A CONSERVATIVE REVOLUTIONARY: EMMELINE PANKHURST (1857-1928)

Author(s): CARL ROLLYSON

Source: The Virginia Quarterly Review , SPRING 2003, Vol. 79, No. 2 (SPRING 2003), pp.
325-334
Published by: University of Virginia

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/26440996

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A CONSERVATIVE REVOLUTIONARY:

EMMELINE PANKHURST (1857-1928)

By CARL ROLLYSON

" "TT say with no fear of contradiction that whatever view posterity
I may take, Mrs. Pankhurst has won for herself a niche in the
JLTemple of Fame which will last for all time."—Stanley
Baldwin speaking on March 6, 1930 to the thousands present at the
unveiling of Mrs. Pankhurst's statue in Victoria Gardens, adjacent to
the House of Commons
"There has been no other woman like Emmeline Pankhurst,"
reminisced Rebecca West in 1933, five years after the death of
England's most famous suffragette:

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 litde 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 for only a day or two and then
clambered back on the platforms, she staggered back under the
horses' hooves. She did this against the grain. What she would have
preferred, could her social conscience have been quieted, was to
live in a pleasant suburban house and give her cronies tea with veiy
thin bread-and-butter, and sit about in the garden in a deckchair.

West wrote about this world figure remembering the vigor of a

19-year-old who joined other women in heckling the Liberal Party
politicians for promising women the vote but then doing nothing to
fulfill their pledge. Mrs. Pankhurst's WSPU (Women's Social and
Political Union), established in 1903, stood in the forefront of

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326 THE VIRGINIA QUARTERLY REVIEW

militancy in the years just before the beginning of World War I, when
women smashed shop windows in the Strand, slashed paintings in the
National Galleiy, and swung from ropes in meeting halls, interrupt
ing August persons such as Winston Churchill with cries of "Votes for
Women." Emmeline Pankhurst, West emphasized, was the "embod
iment of an idea": women deserved to be treated as full citizens,
which meant not only voting but participating in all the tasks of
building and maintaining a free, open, and democratic society—
including, when war came, charging to the defense of the very
government that had denied women the vote.
By 1933, however, just five years after women had secured the
same voting rights as men, Emmeline Pankhurst's role in that victory
had already become obscure and distorted. And since 1933, no
historian—until now—has expanded upon West's effort to restore
the centrality of Mrs. Pankhurst's place in modern history. More is at
stake, however, than doing justice to one individual. To understand
what happened to Emmeline Pankhurst is to also to understand how
figures like her and Rebecca West were marginalized as anti
Communists and relegated to the reactionary bin built by leftist/
Socialist historians who effectively rewrote the story of how women
got the vote. Instead The Suffragette Movement (1931), written by
Mrs. Pankhurst's estranged radical daughter, Sylvia, became their
foundation narrative.

The extraordinary erasure of Emmeline Pankhurst is superbly

documented in Emmeline Pankhurst: A Biography (Routledge 2002)
by June Purvis, the first full-fledged treatment in nearly 70 years of
"that weapon of will-power by which British women freed themselves
from being classed with children and idiots in the matter of exercising
the franchise," wrote the London Evening Standard, and the "most
remarkable political and social agitator of the early part of the
twentieth century," The New York Herald Tribune declared. Purvis
not only takes her cue from West, her biography goes well beyond
West's essay by repudiating much of the left-controlled historiogra
phy on the votes for women movement. Both in her narrative and in
her notes, Purvis shows just how elaborately Mrs. Pankhurst's
trajectory from Labor Party supporter to Conservative candidate for
Parliament has been misunderstood and diminished.

