Emmeline Pankhurst: A Biography

INTRODUCTION
1 I am defining as ‘feminist’ a woman who believes that her sex are discriminated against
and oppressed by men, and who devotes much of her time to fighting or rebelling against
this. ‘Feminism’ is thus a political movement that seeks to eradicate the injustices that
women experience and to end women’s subordination to men. Although the terms ‘femi-
nist’ and ‘feminism’ appear not to have been used in Britain until the late nineteenth
century, their application to an earlier period may be justified. As B. Taylor, Eve and the
new Jerusalem: socialism and feminism in the nineteenth century(London, Virago, 1983), p. x
points out, ‘at least a century prior to the entry of the actual word into popular political
discourse there existed the ideology which it described – a distinct and identifiable body
of ideas and aspiration commonly known as “the rights of women”, the “condition of
women” question, the “emancipation of women” and so on.’
2 R. Pankhurst, Introduction to the 1987 reprint of Dame C. Pankhurst, Unshackled: the
story of how we won the vote(London, Cresset Library).
3 M. Mackenzie, Shoulder to shoulder: a documentary(London, Penguin, 1975).
4 Women of the century,The Observer, 29 June 1997;Daily Mirror, 12 October 1999.
5 As far as I am aware, Claudia Fitzherbert is writing a biography of Emmeline Pankhurst
while Paula Bartley’s Emmeline Pankhurstwill be published in 2002 as part of Routledge’s
Historical Biographies Series.
6 Dame C. Pankhurst, Unshackled: the story of how we won the vote(London, Hutchinson,
1959).
7 E.S. Pankhurst, The life of Emmeline Pankhurst: the suffragette struggle for women’s citizenship
(London, T. Werner Laurie Ltd, 1935).
8 Socialist feminism stresses that the subordinate position of women in society may be
attributed to both the nature of capitalism and to the control that men exercise over
women; importance is attached to men and women working together, as comrades, in the
building of a socialist society, although socialist feminists may also form women-only
groupings as a means of raising feminist consciousness.
9 E. S. Pankhurst, Emmeline Pankhurst, p. 71.
10 Ibid., pp. 46–7.
11 Ibid., p. 165.
12 E. S. Pankhurst, The suffragette movement: an intimate account of persons and ideals
(London, Longmans, 1931), hereafter TSM.
13 K. Dodd, Introduction, to her edited A Sylvia Pankhurst reader(Manchester, Manchester
University Press, 1993), pp. 21–2.
14 J. Marcus, Introduction, re-reading the Pankhurst and women’s suffrage, in her edited
Suffrage and the Pankhursts(London and New York, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987), pp.
5–6.

NOTES