SOURCE: “Mrs. Pankhurst,” in The Post-Victorians, Ivor Nicholson & Watson, LTD., September, 1933, pp. 477-500.

There has been no other woman like Emmeline Pankhurst. 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 little 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 to 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 very thin bread and butter, and sit about in the garden in a deck-chair.

Mrs. Pankhurst came to these cruel and prodigious events not as some who have attained fame in middle life. She had not lived in ease all her youth and dammed up her forces, so that there was a flood to rush forth when the dam was broken. She had borne five children, she had been distracted by the loss of a beloved husband, she had laboured long at earning a livelihood and at public work. Enough had happened to her to draw off all her natural forces. That she was not so depleted can be partly explained by the passion for the oppressed which burned in her as a form of genius; and she drew, no doubt, refreshment from the effect she had on her fellow creatures, the response they made to her peculiar quality, which was apart from her beauty, her courage, her pity. She was vibrant. One felt, as she lifted up her hoarse, sweet voice on the platform, that she was trembling like a reed. Only the reed was of steel, and it was tremendous.

On an Atlantic liner during a great storm passengers will feel in their bones the quiver that runs through the ship's backbone as her stern rests on a wave and her prow hangs in mid-air over the trough till she finds the next wave to carry her. Something of the same sort was the disturbance, the perturbation, the suspense at the core of Mrs. Pankhurst's being. She was not a particularly clever woman. One could name scores of women who were intellectually her superior. She was constitutionally naïve, she could swallow fairy stories, she had only an imperfect grasp of the map of the universe man has drawn with his thought. She was one of those people who appear now and then in history against whom it would be frivolous to lay a complaint on these grounds, since they are part of that map. She was the embodiment of an idea. Her personality was possessed by one of man's chief theories about life, which it put to the test, and which it worked out in terms of material fact. She went forward, precariously balanced on what there was of old certainty, hanging in mid-air till she could attain a new certainty, her strength vibrating as if it were going to shatter into pieces like glass, maintaining itself because it was steel.

She was born in Manchester on July 14, 1858, of North-country stock with character. Her grandfather, a master cotton-spinner, had in his youth been cruelly used by the State. One day he was carried off to sea by the Press Gang, and did not manage to make his return for many years, by which time his family had completely disappeared. Later he fled before the soldiers at the Battle of Peterloo, and with his wife, a fustian cutter of sturdy disposition, took part in the Cobdenite agitations of the Hungry Forties. His son, Robert Goulden, was brilliant and versatile. He began as an errand boy and ended as a manufacturer, he was an amateur actor who made a great impression in the heavier Shakespearean parts; he ran a theatre in Salford as a hobby, and he was a romantic Liberal. He took a leading part in that altruistic movement by which Lancashire, brought to beggary by the American Civil War and constrained by every economic reason to side with the South, solidly upheld Lincoln and the North. He had by that time married a Manxwoman, who bore him five sons and five daughters. His eldest girl, little Emmeline, rattled a collecting box for the poor Negroes and learned to weep over Uncle Tom's Cabin, though, with an entirely characteristic refusal to restrict herself to logical categories, she gave the most fervent loyalty of her imagination to Charles the First.

When she was thirteen Robert Goulden took her to school in Paris. He left her at the Ecole Normale at Neuilly, a green and spacious suburb which must have been a pleasing contrast to Manchester. In any case, Emmeline's love of beauty would have made her a friend to France; but owing to an accident, Neuilly offered a seduction even more specially appealing to her temperament. Because Mr. Goulden had to make the expedition fit in with business engagements, he left her at the school during the holidays, when there was but one other pupil. This was a fascinating little girl called Noémie, who had no home to go to, because her mother was dead, and her father, Henri de Rochefort, was in prison in New Caledonia for the part he had played in the Commune. The two girls became instantly welded in a friendship that lasted till the end of their lives, and Emmeline learned to adore Henri de Rochefort in his daughter's talk, as later she was to adore him in his own person. He was something for a romantic little Radical to adore, a splendid, spitting cat of a man, who spoke his mind in the face of any danger, who, though Napoleon III sat on the throne, began his leader on the shooting of Victor Noir by Prince Pierre-Napoleon Bonaparte with the words, “J'ai eu la faiblesse de croire qu'un Bonaparte pouvait être autre qu'un assassin. J'ai osé m'imaginer qu'un duel loyal était possible dans cette famille où le meutre et le guet-apenus sont de tradition et de l'usage …”; who fought duel after duel, suffered arrest again and again, and endured exile and imprisonment with like fiery fortitude.

Emmeline was, owing to a real or maldiagnosed weakness of health, forbidden to take part seriously in the school work; she never then or later knew any form of study stricter than desultory reading, or appreciated its uses. But she was receiving, from Noémie and her absent father and her guardian, Edmond Adam, a thorough education in a certain department of French life, in the passionate and picturesque conduct of politics. There the prizes went to the daring. There it was no shame to act violently and fight one's enemies as if they were enemies. And in this atmosphere she spent those very formative years between thirteen and twenty; for she loved Paris so much that, when her own school-days were over, she coaxed her father to let her stay on as companion to a younger sister.