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 EMMELINE PANKHURST (1857-1928) 327

Embedded in West's depiction of Emmeline Pankhurst is the

biography Purvis has now extrapolated. Every line in the first
paragraph of "A Reed of Steel" is calculated to redeem the suffrag
ette movement and its leader's role in it. That Emmeline Pankhurst

was beautiful—as were many of her female followers—put the lie to

the charge that suffragettes tended to be ugly old maids and
somehow unfeminine—what the parlance of the day termed "un
womanly women." Her pale face suggested what West later made
explicit: Mrs. Pankhurst was a frail woman, a reed, but a "reed of
steel"—the square jaw might be set in a delicate frame but it bespoke
an honorable, sturdy, and (this was often not observed) conservative
sensibility. Though inspired by the French revolution and enamored
of French ideas and fashions (she spent her formative teenage years
in Paris absorbing Thomas Carlyle's heroic vision of historical
change), Pankhurst's revolution and West's was a conservation of
democratic rights for men and women. There was no need of another
revolution, except in so far as Englishmen had to be challenged to
continue the quest for liberty, equality, and fraternity. As West put it,
Emmeline Pankhurst was "the last popular leader to act on inspira
tion derived from the principles of the French Revolution." As a
result, Mrs. Pankhurst has become the most misconstrued conserva
tive revolutionary—or as Purvis calls her, "patriotic feminist"—in the
20th century.
Mrs. Pankhurst was a paradox: a revolutionary, she was also the
cosmopolitan owner of a woman's shop called Emerson's; she was
also a woman who proposed that Richard Pankhurst become her
lover, not her husband, but a moral purist, a mother who disowned
her daughter Sylvia both for her Socialist/Communist politics and for
having bom a child out of wedlock; an intensely domestic woman, she
was always leaving home, nerving herself up not only to confront
policemen who pummeled women petitioning prime ministers, but
also to address crowds of thousands, many of whom had never heard
a woman speak in public outside of a theatre. Her own daughter
Sylvia and other critics inside and outside of the Votes for Women
movement accused her of grandstanding and liking nothing better
than a fight. She stood for democracy, yet ran her own organization
like an autocrat.

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328 THE VIRGINIA QUARTERLY REVIEW

A word about the "Mrs."—the term Rebecca West employs

throughout her essay and the way nearly everyone referred to
Emmeline Pankhurst. "Not the bitterest critic of Mrs. Pankhurst ever

suggested that her husband did not find her, from beginning to end
of the nineteen years of their marriage, a perfect wife," West insisted.
It was as the wife of Richard Pankhurst (1833-1898) that Emmeline
entered public life, supporting his unsuccessful parliamentary cam
paigns, which were based on a radical platform advocating, in June
Purvis's words, "abolition of the House of Lords, disestablishment of
the Church of England, nationalization of the land, adult suffrage for
men and women, free compulsory secular education, and Home Rule
for Ireland." Active in her husband's causes, she managed to raise five
children and remain a homemaker. When he died in 1898, a
heartbroken wife vowed to carry on his ideals. Eventually two of her
daughters, Sylvia and Adela, would accuse their mother of betraying
their father's principles.
Between 1898 and 1905, Mrs. Pankhurst focused ever more
intendy on the Votes for Women issue, following the lead of the
"constitutionalists"—men and women who had peacefully petitioned
Parliament for a suffrage bill that granted women the right to vote on
the same basis as men. On more than one occasion during the
previous 50 years Parliamentary majorities had been mustered for
the enfranchisement of women, but parliamentary maneuvers plus
the opposition of Liberal leaders such as Gladstone and Asquith had
thwarted progress along constitutionalist lines. On May 12, 1905,
hopes rose again as Parliament convened to consider the first
woman's suffrage bill in eight years. As had happened on previous
occasions the bill was "talked out"—amid much laughter provoked by
coarse jokes about women and cheers at the end of the day when it
was certain the bill would not even come to a vote. In the waiting
room outside the Commons, Mrs. Pankhurst called upon the women
to follow her "outside for a meeting of protest against the govern
ment." As Purvis tells the story, the police then attempted to foil this
mild but first step toward militancy by jostling the women down the
steps. But Mrs. Pankhurst held her ground and demanded to know
where the women could hold such a meeting. A police inspector
relented and took them to Broad Sanctuary, near the gates of

