Emmeline Pankhurst: A Biography
Emmeline Pankhurst, along with other revolutionary figures such as Oliver Cromwell and Thomas Paine, endured vicious misrepresentation until some real historians appeared on the scene to do her justice. In the case of Emmeline, the scurrility of the attacks has continued right up to the present day: a whole male regiment can still be mobilised to deny her revolutionary stature. June Purvis's new biography is a full recognition of her greatness.
The fight for women's rights, like so many good causes, had its origin in the French revolution of the 1790s. It should have secured the vote for women in the British parliament during the last decades of the 19th century. John Stuart Mill, the greatest liberal philosopher of the age, had given his blessing. His disciples, both men and women, could not imagine why so obvious a claim was thwarted. But the Liberal campaigners of those times found themselves facing the inscrutable objections of the Liberal leader, William Gladstone, or the devious manoeuvres of one of his successors, Herbert Asquith, or, later still, extraordinary opposition from an up-and-coming Winston Churchill. The strange death of the liberal England of that epoch offered nothing stranger than the opposition to the women's cause right up to the outbreak of war in 1914.
Even while the Liberals were abandoning their principles on women's rights, the Labour party (we members may be eager to record) was showing a more imaginative, truly liberal approach. Just before 1914, the leaders of the women's organisations were noting these developments. Honesty also requires us to recognise that these liberal attitudes, not always shared by all sections of the Labour movement, owed much to the attitude of our leader, Keir Hardie, a supporter of the women's cause since his first election to parliament in 1892.
The woman who best understood these varying historical pressures was Emmeline Pankhurst. She had learned her politics, like so many of that period, in the nascent Labour movement. Her husband, Richard Pankhurst, 20 years her senior, died when she was making her first appearances on the political scene. Yet he remained, as she was always eager to claim, the dominating influence in her life: the dedicated socialist who demanded that men and women take their place together on the stage.
Keir Hardie attended his funeral. Robert Blatchford, editor of The Clarion and a foremost supporter of the women's cause, attempted to secure financial assistance for the Pankhurst family. For the rest of her life, Emmeline was never to escape such anxieties. But she turned, ever more heroically, to face the challenges of public life.
The public platform was the place where she learned to wield her power more successfully than any rival before or since. Women in her day were not supposed to make public speeches: just before Emmeline, Annie Besant had dared to break this convention in the cause of birth control. Emmeline applauded her courage and example. For the whole of the pre-war epoch, Emmeline made herself the master - or the mistress - of the new instrument of public debate.
As Rebecca West wrote in a famous essay on her: "There has been no other woman like Emmeline Pankhurst. She was beautiful; her pale face, with its delicate square jaw and rounded temples, recalled the pansy by its shape and a kind of velvety bloom on the expression. She dressed her taut little body with a cross between the elegance of a Frenchwoman and the neatness of a nun. She was courageous; small and fragile and no longer young, she put herself in the way of horses' hooves, she stood up on platforms under a rain of missiles, she sat in the darkness of underground jails and hunger struck, and when they let her out because she had starved herself within touching distance of death, she rested only for a day or two and then clambered back on to the platforms, she staggered back under the horses' hooves."
What Purvis does for Emmeline Pankhurst in her new biography is to provide a detailed, scrupulous, excellently researched retelling of the story, and thus offer a vindication of the woman so finely observed by West.
When, in August 1914, every other issue was swamped by the outbreak of war in Europe, Pankhurst came to the quick conclusion that the defeat of republican France would not serve the women's cause or anybody else's. At times of such stress, she was accused of treachery to her own cause. But it was not so. Throughout the previous months and even weeks, the Asquith government's treatment of Emmeline had touched new levels of barbarity. So furious were the measures taken against the women's leaders that some of them decided that they must move to Paris to conduct their operations. Her daughter, Christabel, had been there for months. Emmeline would make the crossing whenever she could.
Both mother and daughter had good reason for claiming that the Paris they cherished treated them much more fairly than London. In Paris, too, they had a special vantage point for seeing that the attack from Germany threatened their beloved France even more directly than England. Within a few days they took the momentous decision to call off all the militant operations in which the women's organisations had been engaged, and declared in support of the government.
1914 was unique in its challenge to the old world: so the participants and the historians might agree. But Emmeline knew what she was fighting for, and had the patience to wait for the new triumphs to match the audacity of the great suffragette campaigns.
Christabel was at her side throughout these defeats and victories. Together with Millicent Fawcett and the leaders of the other women's organisations, they successfully conducted the negotiations with the new prime minister, Lloyd George, which proved much more successful than their previous ones with the treacherous Asquith. But if the scene had changed so dramatically, no one had done more to achieve it than Emmeline.
Years later, Rebecca West summarised the matter thus: "She was the last popular leader to act on the inspiration of the principle of the French revolution; she put body and soul at the service of liberty, equality and fraternity and secured a triumph for them."