Consequently, Emmeline shed her membership of the Liberal Party and then
the ILP when she became disillusioned with their male-centred agendas. In the
last year of her life, when women finally won the vote on equal terms with men
under a Conservative government, she became a member of the Conservative
Party, hoping that it might help women use their new voting powers construc-
tively. She died before that dream could be shattered.
Emmeline Pankhurst had the vision to realise that it was women themselves
who had to be roused to demand their own political rights and founded the
WSPU as a women-only organisation although men could, and did, become
supporters of the women’s cause. A charismatic leader and powerful orator, she
inspired her followers by her resolute determination not to be deflected from
the cause she espoused; her courage and her flair for the dramatic even won
grudging admiration from many of those who disagreed with her policies.
Charlotte Despard, a one-time rival, commented that Emmeline Pankhurst’s
great service to women was that she discovered, stimulated and, through her
personal initiative, harnessed for action, a spirit of revolt. Ethel Smyth, one-
time close friend of the WSPU leader, similarly claimed that the supreme
achievement of Mrs. Pankhurst was in creating in women ‘a new sense of power
and responsibility, together with a determination to work out their destiny on
other lines than those laid down for them since time immemorial by men’.^30 As
these comments and countless others illustrate, Emmeline Pankhurst’s desire to
arouse the women of Britain to claim their citizenship birthright succeeded.
Women from a wide variety of backgrounds were recruited into the WSPU
to form a movement that was unparalleled in British history. Engaging in mili-
tant action that was never to endanger human life, WSPU members developed
a new confidence and a new awareness of their political disabilities in a male-
dominated society that excluded women from the parliamentary vote, because
of their sex. This consciousness-raising about the wrongs of women presented a
formidable challenge to the prevailing gender ideology that formed the bedrock
of Edwardian society. Emmeline’s campaign during the war years for women’s
right to war work and to equal pay continued the challenge, while the threat of
a post-war return to militancy, with the prospect of pre-war brutalities being
inflicted on women who had proved their worth, would not have been tolerated
by a disillusioned and demoralised population. Militant tactics shook the
complacency of the British government, making it most unlikely, as Morgan
suggests, that without it women’s suffrage would have been granted. Militancy
was a necessary step for winning the vote as Harold Laski and Fred Pethick
Lawrence amongst others have argued.^31 Constance Rover expressed the view
that ‘While one would like to say that law and order should always be main-
tained, it is almost impossible to find a legal means of protest, open to those
outside the constitution, which is effective.’ Without subscribing to the
doctrine that ‘the end justifies the means’, she continues, ‘it is possible to hold
the opinion that the end was a worthy one and that as suffragette methods
stopped short of endangering human life, they were justifiable.’^32 It can be
NICHE IN HISTORY