Bloody Brilliant Women: The Pioneers, Revolutionaries and Geniuses Your History Teacher Forgot to Mention. Cathy Newman

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СКАЧАТЬ – drilled into moral shape by their ambitious, disciplinarian parents, who treated them as little adults.

      The Pankhursts flitted between a new house in London’s Russell Square and Manchester, Emmeline throwing herself into the role of political hostess while the children jostled for her attention which, when it was given at all, was usually lavished on confident, beautiful Christabel. Sylvia and Adela particularly suffered from this genteel neglect. Sylvia had poor eyesight, but since Emmeline disapproved of glasses she was never allowed a pair and so endured migraines for years.

      In this charged environment, dysfunctionality reigned: the squabbles and more serious relationship breakdowns that blighted the Pankhursts’ adult lives were, says Pugh, ‘clearly foreshadowed in childhood’.79 During this time Emmeline was always exquisitely dressed in the latest Paris fashions, and despised women who looked shabby. She would always take ‘enormous trouble over her appearance in public’, as if to reassure doubters that suffrage-seeking women were not the mannish caricatures of satirical cartoons. Sylvia, by contrast, was a notoriously shabby dresser – ‘a proper scruff’, in the words of one former trade union leader.80

      Emmeline’s involvement with the women’s suffrage movement was, to begin with, politely constitutional, conforming to the widely held view that only single, unmarried women should get the vote. This was partly tactical, as it was thought that pressing for full female suffrage when 40 per cent of men still couldn’t vote was pointless and unrealistic. Emmeline’s subsequent change of tack had two catalysts. One was her election as a Poor Law guardian in Chorlton in 1894, which saw her campaign successfully for workhouse inmates to have private lockers for their possessions, warmer clothing and better food. The other was the death in 1898 of Richard – aged sixty-four – from a perforated ulcer.

      Christabel, meanwhile, had been drifting aimlessly, and in 1901 wrote to her mother: ‘Have you any ideas about me yet?’ She befriended two powerful, highly politicised women, Eva Gore-Booth and Esther Roper, both members of the North of England Society for Women’s Suffrage. They have sometimes been portrayed as a lesbian couple who drew Christabel into their relationship. The Pankhursts’ biographer Martin Pugh thinks this unlikely, but they had a warming, softening influence on Christabel. At Gore-Booth and Roper’s suggestion, she decided to study law. It would prove the perfect training for her quick, lively mind.

      Emmeline seems to have been infuriated by Christabel’s political awakening. In 1903, perhaps jealous of Christabel for picking up the suffrage baton, she founded the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), an extension of an earlier suffrage society she’d founded in 1889, the Women’s Franchise League. The WSPU motto, ‘deeds, not words’, underwrote their manifesto of what Ray Strachey calls ‘moral violence’, which was born of impatience with Fawcett’s slow attempt to obtain reform by constitutional means.

      Emmeline sought a close relationship with the Independent Labour Party (ILP), but the ILP was ambivalent about female suffrage, fearing that if property-owning women got the vote as the WSPU demanded, they’d be more likely to vote Tory or Liberal. They also feared that allowing women to work would be bad for wages.

      In 1905 the ILP leader Keir Hardie, to whom Sylvia had grown close, tried to introduce a bill proposing suffrage for female householders. His failure bolstered the Pankhursts’ confidence and they vowed to turn the WSPU into an ‘army in the field’, recruiting key personnel such as Hannah Mitchell, Flora Drummond – a stout Scot nicknamed Precocious Piglet who liked dressing in military uniform – and Annie Kenney. Annie had met Christabel in Oldham in spring 1906 and pledged allegiance on the spot. The fifth child in a family of eleven, she had left school at thirteen and was needy and damaged – a naive dreamer looking for a good, brave cause. Sylvia Pankhurst would later write that ‘her lack of perspective, her very intellectual limitations, lent her a certain directness of purpose when she became the instrument of a more powerful mind’.81

      That powerful mind belonged to Christabel. For her, militancy was important because of the message it sent that women were capable of such behaviour. On 13 October 1905 she was arrested and imprisoned for deliberately spitting at a policeman outside Manchester’s Free Trade Hall, an event which turned the suffragettes, as the Daily Mail called them, into martyr-heroes.

      After the Liberals won the 1906 election, Christabel severed her links with the ILP, and the WSPU moved to London, its goal to attract fashionable, bourgeois women and acquire both a funding stream and (with Keir Hardie’s help) a treasurer. A newspaper, Votes for Women, was launched and was selling 22,000 copies by May 1909. A car was bought for Emmeline and a chauffeur hired – former actress Vera Holme, who wore masculine attire and was always called Jack.

      Artistic Sylvia, once a prize-winning student at Manchester School of Art and the Royal College of Art in London, oversaw the WSPU’s visual branding – the flags, banners and a broad range of ‘official’ memorabilia – while Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence, a wealthy philanthropist who was co-editor of Votes for Women, came up with the iconic colour scheme: purple (for dignity), white (for purity) and green (for hope). Members were encouraged to wear the colours ‘as a duty and a privilege’. Suffragette ‘uniforms’ were stocked by leading department stores like Selfridges and Liberty.

      The WSPU fractured repeatedly over the next few years as new offshoots formed, such as the Women’s Freedom League. On 21 June 1908, a staggering 250,000 people attended a WSPU rally in Hyde Park, only for Asquith to dismiss its significance. Christabel was roused to violence once more and the suffragettes stormed Parliament Square in October 1908, after which Emmeline, Christabel and Flora Drummond were put on trial charged with incitement to rush the House of Commons. Lawyer Christabel scored another PR victory when she called Lloyd George and Gladstone in evidence and ran rings round them, controlling the courtroom ‘like a little singing bird’ (as the caricaturist Max Beerbohm put it). Jailed again, Christabel became a huge celebrity, and Madame Tussaud’s even commissioned her waxwork. But prison ground her down and the Liberal government, more distracted than ever by the effort of forcing through its radical programme under Lloyd George, continued to ignore female suffrage as an issue.

      In the years leading up to the First World War, the WSPU continued to pursue its policy of seeking out violent conflict for propaganda purposes. When the suffragettes marched on Parliament again on 29 June 1909, Emmeline struck a policeman so that she would be arrested and tried for sedition. This ushered in a period of arson, chemical attacks and hunger strikes. The first imprisoned woman to refuse food was Marion Wallace Dunlop, who in July 1909 had been sentenced to a month in Holloway for vandalism. When she was denied political prisoner status, she refused food for ninety-one hours. Afraid that she would die and become a martyr, Gladstone released her early on medical grounds. This established a pattern other suffragettes would mimic – imprisonment followed by swift release. The government tried to break the pattern, first through barbaric methods of force-feeding (from September 1909), then later in April 1913 through the Prisoners (Temporary Discharge for Ill Health) Act, known as the Cat and Mouse Act. This enabled a hunger-striking prisoner to be released from prison when her health started to fail, then re-imprisoned when she had recovered so that her sentence could be served in full.

      After 1910, Fawcett’s NUWSS became the main players as support for militancy crumbled. The WSPU had announced a cessation of hostilities in January 1910, but it didn’t last long. The eighteenth of November 1910 became known as Black Friday when Asquith’s quashing of the Conciliation Bill, which would have extended the vote to property-owning women, caused widespread protests. Around two hundred women were assaulted by police and the event gave rise to one of the suffrage campaign’s most famous photographic images: demonstrator Ada Wright lying on the ground, her hands covering her face while two men stoop over her.

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