of force-feeding. It is a reminder of the controversial means, the indomitable spirit and the sacrifices of life and liberty by which women won their political freedom.
Emmeline Pankhurst was born in 1858 in Manchester, into a politically active family. She became interested in politics at a young age and a supporter of women’s suffrage by the age of fourteen. As a teenager she attended school in Paris and on her return to Manchester she met and married Richard Pankhurst, a barrister twenty-four years her senior. Over the next ten years they had five children. Emmeline’s interest in politics and involvement in the suffrage movement continued to develop and she was a member of the Women’s Franchise League and later the Independent Labour Party. In 1903, frustrated by the lack of progress on securing votes for women, Pankhurst and several colleagues founded the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU), a militant organisation devoted to securing votes for women by direct action. For the following twenty years, members of the WSPU, led by Pankhurst, endured prison and hunger strikes in their struggle to win the right to vote. Their activities were called to a halt by the start of the First World War but in 1918, the government gave voting rights to women over thirty. Emmeline died on 14 June 1928, shortly after women were granted equal voting rights with men.
I grew up on one of those streets where everyone knows each other. The kind that has barbeques in the summer and drinks mulled wine together in the winter. Every year one of the neighbours would volunteer to hold the street’s New Year’s Eve party, where the grown-ups would get howling drunk and play silly games. In 1990 my parents volunteered to have the party at our house. Being the start of a momentous new decade, it was decided that it would be fancy dress and people were asked to come dressed as 20th-century icons. Not requiring even a moment’s thought, my mother knew she would be bringing in the new decade dressed as Emmeline Pankhurst.
I vividly remember sitting on the step outside my parents’ bedroom as she put on her Emmeline Pankhurst costume. It consisted of a slightly flattened hat that she had probably bought for a wedding around 1983. The hat had clearly sat at the bottom layer of her wardrobe, fossilising under the weight of years of debris piling on top of it. She wrapped a scarf over the top with ties hanging down to go under her chin, pepping up the hat and lending it the air of a bonnet. Then came a plain cotton dress, with a blue buttoned overcoat, and stockings – or, in fact, pop socks, for my mother was a feminist who expressed her beliefs mainly through seeking out the most comfortable attire possible; bras and suspenders were definitely believed to be the chains of oppression. A pair of battered, black lace-up boots, which conveniently were as fashionable in the early 1990s as they had been in the 1890s, completed the outfit.
Given that the main bones of the costume were at best thrown together, she looked like a dashing bag lady (if I’m being completely honest), but the costume came alive in the accessories. My mother had made a classic ‘Votes for Women’ sash, resplendent in green, white and purple. She had made a ‘Deeds not Words’ badge, and printed out leaflets with some of the original campaign slogans of the women’s suffrage movement. I was familiar with all of these additions: I had been brought up on a steady diet of women’s history at home and courtesy of my childcare provider, ‘The Women’s Liberation Playgroup’. It was the final piece of the costume that puzzled me. It was a long coil of clear plastic hose that my dad had fashioned for her in the garage. She stepped into the spiral of clear plastic tubing, pulled it up to her waist until it lassoed her three times around her torso and finished at her shoulder where it protruded proudly with a funnel from the kitchen shoved in the end which stood to attention almost as if it was a parrot sitting on a pirate’s shoulder. I was horrified by the contraption, which I felt had ruined a perfectly good costume.
‘What is it, Mom?’ I asked. ‘It looks stupid!’
She told me that the contraption was to represent the barbaric methods that were used to force-feed Emmeline Pankhurst and her fellow suffragettes while they were in prison. She talked to me about how they weren’t just genteel campaigning ladies but that they were militant women, a collective sisterhood and army. She told me she respected their work because they were fighters, who went through pain and suffering so that little girls like me could have the same rights as my brothers. She pointed at the poster on the wall in the staircase up to the attic where my brothers’ bedrooms were. The poster listed all the things a man could be and still get the vote – a drunkard, a convict, a lunatic, a proprietor of white slaves – alongside the list of what a woman could be and not get the vote: a mayor, a teacher, a factory hand, a nurse, a doctor, a mother.