She tried her best to stay in France for ever; and that, alas, led to her smarting and tearful removal back to Lancashire. There was a curious event which, for the first time, revealed that Emmeline was an odd fish who was not going to take life as she found it. Noémie married, and thought it would be delightful if Emmeline found a French husband and settled down as her neighbour. Such a husband could be obtained, of course, only by a bride with a dot. But Emmeline knew that her father was well-to-do, and she found nothing abhorrent in the dot system. She had disliked the scenes that her father had made when her mother brought him bills, and had seen with her clear eyes that, in a masculinist and capitalist social system, where women have not economic freedom and wives are not paid, the dowry is the only way by which a woman can be given self-respecting security and independence. Romantic Liberalism could go and hang itself. She was a realist. But unfortunately her father was still a romantic Liberal. When Emmeline found a pleasing suitor and asked for her dot, Robert Goulden stormed the house down at the idea of buying a husband for his daughter, and immediately made her leave Paris and come home. She obeyed with the worst possible grace; and suddenly looked up through her sulks and saw someone as spectacular as Rochefort, Dr. Richard Marsden Pankhurst, and fell in love with him.

It was, on the surface, an astounding match. He was twice her age, a scholar with many academic honours, a distinguished jurist, whose studies filled all his leisure hours. He was dedicated to public work, of a laborious and unrewarded sort; he achieved great things in the promotion of popular education, he was a Republican, and an indefatigable enemy of Disraeli's Imperialism. He had a great position in the North. When he arrived at a meeting thousands waited cheering and waving their handkerchiefs. Though he had what would have been a crushing handicap for most politicians, an extremely unpleasant, shrill, edgy voice, the force of his mind and the transparent beauty of his nature was such that an audience never remained conscious of this defect for more than the first few minutes. He was a saint who had put all weaknesses behind him and wore himself out in acts of benevolence. Such works of art were these private good deeds that they had something of that immortality: a visitor to Manchester more than a decade after his death thought that he must have been dead only a month or so, so vividly had some whom he had helped spoken of him.

But Emmeline was just a wicked little thing, fond of pretty clothes and French novels. It happened, however, to be a perfectly right and wise marriage. Emmeline committed herself gravely and honestly to her love for him. Her mother was deeply shocked, and tried to inspire her to the proper female monkey-tricks by telling her of the coldness with which she herself had received her prospective husband's wooings, and was shocked still more when her daughter suggested to her betrothed as a protest against the then legal disabilities of married women, that they should form a free union. (Noémie's mother had married Henri de Rochefort only on her death-bed to give her children a legal protector.) Dr. Pankhurst would not consent, however, partly because he feared to expose her to disrespect, partly because he knew that those who challenged the marriage-laws were usually prevented from challenging any other abuses. So they married, and were happy ever after. 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.

They had five children: Christabel, who was born when her mother was twenty-two, Sylvia, born two years later, Frank, born two years later, Adela, born a year later, and Harry, born four years later. Theirs was not a home in which parents exerted themselves to keep their children's lives a thing apart, a pool of quietness in which they could develop until they were mature. Mrs. Pankhurst was a young woman, full of appetite for life, and wildly in love with her husband, so that she was delighted to stand by him in his public work. She did not neglect her children, but the stream of affairs flowed through her home, and the children bobbed like corks on the tide of adult life. One of them hated it. Sylvia Pankhurst's The Suffragette Movement stands beside Gordon Craig's Memories of My Mother as an expression of the burning resentment that the child of a brilliant mother may feel at having to share her brilliance with the world. But the other children liked it, and revelled in the dramas that followed one after another. First, there was the famous Manchester by-election, at which Dr. Pankhurst stood as an Independent candidate on a platform including Adult Suffrage, Republicanism, Secular Education, the payment of Members of Parliament, Disestablishment, Home Rule, Disarmament, and a kind of League of Nations. The year was 1883. He was not elected; but a quarter of the electorate supported him—an incredible proportion at that time—and his expenses were £500 as against his opponents' £5,000. It was a triumphant piece of propaganda work; but it ended in personal bitterness, in the first display by Mrs. Pankhurst of that ruthlessness which she shared with the armed prophets. Till then she and her family had lived in her father's home, a patriarchal dwelling where the Manx mistress of the house carried on all the domestic arts, even to bread-baking and butter-making. But though Robert Goulden had stood by Dr. Pankhurst during the by-election, he rebuked him afterwards for his Socialist extremism, and to mark a dissociation of political interests Dr. Pankhurst and his family left the Goulden home, accompanied by Mrs. Pankhurst's sister Mary. On this separation Mrs. Pankhurst reminded her father that he had promised her some property on her marriage. He denied ever having made such a promise. They never spoke to each other again.

