Emmeline Pankhurst: biography of this leader of the suffrage movement

Although it is already part of the past, at least in the Western world, it was not long ago that women were considered as beings with delicate hands, made for sewing, drinking tea, and raising children, while it was the men who, through political struggle, took care of the affairs of condition.

But all this changed when Victorian women, fed up with being denied the right to vote, took action. Under the slogan "deeds, not words," Emmeline Pankhurst fought for women's suffrage to be recognized.

Her life is that of a fighter, a woman who did not limit herself to an intellectual life but participated in numerous protests, many of them not very peaceful but, thanks to them, women have recognized their right to vote. Let's discover her story through a summarized biography of Emmeline Pankhurst.

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Short Biography of Emmeline Pankhurst

Emmeline Pankhurst, née Goulden, was born in Manchester, England, on July 15, 1858., although as an anecdote we can comment that she always defended having been born on the 14th. From a very young age, she read "Women 's Suffrage", a publication that her mother bought every week since she Young Emmeline's family was politically active, sensitized about the situation of people oppressed. Her father, Robert, was an anti-slavery businessman, and her mother, Sophia, was a passionate feminist.

Youth and contact with suffragettes

Despite the political interests of her family and being against the way things were in her time, Emmeline's parents preferred to raise her daughter so that she would be a good wife and mother, in tune with what was expected of a woman in Victorian society. However, the young woman did not commune much with these ideas and that is why she, with only 14 years old, after attending a speech in favor of women's rights, she Emmeline decided to start in the suffrage movement British.

Shortly afterwards she had the opportunity to live in Paris, where she would attend the École Normale de Neuilly. France, or at least its capital, was a less conservative place than its neighbor Great Britain, giving women access to rather limited knowledge elsewhere in Europe. This is why the young Emmeline would have the opportunity to study chemistry and accounting, but she should also take subjects considered feminine, such as embroidery.

First years of claims

In the fall of 1878, her relationship with Richard Pankhurst, a lawyer 24 years her senior, began. Richard was a socialist and was very committed to the fight for the female vote. The couple, despite their age difference, hit it off in a very short time and just a year later they married with the approval of the bride's parents. The connection between the two was both political and romantic, and Emmeline's parents were very fond of having such a brilliant lawyer in the family.

The marriage between Emmeline and Richard Pankhurst was appropriate for their class and her time, having four children in the first six years of life. However, they differed from the others by being members of the Independent Labor Party and the suffrage movement. The couple would found the “Women’s Franchise League” (WFL), which defended that both married and single women had the right to vote..

The WFL was considered a radical organization, an opinion that increased when the organization began to fight in favor of considering men and women equal in aspects such as divorce and inheritances. He advocated unionism and tried to seek alliances in political socialism. However, his ideas were too advanced for this time and even several of his members suffragettes saw them as too radical, leaving the organization and causing it to end falling apart.

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Her activism: facts, not words

Richard Pankhurst passed away in 1898 due to a perforated ulcer which leaves Emmeline under the responsibility of many debts. That is why she started working at the Chorlton Register of Births and Deaths, near Manchester, where she would have the opportunity her to know first-hand the lives of many women, seeing the real differences in the rights recognized between men and women.

In 1903 Emmeline realized that the moderate speeches on women's suffrage in Parliament were going nowhere. Disappointed by the results of the moderate suffragettes decided to found the "Women's Social and Political Union" (WSPU). In it Emmeline publicly defended the female vote, and in one of her speeches she pronounced her slogan "Facts, not words" that would end up becoming the motto of the movement.

The group began to assert itself through non-violent action, delivering speeches, collecting firms, organizing demonstrations and publishing a newsletter called “Votes for Women” Women"). She also convened a "Women's Parliament", which met by coinciding its sessions with those of the official Parliament.

On May 12, 1905, Pankhurst and several colleagues from the WSPU gathered in front of Parliament to demonstrate in favor of an amendment regulating women's suffrage. The police came forward to disperse them, but later the group re-formed and continued to demand her approval. Although the amendment was not approved, Emmeline Pankhurst, seeing the lobbying capacity of such a demonstration, pointed out that her protest had turned them into a real political force.

Imprisonment as an act of protest

Emmeline's daughters, Christabel, Adela and Sylvia, were active members of the WSPU and were therefore arrested on more than one occasion. The first time that Emmeline Pankhurst was arrested was in 1908, after trying to enter Parliament to deliver a protest to the Prime Minister. She spent six weeks in prison, which helped her learn about the deplorable conditions in which the prisoners were found. and it was at that moment that Emmeline Pankhurst decided to make imprisonment her means of protest.

She was doing her best to get arrested and imprisoned. This, which may seem like an almost suicidal mission, had a powerful intention: to show the world that she was not being arrested for committing crimes, but for wanting to become a legislator. Emmeline Pankhurst was arrested up to seven times before women's suffrage was passed in the UK.