She explained how proud she was of these women, because of the pain and torture they endured so that I could be free. At the time the poster was one I just ran past, usually away from an angry teenage boy, but now I see how much it mattered to my mom, especially because of me, being the only girl in a house full of boys and men. I love the fact that she put it in the boys’ bit of the house, knowing it was them who needed to learn the lesson most. My mom respected and wanted to pay tribute to Emmeline Pankhurst because of all she did for womankind, but she felt indebted to her, and felt love for her cause because of what her legacy offered to me, her then nine-year-old daughter.
Twenty-eight years later, on February 6 2018, I stood in a cold and cavernous Westminster Hall. It was the celebration to mark the centenary of the date when Emmeline Pankhurst finally achieved something she had fought for all her life. Votes for women. I stood there as the Member of Parliament for the seat where my mother was raised by her single mom. I stood next to Stella Creasy, the MP for Walthamstow, who was wearing a t-shirt emblazoned with the words ‘Daughter of Pankhurst’. As I stood amongst hundreds of women, I cried with thanks for everything that Emmeline Pankhurst, and all daughters of Pankhurst like my mom who came after her, had done for me. These women did so much to give me power, to give me a voice, to help me to carry on the fight which was nowhere near its conclusion. That little girl, shocked by a weird funnel tube, will remain horrified for the rest of her life at what the suffragettes endured in the pursuit of freedom. A debt of gratitude like this must be repaid.
As a nine-year-old, it was Emmeline Pankhurst’s deeds that I had learned about, but it was not until many years later that her words reached me. This book you are about to embark upon is surprisingly relatable and easy to read for a book written in 1914. There is a delightful mix of frustration at a need to change things coupled with what seems like a trot through thirty years of patiently chipping away at a cause. I don’t know how Emmeline Pankhurst didn’t give up at all the false starts. She sweeps past every time a bill was raised in the House of Commons and then fell at the first reading or somehow forgot the women bit at committee stages, as if these were just trips along the way. As someone who knows how hard it is, especially from a position of opposition, to get anything even up and running in the House of Commons, I am astounded by how temperate her language is. I know times have changed but I like to think that Mrs Pankhurst gave herself a few moments in her private chambers to eff and blind at the enormity of the task she had taken on. I would have been swearing like a sailor.
People often ask me why I got involved in politics and the answer I always give is that if anyone had seen the things I have seen when I was working with victims of domestic and sexual violence they would have the heat of rage coursing through their veins to change it. It seems Emmeline Pankhurst felt the same. I am frustrated to have to say this, but Mrs Pankhurst’s own story is one that could be told just as easily today. Her account of being a poor law guardian and the poor women of all ages that she met while she acted as an auditor of workhouses in both London and Manchester, coupled with the stories that she heard of teenage mothers abandoned and demonised while she was working in Manchester’s births, deaths and marriages registration are easily comparable to the cases I saw while working in refuges, rape crisis centres and continue to see in my work as a constituency MP. While the workhouses have morphed into a gentler Welfare State, I meet women every day who are left holding the baby and feeling the shame of the absence of a man in their child’s life. I regularly meet older women, whom Pankhurst gleefully describes as being far more useful and industrious than older men, who have been put out to pasture, no longer considered fit for work but without the safety net of an old age pension to fall back on as the age of qualification steadily rises. Women, as in Pankhurst’s day, still bear the brunt of not only working but also taking on the lion’s, the tiger’s and every animal’s share of the caring responsibility. This means today, as it did then, that when women reach their fifties, the years of child rearing which have lessened their wages smash headlong into the need to care for their ageing parents, leaving them with no room to earn their keep.
Alas, even Mrs Pankhurst’s exclusion from joining her local constituency party of the then Independent Labour Party in the North West, while it wouldn’t happen exactly as it did then, does chime with painful similarity with some of the emails I receive from women in the Labour movement who feel that they have been discriminated against because of nothing more than their gender when trying to get involved in local committees and parochial politics.