This deep feeling over a matter of property was odd to find in a woman who all her life long regarded money chiefly as something to give away. But it was a consequence of the simple, surgical directness of her mind. If Robert Goulden wanted to accept the masculinist and capitalist world, then he ought to be logical about it, and protect her in the only way that a woman can be protected in a masculinist and capitalist world. The only reason he could have for failing to do so must be that he did not love her. But it must also be remembered that her childhood hero had been Charles I, the King who lost his crown and his head, and that she attached an importance to Henri de Rochefort's refusal to use his marquisate which was, since the renunciation had actually been made by a previous generation of the family, historically undue. The men she specially admired were those who had power and renounced it. It is an indication that in her there was an element of sex-antagonism, that neurosis which revolts against the difference of the sexes, which calls on the one to which the neurotic does not belong to sacrifice its special advantage so that the one to which the neurotic does belong may show superior. But neuroses often engender the dynamic power by which the sane part of the mind carries on its business. Mrs. Pankhurst sublimated her sex-antagonism. She was in no way a man-hater, loving her sons as deeply as her daughters, and she completely converted her desire to offend the other sex into a desire to defend her own.

Dr. Pankhurst stood for Parliament again at Rotherhithe, and was again defeated. There followed a painful libel action. A Conservative speaker had told a lying story which put into Dr. Pankhurst's mouth a coarse declaration of atheism. He was in fact an agnostic of the gentlest type, full of reverence and love for the person of Christ. He brought action, not so much for his own sake, as to bring a test case which would show how far Socialist candidates could find remedy in the new libel law for the flood of slanderous abuse that was turned on them at every election. There were aspects of this libel action which were calculated to remove certain comfortable illusions about human nature from the minds of the least critical. Dr. Pankhurst, never worldly-wise, appealed to Mr. A. J. Balfour as a brother agnostic, on the undisputable evidence of certain passages in A Defence of Philosophic Doubt. Mr. Balfour received the appeal without brotherly enthusiasm, and practised the arts of evasion to avoid associating himself with this crude imbroglio. The trial itself was conducted with what might have seemed shameless prejudice to those who did not know that British justice is above suspicion. Mrs. Pankhurst ran the risk of prosecution for contempt of court by sending a cutting letter to the judge who tried the case.

The Pankhursts went to live in London. There Mrs. Pankhurst was extremely happy. It is true that shortly after she settled there her son Frank died and her grief was terrible. But she had a gay time establishing herself as a political hostess with tea-urns in Russell Square for the Socialist London that was humbly proliferating in the Fabian Society, the Social Democratic Federation, the Independent Labour Party, and half a dozen other obscure organisations; a naïve and ludicrous parody it must have seemed to those who really knew the world, of the real social functions of power, where great ladies shining with diamonds received at the head of wide staircases under magnificent chandeliers. She worked hard for all feminist causes, for all issues which promised man more liberty, although always she regarded herself not as an independent worker, but as her husband's helpmate. She had much amusement, too, trying to support herself by running Emerson's, a kind of amateurish Liberty's. The French influence came back into her life at full strength, for Henri de Rochefort was an exile living in London, and he constantly visited her.

It had to come to an end soon. Both Mrs. Pankhurst and her husband were children about money. They spent it, not like drunken sailors, but like drunken saints. They gave it away with both hands. Emerson's, owing to bad costing, was an expensive toy. They had taken the Russell Square house on the fag-end of a lease without reflecting that at the end they would have to pay dilapidations. In bad order they retreated to Lancashire, first to Southport, and then to Manchester, where they got on a sounder financial footing, and Mrs. Pankhurst came to her proper form as a social worker. She helped to organise the unemployed in the slump of 1894, and did much to popularise her husband's views on productive public works as a means of relieving unemployment. She was elected to the Chorlton Board of Guardians, and blazed with rage because she found the little girls in the workhouse still wearing eighteenth-century dress, with low necks and no sleeves. For some obscure reason they had no nightdresses, and they had no drawers or knickers, even in winter time—a fact which infuriated her beyond bearing—because the matron and a couple of refined female guardians had been too modest to mention such garments to the male members of the Board. This was the kind of tomfoolery which Mrs. Pankhurst could not stand, and which her Movement did much to end. These, and many other abuses, she reformed.

There was a fight, too, against an attempt by the City Council to deny the I.L.P., now newly become formidable, the right of meeting in the public places of Manchester. Mrs. Pankhurst acted as chairman to the speakers at the test meeting, sticking the ferrule of her open umbrella in the ground so that the faithful could throw their pennies into it. With eight others she was arrested, and stood calmly in the dock, dressed her prettiest, wearing a little pink straw bonnet. The case against her was dismissed, though she announced that she would repeat her offence so long as she was at liberty. This she did, although she was summoned again and again. She always wore her pink straw bonnet, and it became the signal round which the rebels gathered. This was a real fight, and it took a long time to win. She lived therefore for many months under the expectation of prison. She was willing then, had the need arisen, to prove the point she proved later.

