and reprinted at least up to 1972. As the first male historian to treat the
women’s suffrage movement seriously, his plot had the power of a ‘first’ history
from which few subsequent historians could escape.^20 Dangerfield belittles the
suffragette movement, labelling it as a ‘brutal comedy’, a ‘puppet show’ where
the strings are carefully manipulated by Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst.
Both women are seen as opportunists, seeking to rise above their impecunious
middle-class background in provincial Manchester, and as despots who ‘dictated
every move, and swayed every heart, of a growing army of intoxicated women’.
He continues, ‘They had only to say the word and castles and churches went up
in flames, pictures were slashed, windows shattered, the majesty of parliaments
and kings affronted.’ And there, above the lurid picture, ‘the forms of Emmeline
and Christabel Pankhurst scour the furious scene like a pair of risen but infernal
queens’.^21 Drawing upon the comparatively new field of psychoanalysis,
Dangerfield sought for the cause of militancy in some ‘irrational and uncon-
scious element’ of ‘the human soul’, an element that came particularly to the
fore when women entered political life. The ‘outrageous Suffragette
Movement’, he claims, was a rejection of the respectable, smothering security
offered to women, a movement in which woman became ‘suddenly aware of her
long-neglected masculinity’. Thus militancy is linked with the ‘homosexual
movement’, and is a form of ‘pre-war lesbianism’ which is ‘more sensitive than
sensual’, a form of behaviour where woman leaves the company of man and goes
‘out in the wilderness, there to be alone with herself and her sisters’.^22 As
Holton persuasively suggests, for Dangerfield the suffrage campaigns of the early
twentieth century appeared as a symptom of both social and individual
pathology.^23
More recent group biographies of the Pankhurst women have not deviated
largely from this path. David Mitchell’s 1967 text The fighting Pankhursts
attempts to assess the careers and achievements before and after suffrage of not
only Emmeline, Christabel and Sylvia but also of Adela, the least-known
daughter in this remarkable political family. But his story is written from a
masculinist perspective that is riddled with demeaning comments and sexist
jibes that belittle the lives of the ‘posse of Pankhursts’, as he terms them, who
circled ‘the great, recalcitrant herd with their little lassoes of hope and convic-
tion’.^24 Martin Pugh in his book The Pankhurstsalso colludes in presenting the
all-too-familiar scenario. Emmeline Pankhurst is an opportunist who seeks to
marry ‘an important man’ so that she can be upwardly mobile.^25 She is a bad
mother as well as a misguided and weak leader of the WSPU since she
constantly defers to Christabel.^26 Further, she became the ‘target of one of the
most frank lesbians in the suffrage movement’, the composer Ethel Smyth, who
‘often shared Emmeline’s room at the Inns of Court hotel and entertained her at
her home in Surrey’.^27 The hints about Emmeline’s lesbianism, which is never
defined but assumed to involve genital contact, is particularly prurient in a
newspaper article where Pugh claims that the suffragette leaders, including
Christabel, engaged regularly in ‘lesbian love trysts’.^28 Pugh does not discuss
INTRODUCTION