In these modern times of intersectional feminism that seeks to ensure that all women can progress regardless of age, race, class, sexuality and disability, I have no doubt that Mrs Pankhurst – a woman who ended her life standing as the Conservative party election candidate and is often criticised for her view on the British Empire – would curry little favour. I have heard 21st-century feminists seek edgy approval discrediting her on these grounds. In the Labour movement there is no doubt that of the Pankhursts, Emmeline’s rebel socialist daughter Sylvia is the favourite. By all accounts Emmeline disowned Sylvia for choosing to have a baby out of wedlock, which if we judge her by modern standards leaves us thinking that she ain’t no sister. However I want to give her credit for the era she lived in, not judge her by our modern standards. The greatest intersection in the time of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) was that of class, and I found this account (which is obviously written from her point of view and another view may very well be different) to tell a story of a woman breaking class boundaries. Pankhurst never seeks to romanticise the poverty of the working-class women she worked with and, even in this abridged edition, one gets glimpses of the true hero of My Own Story – not Emmeline herself, but rather Annie Kenney, a mill worker from Oldham. In some places it seems as if every innovative idea, and every new campaign tool that the WSPU employed, was conceived by Kenney. If Kenney were alive today, I imagine she would be General Secretary of the Trades Union Congress.
Pankhurst was as certain then as I am today that votes for women in her case, and equality for women in mine, would not simply liberate the women but in fact was and is the key to solving so many of society’s problems. ‘We shall have to have new laws,’ she states when describing how the English Poor Law and workhouse welfare was failing so many vulnerable women, children and men, ‘and it soon became apparent to me that we can never hope to get them until women have the vote.’ She was not wrong. The very reason I and many other feminists have struggled to improve the agency and then the representation of women in politics is for exactly the same reason. Women don’t forget women when making policy. All bar one (the 1967 Abortion Act which David Steel took through Parliament) of the greatest advancements in women’s rights, education, health and economic independence were driven through the UK Parliament by female politicians. It is only now, in my era of politics, that women members of parliament and local councillors have reached the critical mass that ‘women’s issues’ are no longer considered an add-on to the big ticket policies. It is by no means perfect, but political women from Emmeline Pankhurst to the women who sit in the Commons today force the men who make the rules to remember that we exist when they tinker with the lives of the nation.
My Own Story is an exercise in explaining and justifying the rage, anger and ultimately the frustration that led this sisterhood to arm themselves. The women of the 1960s who burned their bras and took control over their reproductive organs; the striking women in Dagenham who won for 1970s women equal pay for equal work; the ‘lad culture’ of the women in the 1990s sticking two fingers up to the establishment where women were in rock bands and could sleep with whomever they pleased, whenever they pleased; and in the 21st-century the #MeToo and #TimesUp campaigns which see women bleed their anger about sexual assault and harassment over every company and institution. Every action women have taken collectively since the suffrage movements of Pankhurst’s day all have their locus in this shuddering rage and frustration. For a gender that is not supposed to be angry or aggressive we have spent hundreds of years kicking off. How on earth is it that women are stereotyped as meek? The underdog is always the most likely to bite. Pankhurst uses this book to help people understand why she bit.
On a chilly February afternoon as the snow falls on Westminster and oh-so-British weather warnings fill the news channels, I walk from the Chamber of the House of Commons up to the committee corridor. On this journey through the members’ lobby, I walk past Winston Churchill in brass looming over me, and I chuckle at the terrible write-up he gets in this book. I make my way to the central lobby where I think of Emmeline, Annie and Christabel a hundred and ten years ago, begging passing members of Parliament to choose their cause for a Private Members Bill. I swing around the corner and head to the grand spiral of stairs up to a dark and serious corridor and Lloyd George, who described Pankhurst and her suffragettes as mewing cats. Pictures of other great men pass by in my peripheral vision as I walk. Along the corridor I do not pass a single image of a woman at all, let alone a woman politician or activist, yet the men who were for so long the enemies of Mrs Pankhurst are revelled in and displayed with glory. I arrive – characteristically late – at Committee Room 16. I open the heavy wooden door from the silent dark corridor to a brilliant contrast. A big light room full of women, with a smattering of male faces. The room is so full, people are standing. Only one seat remains free, the raised seat in the centre of the crescent at the front of the room, the seat reserved for the Chair of this gathering, a cross party group here to discuss ‘Women and Work – Policy Change to End Gender Discrimination in the Workforce’. The room falls silent and I take my seat as the Chair of the meeting and we proceed to try to change the world. Emmeline Pankhurst’s My Own Story is not just her story, it is the very reason I have a story to tell at all. It is the story of why what women thought mattered. What a story it is indeed.