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 EMMELINE PANKHURST (1857-1928) 329

Westminster Abbey, where she could address the crowd, flanked by

Keir Hardie, Labor MP and staunch supporter of Votes for Women.
By the autumn of 1906, Mrs. Pankhurst and her suffragettes (a
term of derision coined by the Daily Mail but adopted with pride by
the militants) had galvanized all of the Votes for Women movement.
Thus Millicent Garrett Fawcett, a constitutionalist and president of
the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies (NUWSS), sup
ported the WSPU activists:

Every kind of insult and abuse is hurled at the women who have
adopted these methods. ... But I hope the more old-fashioned
suffragists will stand by them. ... in my opinion, far from having
injured the movement, they have done more during the last 12
months to bring it within the region of practical politics than we
have been able to accomplish in the same number of years.

Even Liberal cabinet ministers conceded that asking politely for the
vote is not how men had become enfranchised. On Feb. 18, 1908,
Home Secretary Herbert Asquith acknowledged:

There comes a time when political dynamics are far more impor
tant than political argument Men have learned this lesson, and
know the necessity for demonstrating the greatness of their
movements, and for establishing that force majeure which actuates
and arms a Government for effective work.... Looking back at the
great political crises in the 'thirties', the 'sixties' and the 'eighties'
it will be found that people ... assembled in their tens of
thousands all over the country. ... Of course, it cannot be
expected that women can assemble in such masses, but power
belongs to the masses, and through this power a Government can
be influenced into more effective action than a Government will
be likely to take under present conditions.

Emmeline Pankhurst, and her brilliant daughter Christabel, would

make use of this statement to mobilize the very masses of women
Gladstone could not even dream of in his philosophy.
Certainly the suffragettes aroused a hostile press and public when
they stepped up their campaign of destruction against private
property. But no loss of life and virtually no human injury occurred
because of suffragette activism, except for the excruciating pain they
themselves suffered in prison during hunger strikes when their noses

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330 THE VIRGINIA QUARTERLY REVIEW

and throats and rectums were brutally violated by the forcible

feeding tubes, often causing internal injuries leading to permanent
disabilities and deaths.

It is important to understand that during this crucial period—

between 1908 and the outbreak of war in 1914—Emmeline became

increasingly disenchanted with the Labor Party and with the trades
unions, even as her daughter Sylvia intensified her commitment to
socialism and saw Votes for Women as a Socialist issue. Emmeline,
on the other hand, observed that Socialist men no less than their
capitalist counterparts worried about losing jobs to women if women
had equal rights. A Socialist, no less than a capitalist disliked the idea
of giving his woman property rights. Mrs. Pankhurst did not attack
men per se, but to her it was an inescapable fact that only
organizations like her WSPU, composed exclusively of women, could
agitate effectively for the vote. Votes for Women always became
subordinated to a broader agenda in male-dominated organizations.
It was precisely this desire to maintain a militant organization
composed entirely of women that provoked Emmeline Pankhurst in
1912 to expel Emmeline and Frederick Pethick-Lawrence from the
WSPU. The couple had been Mrs. Pankhurst's mainstays and one of
her important sources of funding. To many WSPU members,
including Sylvia Pankhurst, the Pethick-Lawrences seemed indis
pensable. But Mrs. Pankhurst found Frederick's participation prob
lematic, especially on public platforms when he seemed to put
himself forward and talk too long. The Pethick-Lawrences seemed
too ready to collaborate with other men's and women's organizations,
thus diluting the WSPU's role. Mrs. Pankhurst found her leadership
and the focus of her enterprise in jeopardy. Other personal and
political factors undoubtedly contributed to this split, but the main
point is that Mrs. Pankhurst's reputation as an autocrat began to
burgeon, and her abrupt jettisoning of two revered WSPU leaders
sent shock waves through her movement.
There is no doubt that in the two years leading up to World War
I, the WSPU lost members and became somewhat isolated, although
Mrs. Pankhurst retained a strong cadre of followers, and her
influence did not diminish as precipitously as her opponents and later
historians have assumed. They have taken the Socialist line of Sylvia