There was an election, too, at Gorton, Lancashire, where Dr. Pankhurst stood as I.L.P. candidate. The I.L.P. had the scantiest funds, and had to use cheap methods of campaign, such as chalking announcements of meetings on the pavements. For £343 of election expenses against the Conservative candidate's £1,375, Dr. Pankhurst gained 4,261 votes against the Conservative's 5,865. The Pankhurst children helped in the campaign, and it was no minor part of their education, which was indeed unconventional.

Mrs. Pankhurst as a mother offers certain surprises to those who would expect her to have the same views as the kind of woman who has followed in her steps regarding feminism. She was thoroughly of her time. She believed in corporal punishment for children as mothers did in the 'eighties, and in making them finish their porridge even if their stomachs revolted against it. She had some of the prejudices of her Manx country-bred mother. She had no such great opinion of fresh air as a nursery remedy, and she strongly disapproved of spectacles, causing her younger son, who had weak eyes, great inconvenience thereby. And in one respect she was almost behind her times. She attached no importance to ordinary education for her daughters. They were often put in the care of governesses who gave them no lessons whatsoever, but trained them in such unusual subjects as the appreciation of Egyptian art; and when they did attend schools she connived shamelessly at their truancy. This was due in part, perhaps, to her knowledge that schools were so much part of the capitalist system that her family could have no comfortable welcome there, and it is true that at least one headmistress persecuted and humiliated the children because their father was a Socialist. In those days political rancours went deeper than we care to imagine today. When Mrs. Pankhurst was on the Manchester Education Committee she had to intervene to protect a woman teacher who had been dismissed by the owner of a school because it had leaked out that she was a daughter of Ernest Jones, the Chartist, who had been dead for over thirty years.

But there was also a deeper reason for Mrs. Pankhurst's unconcern about education. It is said that the only occasion on which she showed overwhelming grief about a personal matter other than over the death of her husband and her sons and her final alienation from one of her family, was when her daughter Christabel decided that she would not become a professional dancer. The child had shown great promise at her dancing classes, and it had been her mother's dream that she should become a great ballerina, who should practise her art all over the world. This anecdote has been repeated querulously, as if it were a proof of Mrs. Pankhurst's light-mindedness. But it surely gives a clue to the secret of her greatness as a leader. She knew that no culture can evolve values which wholly negate primitive ones. She would have understood that Sir Walter Scott's boy spoke better sense than the learned when, brought up in ignorance of Waverley and its fame, he accounted for the fuss people made of his father by saying, “It's commonly him that sees the hare sitting.” She had not lost touch with primitive wisdom; she knew that man's first necessity is to be a good animal, that rhythm can prove as much as many arguments, that the mind is only one of the instruments of human power.

Dr. Pankhurst died. His widow was heartbroken. For a time she was too distracted to attend to any public work. But she could not be idle, for she was without means. Her husband had been splendidly careless about money. His last months had been spent in successfully organising opposition to a dirty and dangerous scheme by which the Manchester Corporation intended to pollute the Mersey with the town sewage by diverting it through a new culvert, designed to dump it in a part of the river outside the scope of sanitary jurisdiction. Had he not opposed the construction of the culvert he would have been instructed to act as Counsel for the scheme, and might have made over £8,000 by it. With poverty earned thus his family were well content, but Mrs. Pankhurst had to work. She became Registrar of Births and Deaths in Chorlton, and opened another Emerson's, which lingered on for some time and then had to be abandoned. She came back to public life for a little in 1900, in the Pro-Boer agitation. Then she began to feel a special interest in Woman Suffrage, perhaps because her daughter Christabel had suddenly, and for the first time, become keenly interested in feminism, and was studying for a law degree at Victoria University. It also happened that about this time she was stung to fury by an incident connected with a memorial to her dead husband. Though she had accepted some funds raised by his wealthier friends, she had refused to touch the subscriptions gathered from the predominantly working-class readers of Robert Blatchford's The Clarion, on the grounds that she did not wish them to give her children an education which they could not have afforded for their own; and she suggested that the money should be spent on building a Pankhurst Memorial Hall for the use of Socialist societies. When it was finished she found that the branch of the Independent Labour Party which was to use it as headquarters refused to admit women. This led her to review the attitude of the I.L.P. and the Socialist Movement generally towards feminism. She found that it was no more than lukewarm; and therefore on October 10, 1903, in her drawing-room at 62 Nelson Street, she held the inaugural meeting of a society called the Women's Social and Political Union.

For the first two years the proceedings of this society were limited to humdrum harrying of the Socialist societies. But the result of this routine was to force up to explosion point Mrs. Pankhurst's realisation of the wrongs inflicted on women by their status, and the indifference on this subject which was felt by even the most progressive societies dominated by men. It was becoming every day more clear, too, that a certain condition she found necessary if she was to act effectively was about to be abundantly fulfilled. Oddly enough, she never did anything important alone. She had to work with an ally. For that purpose Dr. Pankhurst had been perfect; but the development of her daughter Christabel made her see that he might not be irreplaceable. Though Christabel had never studied anything but dancing at all seriously until her middle teens, she was taking her law studies well, and when she went up to London to apply for admission to the Benchers of Lincoln's Inn she conducted the proceedings with a strange, cool, high-handed mastery that was remarkable in a girl in her early twenties.

