CORBIS English suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst founded the Women's Franchise League in 1889 and the Women's Social and Political Union in 1903 with her daughter Christabel Harriette

Monday, June 14, 1999
Not even the noisiest proponents of women's proper place back in the home could seriously suggest today that women should not have the vote. Yet "the mother half of the human family," in Emmeline Pankhurst's phrase, was fully enfranchised only in this century. In Britain, so proud to claim "the Mother of Parliaments," universal suffrage — including women's — was granted only in the year of her death, 1928. Mrs. Pankhurst was born a Victorian Englishwoman, but she shaped an idea of women for our time; she shook society into a new pattern from which there could be no going back.

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The struggle to get votes for women, led by Mrs. Pankhurst and her daughter Christabel at the head of the militant suffragists, convulsed Britain from 1905 to 1914. The opposition the Liberal government put up looks incomprehensible today, and it provoked, among all classes and conditions of women, furious and passionate protests. The response of the police, the courts and sometimes the crowds of suffragist opponents still makes shocking reading. Women were battered in demonstrations and, on hunger strikes, brutally force-fed in prison. When these measures risked taking lives, the infamous Cat & Mouse Act was passed so that a dangerously weakened hunger striker would be released and then rearrested when strong enough to continue her sentence. Under its terms, Mrs. Pankhurst, age 54 in 1912, went to prison 12 times that year. No wonder she railed, "The militancy of men, through all the centuries, has drenched the world with blood. The militancy of women has harmed no human life save the lives of those who fought the battle of righteousness."

Mrs. Pankhurst's father was a Manchester manufacturer with radical sympathies. When she was small, she was consuming "Uncle Tom's Cabin," "John Bunyan" and abolitionist materials; her earliest memories included hearing Elizabeth Cady Stanton speak. Her father was keen on amateur theatricals in the home; his daughter later enthralled the suffragists with her oratory and her voice. The young Rebecca West described hearing Mrs. Pankhurst in full cry: "Trembling like a reed, she lifted up her hoarse, sweet voice on the platform, but the reed was of steel and it was tremendous."

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