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 EMMELINE PANKHURST (1857-1928) 331

Pankhurst at face value—in part because British historians as a rule

have wished to claim Votes for Women as a Socialist cause; in part
because of the apparently breathtaking turnabout Mrs. Pankhurst
and her daughter Christabel performed when they supported the
British government immediately after war broke out; in part because
neither Emmeline nor Christabel had the persuasive literary and
political genius that Sylvia showed later on.
So influential has Sylvia's narrative become that when former
Labor Party cabinet minister Barbara Castle published a short study
of the Pankhursts she blithely relied on Sylvia's The Suffragette
Movement without noting any of its numerous inconsistencies and
biases, flaws that June Purvis identifies. Jill Craigie (1911-1999), a
lifelong student of the suffragettes, and wife of former Labor Party
leader Michael Foot, was so outraged at Castle's ignorance that she
called her up and threatened to "flatten her." Craigie, a staunch
Socialist and Labor Party loyalist, nevertheless knew from firsthand
experience how brutal Sylvia had been in her quest to superimpose
her narrative of Votes for Women on the memory of her mother. In
1940, Craigie had read Sylvia's The Suffragette Movement and had
been captivated by its "rich" writing. Sylvia saw history, Craigie
commented, with the "eyes of an artist." But in 1943, when Craigie
decided to write and direct a documentary on the suffragettes, she
found herself pitted against Sylvia and other suffragettes who fought
over who would act as advisor to the film and thus control the master

narrative of their story. The film never got made because of this
internecine warfare, and Craigie spent the next several decades of
her life assembling a massive collection of material and writing a
book (left incomplete at her death) that exposes how Sylvia distorted
her mother's legacy. As I will show in a forthcoming biography of
Craigie, she is the missing link between West and Purvis. Craigie is
partly responsible for the rediscovery and reprinting of West's work
in the 1970's and is the key transitional figure who leads to Purvis'
brilliant demonstration that during and after the war Emmeline
Pankhurst not only did not abandon her principles, but saw the war
and its aftermath as a way to implement them. Although there are
many reasons why Craigie did not complete her epic work (a
substantial manuscript of over 200,000 well-polished words), one

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332 THE VIRGINIA QUARTERLY REVIEW

consideration surely is the massive criticism she would have endured

in her own party for putting one of Britain's Socialist icons on the
rack.
Like Rebecca West, who never doubted the Russian Revolution
was wrong, Emmeline Pankhurst never doubted it was wrong of
Socialists not to defend their country against German militarism,
wrong of workers to put up obstacles to the war effort, wrong of
unions to allow Communist organizers to infiltrate their ranks, and
wrong to speak in terms of class war in a time of a national crisis.
Curiously, West does not do justice to the post World War I Mrs.
Pankhurst when she abruptly announces that Mrs. Pankhurst "came
out of the war a high Tory." As Purvis demonstrates, Mrs. Pankhurst's
transformation was not quite so sudden as that.
Purvis quotes historian Joan Beaumont as pointing out that "recent
feminist writers have projected their own alignment with anti
imperialism and anti-militarism onto the past, seeing imperialism and
militarism as incompatible with feminism when this was not so for
many women in the First World War." Sylvia and many of her
socialist allies took a pacifist line and were horrified when Mrs.
Pankhurst, like Rebecca West, believed that her country and British
culture came first, especially in war. While it is true that the WSPU
ceased all agitation for the vote during the war, its leader hardly
reneged on fighting for a greater role for women in society. She
wanted them working in the munitions factories, for example, saying
in late January 1915: "I'm not nursing soldiers. There are so many
others to do that... it's no more to be expected that our organisers
should now necessarily take to knitting and nursing than that Mr.
Asquith should set his Ministers to making Army boots and uni
forms." Yet she found it was the trade unionists who objected to
women in the factories, fearing their lower pay for females would
deprive the male breadwinner of his job.
The turning point for Mrs. Pankhurst came when Lloyd George,
on behalf of the British government, asked her to organize a massive
demonstration in favor of employing women in the factories and
other crucial areas of war work. This was the very man who had
helped thwart so many of her suffrage campaigns, and it pained her
to oblige him—but she did. Thus began an extraordinary alliance