In 1905 Mrs. Pankhurst came to London to find a private member who would give his place in the ballot to a measure giving votes for women. There was then, as for many years before, a majority of members in the House pledged to support Woman Suffrage, but this meant nothing more than a polite bow and smile to their more earnest female helpers in their constitutencies. Hardly any of them meant to lift a little finger to make Woman Suffrage an accomplished fact.

Mrs. Pankhurst had the greatest difficulty in finding a sincere Suffragist among the small number of members who had been fortunate in the ballot that gave them the right to introduce a Bill on one or other of the Friday afternoons during the Session; but on May 12, Mr. Bamford Slack brought in a Suffrage Bill. Mrs. Pankhurst brought with her to the House of Commons an immense number of women, which was swelled by members of the more old-fashioned and conservative Suffrage societies, who had been excited by the agitation of the new movement. There were so many that they filled the Lobby, the passages, and the Terrace. When it became obvious that the Bill was, as usual, going to be obstructed and talked out, Mrs. Pankhurst looked round her at the great crowd of women. Much more than the future of the feminist movement was decided in that second. Then she scribbled a note to be taken in to the Prime Minister, in which, with the arrogance of a leader writing to a leader, she told him that unless he gave facilities for the further discussion of this Bill her Union would work against his Government. She was a little woman in her late forties, without a penny, without a powerful friend. The threat was comic. As soon as the Bill was talked out, there was an impromptu meeting outside the House which would have been stopped had not Keir Hardie intervened.

Mrs. Pankhurst went home. There were some new recruits in the North, a mill girl called Annie Kenney, an Irish school-teacher called Teresa Billington. All that summer Mrs. Pankhurst with these girls and Christabel and Sylvia went from wake to wake in the Lancashire and Yorkshire mill-towns, and stood on I.L.P. and Trade Union platforms. In the autumn Sir Edward Grey came to speak at Manchester, and failed to reply to a letter from the Women's Social and Political Union asking him to receive a deputation. They attended his meeting and asked questions regarding the attitude of the coming Liberal Government. But these were not answered, so they interrupted the subsequent proceedings, and were ejected. Outside the hall they addressed a meeting and were arrested on a charge of having assaulted the police, and were sent to prison for seven and three days in the third division. It is hardly necessary to say that the balance of the assaults committed on this occasion were committed by the stewards and policemen on the Suffragists; but the Suffragists would themselves hardly have troubled to raise that point. They candidly admitted they had meant to be arrested. For it was their intention to maintain that in a democratic State government rests on the consent of the governed, and that until they were granted the franchise on the same terms as men they were going to withhold that consent; and that they were going to mark the withholding of their consent by disturbing the peace, to the precise degree which the resistance of the Government made necessary; and that they would not take it that the Government had yielded unless whatever party was in power itself passed an Act for the enfranchisement of women.

For nine years this policy was carried into effect by innumerable women under the leadership of Mrs. Pankhurst. For nine years no politician of any importance could address a meeting without fear of interruption. There was never any lack of women volunteers for this purpose, even though the stewards nearly always ejected them with great physical violence, sometimes of a sort that led to grave internal injuries. One of the most brilliant Suffragists, or Suffragettes, as The Daily Mail started people calling them, May Gawthorpe, was an invalid for many years as a result of a blow received in this way. When the harried political organisers tried to solve the problem by excluding all women from the meetings, interruptions were made through windows and skylights, even if this involved perilous climbing over roofs and gutters, and evading police search by concealment in neighbouring attics for two or three days. There were also constant disturbances at the House of Commons. When a Private Member's Bill for Woman Suffrage was being talked out in 1906, Mrs. Pankhurst and some friends created a riot in the Ladies' Gallery. From that time repeated raids were made on the House of Commons by women seeking interviews with Cabinet Ministers, and these became in time vast riots which it taxed the power of Scotland Yard to keep within bounds. All the area round Whitehall and St. Stephen's Square was packed with people, watching while women threw themselves against a cordon of police, and withstood massed charges of mounted men. The spectators divided themselves as the night went on into supporters and opponents, and there would be dashes made to rescue individual women or to manhandle them. The police were ordered to make as few arrests as possible, so some of the women would find themselves thrown about like so many footballs.

Participation in these interruptions and in these riots meant imprisonment. Very soon the women were getting sentences of six weeks' imprisonment. They rose soon to three months, to nine months, to two years. To put the Government in an impossible position, they hunger-struck, abstaining from food, and sometimes even from water. At first they were released. Then the Government employed surgical methods of forcible feeding. The prisoners resisted that, but this meant that their gums were hacked to pieces with steel gags, and the tubes were apt to injure the internal organs, and the food was often vomited, so they frequently had to be released all the same. Then the Government passed the Cat-and-Mouse Act, which enabled them to release the hunger-striking prisoners when they were within touching distance of death, wait till they had recovered their health, and then arrest them again, and bring them back to death once more, and so on. It was one of the most unlovely expedients that the English legislature has ever invented, and it is ironical that it should have been the work of a Liberal Government. And it had the further disgrace of being ineffectual, for it entirely failed to quench the Movement. That spread like wild-fire over the country. It had hundreds of thousands of supporters, its income rose to nearly £38,000 a year, its weekly newspaper had a circulation of 40,000. It held enthusiastic meetings all over the country, though its militancy evoked attack, and Suffragist speakers were not protected as Cabinet Ministers. Many suffered grave physical injury. But for the most part these meetings were passionate acclamations of the rightness of the Cause and its leaders. London saw long, long processions, longer than it had ever known follow any other than Mrs. Pankhurst.

