Votes For Women! by Jenni Murray

Author:Jenni Murray [Murray, Jenni]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oneworld Publications
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

‘I am what you call a hooligan.’

Emmeline Pankhurst

4

Emmeline Pankhurst

1858–1929

It’s Emmeline Pankhurst’s name that has long been most closely associated with the campaign for votes for women, although, I hope, after the preceding chapter on Millicent Garrett Fawcett, it will become clear that it was both the peaceful and persuasive suffragist movement combined with the militant, publicity-conscious tactics of Pankhurst’s suffragettes that made the cause impossible to ignore.

Emmeline Pankhurst was born in Sloane Street in Moss Side, Manchester to Robert Goulden, who owned a calico printing and bleach works, and his wife, Sophia Jane Craine. I’ve always found it deliciously ironic that her mother was born on the Isle of Man. Emmeline was the eldest of ten children and, from an early age, had to do her bit to care for her younger siblings.

She was educated at home, learned to read when she was very young and it was her job to read the daily paper to her father while he ate his breakfast. An interest in politics was thus fostered at the table. Family history also taught her that protest was a necessary part of politics if you felt something passionately. Her paternal grandfather had taken part in the Peterloo demonstration for parliamentary reform and universal suffrage in 1819. A huge crowd of demonstrators gathered peacefully in what’s now St Peter’s Square in Manchester – between sixty and eighty thousand – and were set upon by a cavalry charge. Sabres were drawn and civilian blood shed in a defining moment of British history. The number killed is not altogether clear. Some sources say fifteen, others eighteen, but it’s agreed that at least one woman and a child were among them. Some were killed by sabres, others by clubs or by being trampled to death by the horses. Some seven hundred lay injured. It became known as the Peterloo Massacre and so shocked a local businessman, John Edward Taylor, that he went on to help set up the Manchester Guardian newspaper. Mr Goulden senior was said to have narrowly missed death.

Emmeline’s brothers called her ‘the dictionary’ because she had such a command of the English language. She spoke well, wrote well and they envied her perfect spelling. She is said to have been in bed one night, pretending to be asleep, when she heard her father say, ‘What a pity she wasn’t born a lad.’

She had learned for herself that girls’ education was considered less important than that of boys when she was sent with her sister to a middle-class girls’ school. She was appalled when she found little emphasis on reading, writing, arithmetic or any kind of intellectual pursuit there. A lot of her lessons were devoted to learning how to be the perfect housewife, making a home comfortable for a man. In her ghostwritten autobiography, My Story, published in 1914, she said, ‘It was made quite clear that men considered themselves superior to women, and that women apparently acquiesced in that belief.’

When Emmeline began to be involved in active sexual politics she described herself as a ‘conscious and confirmed suffragist’.

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