Jess Phillips, 2018
I have not personally suffered from the deprivations, the bitterness and sorrow which bring so many men and women to a realisation of social injustice. My childhood was protected by love and a comfortable home. Yet, while still a very young child, I began instinctively to feel that there was something lacking, even in my own home, some false conception of family relations, some incomplete ideal.
This vague feeling of mine began to shape itself into conviction about the time my brothers and I were sent to school. The education of the English boy, then as now, was considered a much more serious matter than the education of the English boy’s sister. My parents, especially my father, discussed the question of my brothers’ education as a matter of real importance. My education and that of my sister were scarcely discussed at all. Of course we went to a carefully selected girls’ school, but beyond the facts that the head mistress was a gentlewoman and that all the pupils were girls of my own class, nobody seemed concerned. A girl’s education at that time seemed to have for its prime object the art of ‘making home attractive’—presumably to migratory male relatives. It used to puzzle me to understand why I was under such a particular obligation to make home attractive to my brothers. We were on excellent terms of friendship, but it was never suggested to them as a duty that they make home attractive to me. Why not? Nobody seemed to know.
The answer to these puzzling questions came to me unexpectedly one night when I lay in my little bed waiting for sleep to overtake me. It was a custom of my father and mother to make the round of our bedrooms every night before going themselves to bed. When they entered my room that night I was still awake, but for some reason I chose to feign slumber. My father bent over me, shielding the candle flame with his big hand. I cannot know exactly what thought was in his mind as he gazed down at me, but I heard him say, somewhat sadly, ‘What a pity she wasn’t born a lad.’
My first hot impulse was to sit up in bed and protest that I didn’t want to be a boy, but I lay still and heard my parents’ footsteps pass on toward the next child’s bed. I thought about my father’s remark for many days afterward, but I think I never decided that I regretted my sex. However, it was made quite clear that men considered themselves superior to women, and that women apparently acquiesced in that belief.
I found this view of things difficult to reconcile with the fact that both my father and my mother were advocates of equal suffrage. I was very young when the Reform Act of 1866 was passed, but I very well remember the agitation caused by certain circumstances attending it. This Reform Act, known as the Household Franchise Bill, marked the first popular extension of the ballot in England since 1832. Under its terms, householders paying a minimum of ten pounds a year rental were given the Parliamentary vote. While it was still under discussion in the House of Commons, John Stuart Mill moved an amendment to the bill to include women householders as well as men. The amendment was defeated, but in the act as passed the word ‘man,’ instead of the usual ‘male person,’ was used. Now, under another act of Parliament it had been decided that the word ‘man’ always included ‘woman’ unless otherwise specifically stated. For example, in certain acts containing rate-paying clauses, the masculine noun and pronoun are used throughout, but the provisions apply to women rate-payers as well as to men. So when the Reform Bill with the word ‘man’ in it became law, many women believed that the right of suffrage had actually been bestowed upon them. A tremendous amount of discussion ensued, and the matter was finally tested by a large number of women seeking to have their names placed upon the register as voters. In my city of Manchester 3,924 women, out of a total of 4,215 possible women voters, claimed their votes, and their claim was defended in the law courts by eminent lawyers, including my future husband, Dr Pankhurst. Of course the women’s claim was settled adversely in the courts, but the agitation resulted in a strengthening of the woman-suffrage agitation all over the country.
I was too young to understand the precise nature of the affair, but I shared in the general excitement. From reading newspapers aloud to my father I had developed a genuine interest in politics, and the Reform Bill presented itself to my young intelligence as something that was going to do the most wonderful good to the country.
I was fourteen years old when I went to my first suffrage meeting. Returning from school one day, I met my mother just setting out for the meeting, and I begged her to let me go along. She consented, and without stopping to lay my books down I scampered away in my mother’s wake. The speeches interested and excited me, especially the address of the great Miss Lydia Becker, who was the Susan B. Anthony of the English movement, a splendid character and a truly eloquent speaker. She was the secretary of the Manchester committee, and I had learned to admire her as the editor of the Women’s Suffrage Journal, which came to my mother every week. I left the meeting a conscious and confirmed suffragist.