Feminism: A very Short Introduction by Margaret Walters

Author:Margaret Walters
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

5. The cover of Ethel Smyth’s 1911 song-sheet for the WSPU proclaims

‘The March of the Women’ towards the vote. She uses the suffragette colours – green, purple, and white – but this is a celebration, as much as a demonstration, full of hope for a better future.

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Susan B. Anthony, who visited Manchester in 1902. Christabel wrote that, ‘it is unendurable to think of another generation of women wasting their lives for the vote. We must not lose any more time. We must act.’

The WSPU would remain, in essence, a family organization, though in 1906 it was Fred and Emmeline Pethick Lawrence who agreed to finance the cause, and found it headquarters in Clement’s Inn in London. (The WSPU is certainly the best-known, and was perhaps the most effective, group fighting for the vote, but there were many others – the Women’s Freedom League, the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, the Actresses’ Franchise League – who may have been less high-profile, but did make progress.) From the start, Christabel Pankhurst dominated the WSPU, and soon a circle Fightin of devoted followers gathered around her. They included the former mill girl Annie Kenney, who was soon recognized as one of their g for th

most effective speakers; a married woman and working-class Scot, e v

Flora Drummond; and a socialist teacher, Teresa Billington.

ote: su

Less than a year later, the WSPU had something like 58 branches; it ffra had also suffered the first of what would prove numerous splits and gett revolts against Christabel. She was undoubtedly charismatic, and es

inspired a sometimes unhealthy devotion among her many followers. But she was often dictatorial and ruthless, and so, perhaps to a lesser extent, was her mother Emmeline. Teresa Billington later remarked that Christabel exploited her followers; that ‘she took advantage of both their strengths and their weaknesses and laid on them the burden of unprepared action, refused to excuse weakness, boomed and boosted the novice into sham maturity, refused maturity a hearing’.

One woman, looking back in 1935, described Emmeline Pankhurst as ‘a forerunner of Lenin, Hitler and Mussolini – the leader whose fiat must go unquestioned, the leader who could do no wrong’.

There may well be truth in her angry exaggeration; and the same thing could be said, probably more accurately, of Christabel. She 77

was, Teresa Billington remarked, ‘a most astute statesman, a skilled politician, a self-dedicated re-shaper of the world, and a dictator without mercy’. Certainly, two of the WSPU’s most dedicated and effective organizers, Fred and Emmeline Pethick Lawrence, would be expelled from the organization in 1914, and even Sylvia Pankhurst was pushed out, in 1913. Sylvia was probably the most interesting, and certainly the most sympathetic, member of the family: a talented artist, and a socialist, who formed her own East London Federation (ELF) in an attempt to reach out to working-class women with families. She was the partner of the Labour politician Keir Hardie, who risked his own career by supporting votes for women.

The shift towards militant action was gradual. The

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