Emmeline Pankhurst
Emmeline Pankhurst
Emmeline Pankhurstwas a British political activist and leader of the British suffragette movement who helped women win the right to vote. In 1999 Time named Pankhurst as one of the 100 Most Important People of the 20th Century, stating: "she shaped an idea of women for our time; she shook society into a new pattern from which there could be no going back." She was widely criticised for her militant tactics, and historians disagree about their effectiveness, but her work...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionPolitician
Date of Birth15 July 1858
[To the heckler who said, 'If you were my wife I'd poison you':] No, you wouldn't. I'd do it myself.
...the way to reform has always led through prison.
Our sons and daughters must be trained in national service, taught to give as well as to receive.
...the moving spirit of militancy is deep and abiding reverence for human life.
I have never advised the destruction of life, but of property, yes.
I had to get a close-hand view of the misery and unhappiness of a man made world, before I reached the point where I could successfully revolt against it.
I suppose I had always been an unconscious suffragist. With my temperament and my surroundings, I could scarcely have been otherwise.
Men make the moral code and they expect women to accept it.
There is something that Governments care for far more than human life, and that is the security of property, and so it is through property that we shall strike the enemy. Be militant each in your own way. I incite this meeting to rebellion.
The whole argument with the anti-suffragists, or even the critical suffragist man, is this: that you can govern human beings without their consent.
I thought I had been a suffragist before I became a Poor Law Guardian, but now I began to think about the vote in women's hands not only as a right but as a desperate necessity.
What is the use of fighting for a vote if we have not got a country to vote in?
You have to make more noise than anybody else, you have to make yourself more obtrusive than anybody else, you have to fill all the papers more than anybody else, in fact you have to be there all the time and see that they do not snow you under, if you are really going to get your reform realized.
Women had always fought for men, and for their children. Now they were ready to fight for their own human rights. Our militant movement was established.