To End All Wars_ A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918 - Adam Hochschild [31]
Christabel Pankhurst, the oldest daughter and her mother's favorite, also appeared the picture of elegance; her lithe figure and dreamy, silent-film star's good looks surely helped her win headlines. "She was slender, young, with the flawless colouring of a briar rose," wrote the middle daughter, Sylvia, "and an easy grace cultivated by her enthusiastic practice of the dance." Like her mother, Christabel usually wore one of the huge women's hats of the period, with a precarious array of feathers, ruffles, lace, and artificial flowers that was so top-heavy the whole assemblage often had to be anchored in place with a ribbon tied under the chin—all the more necessary if you were expecting to be rudely dragged off to a paddy wagon. As the WSPU's chief tactician, she plotted such actions as driving a furniture mover's truck to the entrance of the House of Commons and then flinging open its doors so that some two dozen women could burst forth and rush the building. At Christabel's instigation, women infiltrated all-male meetings of the ruling Liberal Party: they hid underneath the speakers' platform, rappelled down from skylights, climbed through windows, always shouting "Votes for women!" The Pankhurst family had declared war, and a new style of battle was born—radically different from the war many Britons thought their country should be preparing for, with Germany.
In contrast to her older sister, Sylvia Pankhurst, with her prominent nose, slightly bulging cheeks, and heavily lidded eyes, was not one to fit conventional images of beauty. Heedless of her appearance, she paid no attention to fashion and never wore makeup. "She was one of those people whom it was impossible to keep tidy; her hair was always tumbling down," remembered a colleague. "One day I ... noticed that she had her blouse on inside out. I got her behind some packing cases and helped her change it." Sylvia wrote prolifically and also studied art in both England and Italy, putting her skills to work designing suffrage posters, banners, calendars, and a medal for women who had gone to prison for the cause. Ultimately she would spend more time behind bars than anyone else in this oft-arrested family.
When they weren't in jail, the Pankhursts and their followers sometimes appeared at demonstrations in prison uniforms—surprisingly demure long skirts, white caps, and white aprons. On other occasions they wore the WSPU colors: white dresses decorated with green and purple, meant to signify, respectively, purity, hope, and dignity. On an American speaking tour, Emmeline displayed the colors by wearing a necklace of pearls, emeralds, and amethysts.
In the long run, larger and more moderate suffrage groups would be more responsible for actually winning women the vote. But the Pankhursts contemptuously dismissed all other activists, and, in the stormy decade before 1914, they and their confrontational politics edged the others out of the spotlight. Although it was the right-wing Daily Mail that scoffingly coined the term "suffragette," Pankhurst followers proudly adopted it as their own. "We are soldiers engaged in a holy war," Emmeline declared after one arrest, "and we mean to go on until victory is won."
This holy war, however, appeared to threaten Britain as a military power. Not only had Emmeline Pankhurst been a vocal opponent of the Boer War, but she now implied that all war was the mere byproduct of male stupidity. "We leave that to the enemy," she declared to a mass meeting at the Royal Albert Hall. "We leave that to the men in their warfare. It is not the method of women." If women won the vote and followed her lead, would the country still be able to fight its wars?
Many feared it would not be.