Harold Champion and Rupert Butler, but these are slim, ‘great figures in history’
texts, aimed at a young readership – as are three picture books, written for chil-
dren, where her life is presented as exemplary.^35 There are also a few
sympathetic portrayals that focus in depth on Emmeline Pankhurst but these
are only of essay length and concentrate only on her suffrage life.^36 Emmeline
Pankhurst led an active political life both before and after her suffrage days,
which has largely been ignored by present-day researchers. An assessment of her
life and work in a modern full-length biography is long overdue.
In recent years the process of writing biography has been subjected to critical
scrutiny.^37 Concerns have been raised about the complexities of interpreting
written, visual and oral sources as well as about the ways in which biographers
relate to their subjects, shaping accounts in particular ways. For some critics,
biography is a fiction, a creation of the biographer who weaves a seamless narra-
tive, creating coherence and causal connections that bear little relation to the
lived experience of the person being studied. The self, it is sometimes argued, is
not unitary and coherent but shifting and fragmented. Furthermore, the spot-
light approach on a ‘key figure’ as an agent of change in history may represent
what Susan Grogan has termed the last gasp of modernism in the uncertainties
of our ‘postmodern’ age which refuses to accept master narratives that purport
to explain the movement of history in this way.^38 While such debates alert the
biographer to the fallacy of believing that one can construct the ‘real’ person
rather than an interpretation of that subject, it is also important to remember
that the postmodern critique itself is the product of a particular historical
moment in time and does not invalidate the necessity for biography. Individuals
respond in different ways to differing historical situations, and a study of any
particular life can help both to illuminate these situations as well as aid our
understanding of the person being studied.
All biographical interpretations are selective, and my interpretation of
Emmeline Pankhurst’s life is no exception; my own life story is written into this
account in complex ways. In particular, I write as a white, heterosexual, middle-
class feminist who admires the leader of the WSPU. Further, as Olive Banks
and Elizabeth Sarah argue, we cannot understand Emmeline and Christabel
Pankhurst unless we see them as feminists who, some decades earlier, pioneered
a number of concerns that were central to radical feminists in Second Wave
Feminism in the 1970s – the power of men over women in a male-defined
world, the recognition that while men retained a monopoly of power socialism
could be just as disadvantageous to women as capitalism, the importance of a
women-only movement as a way for women to articulate their demands and
raise their consciousness, the commonalities that all women share despite their
differences, and the primacy of putting women rather than considerations of say,
social class, political affiliation or socialism, first.^39 To make this connection is
not unproblematic since some of the WSPU militants, living in the 1970s,
distanced themselves from the ‘Women’s Libbers’ of the day, arguing that the
suffragette campaign had been spiritual while Women’s Liberation was primarily
INTRODUCTION