The Press was overwhelmingly against them; which was one of the first proofs that the modern sensational newspaper has no real influence, that its readers buy it for its news and not for its opinions. There were, of course, certain noble supporters among journalists, such as Mr. Nevinson, Mr. Brailsford, and the late Mr. H. W. Massingham; but for the rest the Press loved to represent the Movement with contempt and derision. Mrs. Pankhurst and her daughters were crazy hooligans, their followers were shrieking hysterics, their policy was wild delirium. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Movement contained some of the détraqués who follow any drum that is beaten, but these were weeded out, for the Cat-and-Mouse Act was something of a test for the solider qualities.

But the Movement was neither crazy nor hysterical nor delirious. It was stone-cold in its realism. Mrs. Pankhurst was not a clever woman, but when she experienced something she incorporated it in her mind and used it as a basis for action. When she started the Women's Social and Political Union she was sure of two things: that the ideas of freedom and justice which had been slowly developing in England during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had grown to such maturity that there existed an army of women resentful of being handicapped by artificial disadvantages imposed simply on the grounds of their sex, and that sex antagonism was so strong among men that it produced an attitude which, if it were provoked to candid expression, would make every self-respecting woman want to fight it. In both of these suppositions she was entirely correct. The real force that made the Suffrage Movement was the quality of the Opposition. Women, listening to Anti-Suffrage speeches, for the first time knew what many men really thought of them. One such speech that brought many into the Movement had for its climax a jocular description of a future female Lord Chancellor being seized with labour pains on the Woolsack; and left no doubt that the speaker considered labour pains as in themselves, apart from the setting, a funny subject. The allegation, constantly made, that all women became insane at the age of forty-five also roused much resentment. But apart from general principles, the wicked frivolity of the attitude adopted towards the women by the Liberal Government was the real recruiting serjeant for the Movement.

It must be remembered that the majority of the Liberal Members of Parliament, and indeed the majority of the Cabinet, were pledged to support Woman Suffrage. There was therefore every logical and every moral reason why they should have granted it; and they did not need to fear the ignominy of seeming to yield to force, for Christabel, with her fine political mind, frequently declared truces and gave them every opportunity to save their bacon. The explanation commonly accepted—and it is the only one that appears possible—was that the opposition to votes for women was insisted on by one important member of the Cabinet, influenced by the views of his wife who has since published book after book of almost incredible silliness. That the protection women can expect from men is highly limited and personal in its scope many Suffragists learned, as they noticed that the stewards of Liberal meetings not only ejected them, but thoroughly enjoyed inflicting as much physical injury on them as possible. They were to learn that even more poignantly in the next few years, as they hid in cellars from bombs dropped by the protective sex; but the previous lesson was even more disgusting, because it was completely gratuitous. The matter could have been settled in ten minutes. But it was not, and the Cabinet Ministers who might have settled it saw nothing to limit their stewards to the task of ejection and often even encouraged them to exceed it; and outside the halls they showed even less adherence to the standards to which, one had believed, our governors adhered.

Was justice, even British justice, blind? The case of Lady Constance Lytton suggested it was not. She, chivalrous soul, suspected that some of the Suffrage prisoners were roughly treated because they were persons of no social importance. She herself had been sentenced to six weeks' imprisonment, and had been instantly dismissed as medically unfit. She went to jail again, not as Lord Lytton's sister, but as Jane Warton, a seamstress, and although on the second occasion as on the first she had mitral disease of the heart, she was forcibly fed within an inch of her life.

Mrs. Pankhurst had said that she would go on applying pressure to the Government till it yielded. She continued to do so. She seemed made of steel, although she had suffered a most crushing bereavement in the death of her son Harry in distressing circumstances. He had contracted infantile paralysis, and to pay for his nursing-home expenses, which seemed likely to continue indefinitely, she had to leave him to go on a lecture tour in America, since for all the tens of thousands of pounds that were coming into the Union she drew no more than £200 a year. Shortly after her return he died, and this inflicted a blow from which she never recovered. But she went on inflexibly along the road she had planned. She thought of new ways of making the Government's existence intolerable every day. The plateglass windows of the West End of London went down one night in a few minutes to answer the challenge of a member of the Government who had reproached the Suffragists for having committed no act of violence comparable to the pulling up of Hyde Park Railings by the Reform rioters of 1867. Christabel fled to France so that the Movement could be sure of one leader to dictate the policy. Mrs. Pankhurst and the two other chief officials of the Union, Frederick and Emmeline Pethick Lawrence, were tried for conspiracy and sentenced to nine months' imprisonment, in spite of the jury's plea that they should be treated with the utmost leniency. They hunger-struck and were released.

