Feminism: a very short introduction by Margaret Walters

Author:Margaret Walters [Walters, Margaret]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780192805102
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2005-10-15T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 7

Fighting for the vote:

suffragettes

The term ‘suffragette’ was coined in 1906 by the Daily Mail; it was a derogatory label that the growing militant movement adopted as their own and transformed. It was only very gradually that some suffragists, at least, had come to realize that they were achieving very little by peaceful means. But as early as 1868, Lydia Becker had claimed, dramatically but with some insight, that ‘it needs deeds of bloodshed or violence’ before the government can be ‘roused to do justice’.

By the early 1870s, a few women were taking the idea of ‘no taxation without representation’ literally, and refusing to pay. But there was little real change until 1903, when the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) was founded by the Pankhurst family. They had already been protesting actively in their native Manchester against attempts to ban meetings held by the Independent Labour Party. Dr Pankhurst had in 1870 drafted the first Women’s Disabilities Removal Bill, which was then presented to parliament by Jacob Bright. (It passed on a second reading, but was quashed by William Gladstone.) Mrs Emmeline Pankhurst had served as a Poor Law Guardian, and had remarked that ‘though I had been a suffragist before I now began to think about the vote in women’s hands not only as a right, but as a desperate necessity’. Her daughter Christabel had probably been influenced, not only by her parents but by listening to, and writing a profile of, the American suffragist 75

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