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 EMMELINE PANKHURST (1857-1928) 333

between former opponents who tacitly understood that the price of

Mrs. Pankhurst's cooperation would be Lloyd George's postwar
support for enfranchising women. No one close to or sympathetic
toward Mrs. Pankhurst doubted the power she still commanded. As
one of her loyal followers told Jill Craigie in 1943, the WSPU slogan
during the war became "We have buried the hatchet, but we know
where to find it."

By the end of the war, Emmeline Pankhurst had emerged as a

stout supporter of her government while retaining her prominence as
a leader of women. But as June Purvis explains, Mrs. Pankhurst
confronted a women's movement now leaning heavily toward the
pacifist left. To achieve more for women, Mrs. Pankhurst had to
abandon the terms of her prewar activism. As she told a Daily News
reporter in January 1926: "It was always a great grief to me to have
to put aside all my wider interests for the sake of a single object—to
break down the sex barrier. Now I think I deserve to be allowed to

work for the general questions affecting women and the country
generally." Conservative MP Nancy Astor, the first women to take a
seat in Parliament, actually offered to resign in favor of Mrs.
Pankhurst in acknowledgment of all that the latter had done for
women and the country. Not yet ready to declare herself a Conser
vative, Mrs. Pankhurst declined. But the general strike declared on 1
May 1926, in which 2,500,000 striking workers forced the govern
ment to plan for a state of emergency, drove her to declare an
interest. On May 3,1926, she wrote to Nancy Astor: "How I wish that
I could do what I did at the outbreak of war ... set a whole
organization to work. ... Do use me if you can."
Emmeline Pankhurst understood power, and in England she could
not wield power without a party. She no longer believed in the dream
of her youth—the State Socialism she and her husband championed.
Trade unionists, militant socialists, and pacifists seemed to her to
threaten the very foundation of a just, peaceful, and defensible
society. First in the Socialist journal Forward, then in The Suffragette
Movement, Sylvia Pankhurst pronounced an anathema on her mother
as one who had "deserted the cause of progress" and repudiated the
work of Karl Marx, William Morris, Keir Hardie, and, of course, her
father. In view of her mother's "defection" Sylvia felt called upon, she

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334 THE VIRGINIA QUARTERLY REVIEW

said, to "reaffirm my faith in the cause of social and international

fraternity, and to utter a word of sorrow that one who in the past has
rendered such service should now, with that sad pessimism which
sometimes comes with advancing years, and may result from too
strenuous effort, join the reaction."
Contempt and pity and rage ring out in Sylvia's repudiation of her
mother—not to mention a psychological attack on an old woman now
presumed to be too tired to think. Mrs. Pankhurst was physically
worn out from the beatings she had suffered on the way to prison and
the hunger strikes and forcible feedings while incarcerated, but she
remained alert, perceptive, and critical— just as intolerant of sexism
among Conservatives as she had been of it among Labor Party
members and trade unionists. She died before she was able to

campaign as a Conservative candidate for parliament.

Rebecca West cautioned her readers not to regard Mrs. Pankhurst
as a zealot and fanatic. Hysterics cannot general their troops and
enforce discipline and make the hard choices she did. Mrs. Pankhurst
and her followers were "stone-cold" realists, West concluded. Yet in
spite of West's efforts, Mrs. Pankhurst's legacy has been lost. Or, as
West wrote at her prophetic best: "It is all forgotten. We forget
everything now. We have forgotten what came before the war. We
have forgotten the war."

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