To End All Wars_ A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918 - Adam Hochschild [30]
Progressive Britons had long called for women's suffrage, but only in the new century had the cause caught fire. Activists were eager to have the well-known Despard in their camp, and the previous year she had been recruited by a new organization, the Women's Social and Political Union, or WSPU, and began traveling the country giving speeches on its behalf. She called for equality for women not just at the ballot box but in the workplace and in pensions. She even demanded wages for housework. When working-class women finally flooded the country's polling booths, Despard believed, the socialist state she had long dreamed of would burst into being. And just as soldiers form strong bonds in war, so in this new kind of battle Despard felt an electric excitement and solidarity. "I had sought and found comradeship of some sort with men," she wrote. "I had marched with great processions of the unemployed.... [But] amongst all these experiences, I had not found what I met on the threshold of this young, vigorous Union of Hearts."
The "young, vigorous Union" she had joined was, however, less of a mass movement than it appeared, for the Women's Social and Political Union was by no means democratically controlled by its thousands of members; rather, the organization was run by one family, the formidable Pankhursts. They brought to their cause flamboyance, fervor, and daring when it came to tactics, and a knack for infuriating friends as well as enemies, all of it unmatched in British politics in this era—indeed, in politics almost anywhere.
Emmeline Pankhurst had been widowed at 40, when her older, lawyer husband died suddenly, leaving her with debts to pay off and four children under the age of 18. She accepted money from friends, and took a job as registrar of births and deaths in a working-class district of Manchester. The work proved eye-opening, as it included tabulating the many illegitimate births to poor women raped or seduced by older male relatives. As a member of the Manchester school board, she was outraged to discover that teachers were paid more if they were male. "I began to think about the vote in women's hands," she wrote, "not only as a right but as a desperate necessity."
When the Boer War broke out, she and her children were outspoken in condemning Britain as the aggressor. As a result, her son Harry, whose health was fragile (he would die of polio at 20), was attacked after school and knocked unconscious. A schoolmate flung a book in the face of her youngest daughter, Adela, and a fellow student of another daughter, Sylvia, threatened to break the windows of their house. Already, the Pankhursts were anything but armchair radicals.
When, a few years later, Emmeline formed the Women's Social and Political Union, its membership was limited to women, and its leadership, it seemed, to Pankhursts. Emmeline and her three daughters, for example, were four-fifths of the WSPU's five-woman speakers' bureau. They militantly carried the gospel of votes for women, now, to debating societies, labor unions, and mass demonstrations. When Charlotte Despard was arrested in that 1907 march on Parliament, so were Emmeline and her daughters Christabel and Sylvia.
Approaching 50, Emmeline Pankhurst moved into the public eye as a powerful speaker who seemed made for the stage. The voice with which she rallied crowds, one friend remembered, was "like a stringed instrument in the hand of a great artist ... from which sprang all the scorn, all the wrath, all the tenderness in the world." Her words seemed to come straight from her heart, for she never spoke from notes. An ethereal, delicate beauty that can be seen in photographs of her as a young woman had now turned into a steely middle-aged majesty. Her authoritative presence