Suffragettes were members of a ‘militant’ movement, ‘inasmuch as the women
in it stand up and protest, with all the strength of their being, against the injus-
tices of women’. Emmeline justified the new stone throwing policy, pointing out
that it was ‘a time-honoured argument in my country, just as I have been told
the revolver is in yours’. However, suffragettes who threw stones were classified
not as political offenders but as ‘the very lowest criminals’, and once in prison,
working-class militants were treated more harshly than those from higher social
class backgrounds, a situation that could not be tolerated. ‘Lady Constance
Lytton was released: she was not forcibly fed; but Mary Leigh, the workingman’s
wife, was forcibly fed for five weeks, to the point of death, before they opened
the prison doors and let her out.’
A recurring theme in Emmeline’s speeches, that of the common bond
between all women as they fought for the right to enfranchisement, a bond that
transcended social class differences, was reiterated once again. ‘We have broken
down class distinction between women’, she cried, to great applause, and
continued:
We are all women, we are all born under a ban, and whether the wife
or daughter of the rich man or the poorest man in the land, we are all
outclassed because we are women. We have got a common cause ... if
there is any distinction of class at all, it is because the privileged
women, the honored women, are doing the hardest and most
unpleasant parts of the work. They think it is their duty to relieve their
sisters from that. If you see a woman selling papers in the streets, or
practising the hunger strike, in most cases it is the woman who has
never had to face the struggle for existence.^38Dubois, writing from a socialist feminist perspective, interprets Emmeline’s
speech as advocating an expanded field of action for upper-class women, who
would take the lead in the militant army, ‘displacing working women’.^39 My
reading offers a different analysis. Emmeline Pankhurst was always a practical
politician, seeking practical solutions to complex issues. She knew that single
and married working-class militants faced more constraints on their time and
pocket than their more fortunate middle-class sisters, so it was practical that
more middle-class women endured imprisonment and other hardships, in the
name of the comradeship of all women. Whereas socialist feminists, such as
Dubois, emphasise class conflict as the central dynamic in society, a conflict
that divided women, for feminists such as Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst,
the central concern was ending the sex discrimination against women in parlia-
mentary voting, a cause that united women. In holding such a world-view,
Emmeline never lost sight of the wretched conditions of life for most working-
class Edwardian women; neither was she reluctant to speak out on their behalf,
as in this speech, when she condemned the harsher treatment that working-
class militants might experience in prison.
PERSONAL SORROW AND FORTITUDE