Emmeline Pankhurst

Date

1858–1928

Description

City of birth: Manchester
Country of birth: United Kingdom
Field of activity: Politics — activism, feminism

More detail coming ...

Quotes

‘Well now, I want to argue with you as to whether our way is the right one: I want to explain all these things that you have not understood: I want to make you understand exactly what our plan of campaign has been because I have always felt that if you could only make people understand most people's hearts are in the right place and most people's understandings are sound and most people are more or less logical — if you could only make them understand. … But this experience will show you that if you really want to get anything done, it is not so much a matter of whether you alienate sympathy; sympathy is a very unsatisfactory thing if it is not practical sympathy. It does not matter to the practical suffragist whether she alienates sympathy that was never of any use to her. What she wants is to get something practical done, and whether it is done out of sympathy or whether it is done out of fear, or whether it is done because you want to be comfortable again and not be worried in this way, doesn't particularly matter so long as you get it. We had enough of sympathy for fifty years; it never brought us anything, and we would rather have an angry man going to the government and saying, my business is interfered with and I won't submit to its being interfered with any longer because you won't give women the vote than to have a gentleman come onto our platforms year in and year out and talk about his ardent sympathy with woman suffrage.’

Author

Emmeline Pankhurst

Speaker

Emmeline Pankhurst

Title of the publication

Freedom or Death

Other contributors

n/a

Publisher (or journal name with vol. and number)

Public domain

City of publication

Hartford

Country of publication (modern nation-state equivalent)

United States of America

Publication date

13 November 1919

Location [pp. or web]

https://awpc.cattcenter.iastate.edu/2017/03/09/freedom-or-death-part-1-nov-13-1913/ *you can access it from many places

Original language

English

Genre

Speech

Context

In 1913, Emmeline Pankhurst was invited to speak at the Parsons Theater in Hartford, Connecticut, by Mrs Katharine Houghton Hepburn (mother of the future actress), president of the Connecticut Women's Suffrage Association. Mrs Pankhurst was on a fund-raising tour of the United States and the following day left Hartford by train, with $1,400 in donations. ‘Freedom or Death’ is widely regarded as one of the most significant speeches of the twenthieth century.

‘But no one could surpass the achievement of Emmeline Pankhurst. Mrs Pankhurst was a fighter. Not everyone, even now, would approve of every tactic she used. But it's sometimes forgotten that it was the example given by Mrs Pankhurst and her colleagues in wartime as much as their militancy in peacetime which brought, first grudging respect, and then enthusiastic support for her cause. The reward of that sacrifice was the enfranchisement in 1918 of women over thirty; and in the same year it became possible for women to enter Parliament. The gratitude of the nation brought justice for women.’

Author

Margaret Thatcher

Speaker

Margaret Thatcher

Title of the publication

‘Pankhurst Lecture to the 300 Group’

Other contributors

n/a

Publisher (or journal name with vol. and number)

Margaret Thatcher Foundation

City of publication

London

Country of publication (modern nation-state equivalent)

United Kingdom

Publication date

18 July 1990

Location [pp. or web]

https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/108156

Original language

English

Genre

Speech

Context

In response to the 1979 general election results, where despite the election of the UK’s first woman Prime Minister, the new House of Commons only had 19 women out of 635 Members, the all-party 300 Group, campaigned for more women in politics and public life. Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, addressed the 300 Group at the Savoy Hotel in Central London four months prior to losing the leadership of the Conservative party to John Major.

‘I shall fight, I shall fight, I shall fight, from the moment I enter prison to struggle against overwhelming odds; I shall resist the doctors if they attempt to feed me. I was sentenced last May in this court to nine months' imprisonment. I remained in prison six weeks. There are people who have laughed at the ordeal of hunger-striking and forcible feeding. All I can say is, and the doctors can bear me out, that I was released because, had I remained there much longer, I should have been a dead woman.’

Author

Emmeline Pankhurst

Speaker

Emmeline Pankhurst

Title of the publication

My Own Story

Other contributors

n/a

Publisher (or journal name with vol. and number)

Eveleigh Nash

City of publication

London

Country of publication (modern nation-state equivalent)

United Kingdom

Publication date

6 January 2011

Location [pp. or web]

p. 298

Other location

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/34856/34856-h/34856-h.htm

Original language

English

Genre

Book

‘I do not remember a time when I could not read, nor any time when reading was not a joy and a solace. As far back as my memory runs I loved tales, especially those of a romantic and idealistic character. Pilgrim’s Progress was an early favourite, as well as another of Bunyan's visionary romances, which does not seem to be as well known, his Holy War. At nine I discovered the Odyssey and very soon after that another classic which has remained all my life a source of inspiration. This was Carlyle's French Revolution, and I received it with much the same emotion that Keats experienced when he read Chapman's translation of Homer —" ... like some watcher of the skies, When a new planet swims into his ken.’

Author

Emmeline Pankhurst

Speaker

Emmeline Pankhurst

Title of the publication

My Own Story

Publisher (or journal name with vol. and number)

Eveleigh Nash

City of publication

London

Country of publication (modern nation-state equivalent)

United Kingdom

Publication date

6 January 2011

Location [pp. or web]

p. 3

Other location

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/34856/34856-h/34856-h.htm

Original language

English

Genre

Book