But a new side of her implacability then showed itself. Her policy had meant a ruthless renunciation of old ties. She had cut herself off entirely from the Labour Party; she was even prepared, in these later years, to attack it as a component part of the Liberal Party's majority. She had silenced her youngest daughter, Adela, as a speaker because of her frank Socialist bias, and her second daughter Sylvia afterwards left the Union to form societies that were as much Labour as Suffragist in the East End. She had been merciless in her preservation of party discipline. There was no nonsense about democracy in the Women's Social and Political Union. Teresa Billington had long been driven out for raising the topic. Mrs. Pankhurst, Christabel, and the Lawrences exercised an absolute dictatorship. But now the Lawrences had to go. They opposed the further prosecution of militancy, and Christabel and Mrs. Pankhurst quietly told them to relinquish their positions in the Union. There was more than appears to be said for the Pankhursts' position from their point of view. They knew that the Government intended to strip the Pethick Lawrences of their fortune by recovering from them (as the only moneyed officials of the Union) the cost of all the damage done by the militants; and as they knew that in actual fact Christabel settled the policy of the Union, they saw no reason why the Pethick Lawrences should stay on to the embarrassment of all persons concerned. But the Pethick Lawrences were heartbroken. Not for a moment did the crisis appall Mrs. Pankhurst. Letters were burned in pillar-boxes; houses—but only empty ones—went up in flames; riot was everywhere. Mrs. Pankhurst was again tried for conspiracy, and this time received a sentence of three years' imprisonment, though again the jury fervently recommended her to mercy. She was then dragged in and out of prison under the Cat-and-Mouse Act, while militancy rose to a pitch that had never been imagined by its most fervent supporters, and acquired a strange, new character of ultimate desperation. Emily Wilding Davidson tried to stop the Derby by throwing herself under the horses' hooves, and, as she had anticipated, was killed. A vast silent cortège of women followed her coffin through the streets. Mrs. Pankhurst, rising from her bed in a nursing home to attend the funeral, was re-arrested. But they were careful never quite to break her body. Both the Government and the Suffragettes knew what was bound to happen if Mrs. Pankhurst should be killed.

Suddenly war came, and in the sight of the world her star darkened. Immediately the pacifism she had learned from Dr. Pankhurst vanished and left no trace. In an instant she stopped all militancy, all Suffrage work; with perfect discipline her army disbanded. She then declared herself a fierce Jingo, her paper The Suffragette became Britannia, and Christabel wrote leaders that grew into more crudely Chauvinist attacks on certain members of the Government, such as Lord Grey of Fallodon, for insufficiently vigorous prosecution of the War. But this did not represent nearly such a fundamental reversal as might be supposed. She had, after all, been brought up in France just after the Franco-Prussian War, and she had then conceived a life-long hatred of Germany; and there was nothing surprising if Britannia translated it into French. “J'ai eu la faiblesse de croire qu'un Bonaparte pouvait être autre chose qu'un assassin. …” Rochefort would have thought himself failing in an obvious duty if he had let a day pass without announcing that somebody, somewhere, was betraying France. This astonishing trace of the influence of French politics on Mrs. Pankhurst, so little modified by time, makes us realise that the Suffrage Movement had been the copy of a French model executed with North-country persistence. We had been watching a female General Boulanger with nous.

Besides these patriotic successes and some propaganda for women's war service, Mrs. Pankhurst and her daughter did little, and they did not undertake any important administrative duties. They were both of them trained and temperamentally adapted for political organisation, for which there was now no place; and the older woman, who was now fifty-six, and had been leading a campaign life in and out of prison for eleven years, was too exhausted for any first-rate work. It is said that Christabel Pankhurst did much good work, much better than her writings would suggest, in an advisory capacity to a certain politician. But this was not ostentatiously done, and it must have seemed to many of their followers that Mrs. Pankhurst and her daughter had passed into obscurity. Yet it was then that she did perhaps the most decisive Suffrage work of her life. She persuaded a certain important politician that when peace came again she could reassemble her party and begin militancy where it had left off. There were many other causes which united to contribute to the triumph of the Suffrage cause at that time. Parallel to the militant movement had developed a nonmilitant movement, also immensely powerful, which had caused a dangerous discontent among the female members of the older political parties. But if the threat of Mrs. Pankhurst's existence had not been there women might not have been given the vote on the same terms as men in 1917, ostensibly as a reward for their war services.