On June 26, 1908, thousands of activists gathered in Hyde Park to demand the female vote.. At the end of the demonstration, several WSPU activists gathered to give speeches but the police came and arrested several attendees. Out of frustration, two members of the formation, Edith New and Mary Leigh, threw stones at the windows of the Prime Minister's home. Although they themselves said that her events were not organized by the WSPU, Emmeline Pankhurst pointed out that she was in favor of them.

In 1909, after the imprisonment of Marion Wallace Dunlop, a suffragette who went on hunger strikes in prison, the WSPU decided to adopt this new strategy of pressure. Several suffragettes tried to go on hunger strikes, but prison officials forced them to feed themselves by putting tubes through their noses or mouths. Both the suffrage movement and medical professionals harshly criticized these measures.

The gap between the suffragism advocated by Emeline Pankhurst and that advocated by more moderate suffragettes caused some of the WSPU members to begin to use the term “suffragete” instead of “suffragist” to differentiate yourself from the moderate ones, who, as we have discussed before, did not appear to be contributing significantly to the movement.

In 1907 Emmeline Pankhurst sold her house to start a busy lifestyle. She moved from one place to another demanding women's suffrage, staying in hotels or in the homes of acquaintances. In 1909 she traveled throughout the United States to give a series of conferences to obtain funds for her cause., in addition to being able to defray the expenses of the illness that her son Henry of hers was suffering.

The law of cat and mouse

After the 1910 elections, a Conciliation Committee for the Suffrage of Women was organized. The WSPU suspended its protest actions while a bill was being negotiated to give voting rights to women. The project did not go ahead, which made Pankhurst lead on 18 November a protest march with more than 300 women heading to Parliament Square. There they were met with police repression led by the Minister of the Interior, Winston Churchill, an event that would become known as Black Friday.

In March 1912 a second bill was rejected. It was another straw that broke the camel's back and, fed up with so many denials, several WSPU members, including Emmeline Pankhurst, stepped up their actions. The police responded by raiding her offices and chasing after her daughter Christabel, who was the organization's main coordinator, who had to go into exile in Paris. Emmeline was arrested and convicted of conspiracy, leading her to organize her first hunger strike in cell.

Public opinion was scandalized by the treatment and harassment of suffragettes by the police, So the authorities decided to apply a new strategy to repress the movement: the law of the cat and the mouse. The cat was the government, which released the mice, which were the suffragettes, when their health deteriorated. Once they recovered and returned to the political struggle, the government again persecuted and imprisoned them. But the WSPU was already a large herd of mice, with more than 100,000 members.

The WSPU had long since ceased peaceful activism and opted for more invasive measures, including fire as a weapon of protest. Various activists tried to cause explosions and set fire to various places during the years 1913 and 1914. Although Emmeline and her daughter Christabel indicated that these actions had not been approved by the organization, they did support them.

One of the best known acts perpetrated by members of the WSPU is what Mary Richardson did who, in 1914, she cracked the painting of the Spanish Diego Velázquez "Venus del Espejo" from 1647, in protest at the imprisonment of Pankhurst. Although with the passage of time this canvas would be restored, such action against a piece of art was very controversial and, at the same time, intensified the pressure on the government and society.

In November 1917 the WPSU became the Women's Party. A year later Christabel announced that she was running as her candidate in the upcoming elections, the first in which women could run. The candidate lost to the Labor candidate by 775 votes, which led the party to not run in other elections and, shortly after, to disintegrate.

Partial victory in his later years

A few months later, women's suffrage would be approved, albeit partially, since only women over 30 could vote.. The reason for this was that there was still a well-established idea that women matured much later than men and that they were not mentally adult until they were in their thirties. This was not satisfactory for the suffrage movement, but that was better than nothing. Likewise, they did not leave the fight behind and, fueled by this victory, they continued to exert pressure.

But Emmeline Pankhurst's time was getting shorter. Just as he was approaching his main life purpose, that is, that all women could vote, Emmeline Pankhurst's health deteriorated and she had to enter a home for people higher. It would be there where she would spend her last days, passing away on June 14, 1928, at the age of 69.. Just over a month later, on July 21 the government extended the right to vote to all women, both married and single, over 21 years of age.

Bibliographic references:

• Ruiza, M., Fernández, T. and Tamaro, E. (2004). Biography of Emmeline Pankhurst. In Biographies and Lives. The Biographical Encyclopedia Online. Barcelona, ​​Spain). Recovered from https://www.biografiasyvidas.com/biografia/p/pankhurst.htm on September 16, 2020.
• Bartley, Paula. Emmeline Pankhurst (2002). London: Routledge. ISBN 0-415-20651-0.
• Purvis, June. Emmeline Pankhurst: A Biography (2002). London: Routledge. ISBN 0-415-23978-8.