Sylvia’s close relationship with an American woman, Zelie Emerson, which
Barbara Winslow has described as ‘very intense, possibly even sexual’ but
assumes that Sylvia, who has an affair with Keir Hardie, the founder of the
fledgling Labour Party, is heterosexual.^29 For Pugh it is Sylvia, the feminine
socialist feminist who cries easily, who is the heroine of the Pankhurst family,
just as she represented herself in The suffragette movement. Consequently, he
makes at least fifty-eight references to the latter and only thirteen to
Christabel’s Unshackled.
In 1977, The suffragette movementwas reprinted in a cheap and widely read
paperback edition by Virago Press. Its narrative about the women’s suffrage
campaigns was eagerly devoured by a new generation of feminist historians –
including myself – keen to find out about our foremothers. Strongly influenced
by Second Wave Feminism, it was socialist feminist voices, like Sylvia’s, that
became the dominant approaches within the new feminist history that sought
to record ‘history from below’, to find out about the lives of ‘ordinary’ women
rather than their more well-known sisters. And it was Sylvia’s portrayal of her
mother in The suffragette movementthat became the dominant representation.^30
The middle-class Emmeline Pankhurst who had deserted socialism, supported
the war effort during the Great War and turned to the Conservative Party
during the last years of her life, became an unfashionable figure, often dismissed
as bourgeois, right wing, autocratic, ruthless, divisive and patriotic; in particular,
the suffrage organisation that she founded and led, the WSPU, was portrayed as
middle class, reactionary and narrow in its aims, a group that failed to mobilise
the working classes and address their economic, political and social needs.^31
Socialist feminist historians were not alone in drawing such a picture. A
number of male historians, admiring the liberal feminist approach of Millicent
Garrett Fawcett, leader of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies
(NUWSS), who encouraged feminists to work closely with men, also presented
a negative portrayal of the WSPU leader. This view is epitomised in an essay by
Brian Harrison where he contrasts the law-breaking, ‘militant’ tactics that
Emmeline Pankhurst advocated with the reasonable and sensible law-abiding,
‘constitutional’ approach that Millicent Fawcett upheld.^32 Millicent Garrett
Fawcett and her peaceful campaigning ‘suffragists’, as NUWSS members and
women suffrage supporters generally became known, were usually credited with
winning the parliamentary vote for women while Emmeline Pankhurst and her
unruly band of ‘suffragettes’ or ‘militants’, as WSPU members were commonly
termed, were seen as hindering the women’s cause, especially from 1912 when
more extreme forms of militancy were adopted, such as destroying letters in post
boxes, setting fire to empty buildings, large-scale window-smashing in London’s
West End and the slashing of paintings in public art galleries.^33
Sympathetic accounts of the WSPU’s militant campaign are to be found only
amongst a minority of writers.^34 But these texts offer a general overview of
suffragette activity rather than a biography of the WSPU leader. There are a few
friendly biographies of Emmeline Pankhurst, written by Josephine Kamm,
INTRODUCTION