published in 1935 and reprinted at least up to 1972. Whether Annie Kenney
read Dangerfield’s account we do not know, but by the early 1940s she was still
worried about the influence of The suffragette movementand wrote to Christabel:
I do so hope that you have written the real true history of our move-
ment. ... Is Sylvia’s book of your family and early life to be the only
family book to which film writers, historians, etc., have to go for the
history of your family and the history of the work that absolutely
changed the position of women?^26But Christabel remained adamant that the manuscript she had written
should not be published during her lifetime, especially during wartime when the
record of the brutality of the Liberal government towards the suffragettes could
be embarrassing and damaging. The manuscript was found in a trunk after her
death in 1958 and prepared for posthumous publication by Fred Pethick
Lawrence.^27 The general account of the WSPU campaign in Unshackled, in
which Emmeline figures prominently and is represented sympathetically, was no
match for Sylvia’s richly detailed autobiographical narrative. In contrast to The
suffragette movement, Unshackled has a rather flat, matter-of-fact tone.
Significantly, it omits any reference to the split with Sylvia, in 1914. Yet Fred
Pethick Lawrence claimed it was written with a ‘remorseless objectivity’ while
for Adela it was ‘accurate as far as it goes & very fair to all concerned’.^28
Annie Kenney’s fears had been well founded. Sylvia’s representation of
Emmeline Pankhurst in The suffragette movementis still the dominant represen-
tation within history, and has only recently been subjected to critical scrutiny.
This biography has continued that interrogation, pointing out that it is a pitfall
for any researcher to accept blindly the story told in that text. As this biography
has illustrated, it is time to reclaim Emmeline Pankhurst from the denigration
of Sylvia and of historians who have marginalised her as a middle-class oppor-
tunist, ruthless, patriotic and right wing, a woman driven by her eldest daughter,
Christabel, the autocratic leader of a militant movement that was bourgeois,
reactionary and narrow in its aims, a movement that failed to mobilise the
working classes and address their economic, social and political needs. It is time
to represent Emmeline Pankhurst as she was seen in her time, a ‘Champion of
Womanhood’,^29 to give to her that ‘honoured niche’ in history of which
Beatrice Harraden spoke.
Emmeline Pankhurst’s feminism was born out of a sense of the burning injus-
tice of the wrongs done to her sex in a male-dominated society where women
were regarded as subordinate and inferior beings, a secondary status epitomised
by the denial to them of the citizenship right that was granted to certain cate-
gories of men, the right to the parliamentary vote. It was a feminism that
embraced all women, stressing gender not class issues, recognising that divisions
between women perpetuated male power, even within socialism. It was also a
feminism that was above party politics and involved putting women first.
NICHE IN HISTORY