After that victory, Mrs. Pankhurst wellnigh vanished from the eyes of her followers. The rebellious glory was departed. She repudiated utterly now everything she had fought for in her youth, besides her husband, and came out of the War a high Tory. She seemed a little puzzled what to do, for her ally had left her. Christabel, the quality of whose mind remains a profound mystery, had taken one look at the map of Europe, spread out in the sunshine of peace, and had grown pale with horror. Her gift for foreseeing political events had often amounted to clairvoyance, and there is reason to suppose that it did not desert her then. Her realisation had the effect, curious in Dr. Pankhurst's daughter, bred in agnosticism, of making her announce that here were the signs and portents that herald the Second Coming of the Lord Jesus Christ. She went to America and led a frugal life as an evangelist of a sober and unsensational kind, devoting her leisure to the care of an adopted daughter. For a time Mrs. Pankhurst lived in Canada, delivering lectures to women's societies on such subjects as the legal protection of women and children, public health, the blessings of the British Empire, and the contempt of liberty she had seen during a visit to Russia. But finally she returned to England and accepted the post of nursing the unpromising constituency of Whitechapel as a Tory candidate, a duty which she fulfilled conscientiously. She secured no financial advantage by this conservatism, for she was paid only a pittance and lived over a baker's shop; she could have attained a much higher standard of living by remaining an unattached feminist writer and lecturer. Now she enjoyed life in little, gentle, old-ladyish ways. She loved window-shopping, and sometimes bought a dress at the sales and remodelled it herself. She liked dropping in on her old friends, the Marshalls, where “she had her own chair,” and talking about the old days in France, about her husband, about her dead boys. There were letters from Christabel and Adela, who, though long alienated from her mother by her Communist views, was ultimately reconciled to her. But Mrs. Pankhurst had never wanted to be old, and her body had been hideously maltreated. As a result of injuries received in forcible feedings, she still suffered from a recurrent form of jaundice. In 1928, shortly after women had received full adult suffrage, she went to church on Easter Monday in the country, was driven home to White-chapel, took to her bed, and, for no particular medical reason, died. She left £72.

It is all forgotten. We forget everything now. We have forgotten what came before the War. We have forgotten the War. There are so many newspapers so full of so much news, so many motor-cars, so many films, that image is superimposed on image, and nothing is clearly seen. In an emptier age, which left more room for the essential, it would be remembered that Emmeline Pankhurst with all her limitations was glorious. Somehow, in her terse, austere way she was as physically glorious as Ellen Terry or Sarah Bernhardt. She was glorious in her physical courage, in her obstinacy, in her integrity. Her achievements have suffered in repute owing to the fashion of jeering at the Parliamentary system. Women novelists who want to strike out a line as being specially broadminded declare they think we are no better for the vote; if they spent half an hour turning over pre-War newspapers and looking out references to women's employment and legal and social status, they might come to a different opinion. Women who do not like working in offices and cannot get married write letters to the papers ascribing their plight to feminism. But even before women got the vote they had to work in offices, with the only difference that they received less money and worked under worse conditions; and then as now there existed no machinery to compel men to marry women they did not want. Few intelligent women in a position to compare the past with the present will deny that the vote brought with it substantial benefits of both a material and spiritual kind.

There were also incidental benefits arising out of the Movement. The Suffragettes' indignant denunciation of the insanitary conditions in the jails meant an immense advance of public opinion regarding penal reform. In 1913 it suddenly came into Christabel Pankhurst's head to write a series of articles regarding the prevalence of venereal disease. These were ill-informed and badly written, but they scattered like wind an age-long conspiracy of prudishness, and enabled society to own the existence of these diseases and set about exterminating them as had never been possible before. But Mrs. Pankhurst's most valuable indirect contribution to her time was made in May 1905; a dusty and obscure provincial, she sent in a threatening note to the Prime Minister, and spent the next years proving that that threat had thunder and lightning behind it. She thereby broke down the assumption of English politicians, which till then no legislative actions, no extensions of the franchise had been able to touch, that the only people who were politically important were those who were socially important; and all the democratic movements of her day shared in the benefits. It would be absurd to deny that the ultimate reason for the rise of the Labour Party was the devoted work of its adherents, but it would be equally absurd to deny that between 1905 and 1914 it found its path smoothed by an increasingly respectful attitude on the part of St. Stephen's, the Press, and the public.

But Mrs. Pankhurst's chief and most poignant value to the historian will be her demonstration of what happens to a great human being of action in a transition period. She was the last popular leader to act on inspiration derived from the principles of the French Revolution; she put her body and soul at the service of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity, and earned a triumph for them. Then doubt seized her, as it was to seize a generation. In the midst of her battle for democracy she was obliged, lest that battle should be lost, to become a dictator. Later we were all to debate whether that sacrifice of principle could be justified in the case of Russia. She trembled under the strain of the conflict, and perhaps she trembled also because she foresaw that she was to gain a victory, and then confront a mystery. She had always said and felt she wanted the vote to feed the hungry. Enfranchised, she found herself aware that economic revolution was infinitely more difficult and drastic than the fiercest political revolution. With her childlike honesty, her hate of pretentiousness, she failed to put up a good show to cover her perplexity. She spoke the truth—she owned she saw it better to camp among the ruins of capitalism than push out into the uncharted desert. With her whole personality she enacted our perplexity, as earlier she had enacted our revolt, a priestess of the people.