Emmeline Pankhurst deals with the canard that women cannot be good speakers. The motto of the WSPU was ‘Deeds, not words’, but Pankhurst was so good with words that she became a professional, being paid £200 a year touring the country as the WSPU’s star orator. Every witness to her speaking style remarked on her air of authority on stage. She was always nervous before speaking but never used notes. She was invariably still, using few gestures and refusing to use a microphone, even at the Albert Hall. Every witness recalls the contrast between her physical fragility and beauty and her verbal aggression.
The case she opens here is radical in one sense. How extraordinary it is that, as late as 1908, it was still thought defensible that women should be denied the vote. Yet her words are not those of a revolutionary. This is the case of someone who wants to join the system, not smash it to bits. Pankhurst makes it plain here that she wants the right to participate in the drafting of the law rather than dispute the legitimacy of doing so.
This speech is one of a series, published as penny pamphlets, which Pankhurst collected under the title The Importance of the Vote. The whole case is pragmatic. There is an assumption in this opening that a change in the franchise will produce a change in the sexist law which will, in turn, produce the desired effect in the status of women. The case for women being given the vote is cast in terms of its beneficial consequences for women rather than due to the moral equality that women human beings have with men human beings. Pankhurst makes this case because she wants to be, rhetorically, the soul of reason to show that violent methods attach to valid ends. She is also a single-issue campaigner who has chosen a battle she might win – the franchise – rather than start a forlorn fight for everything, which yields nothing.
It is interesting to note, with the vantage point of almost a century of legal equality, that the law is a guideline but not a guarantee. On pay and progression at work, for example, the story of gender equality has not been concluded yet. It is interesting too that Pankhurst’s opening foreshadows so many of the arguments for gender equality that follow in the decades to come. Though she bridles at the insult that politics is no place for women, later in this speech and elsewhere in her rhetoric she was at pains to suggest that the traditional role of the wife and mother would not be threatened by the vote. Again, she is trying to reassure the public that she is not a revolutionary breathing fire. To this extent, in raising the expectations of her radicalism, her violent methods are a significant drawback and force her into this concession.
Let us take a few of these laws, and see what there is to say about them from the women’s point of view. First of all, let us take the marriage laws. They are made by men for women. Let us consider whether they are equal, whether they are just, whether they are wise. What security of maintenance has the married woman? Many a married woman having given up her economic independence in order to marry, how is she compensated for that loss? What security does she get in that marriage for which she gave up economic independence? Take the case of a woman who has been earning a good income. She is told that she ought to give up her employment when she becomes a wife and a mother. What does she get in return? All that a married man is obliged by law to do for his wife is to provide for her shelter of some kind, food of some kind, and clothing of some kind. It is left to his good pleasure to decide what the shelter shall be, what the food shall be, what the clothing shall be. It is left to him to decide what money shall be spent on the home, and how it shall be spent; the wife has no voice legally in deciding any of these things. She has no legal claim upon any definite portion of his income. If he is a good man, a conscientious man, he does the right thing. If he is not, if he chooses almost to starve his wife, she has no remedy. What he thinks sufficient is what she has to be content with. I quite agree, in all these illustrations, that the majority of men are considerably better than the law compels them to be, so the majority of women do not suffer as much as they might suffer if men were all as bad as they might be, but since there are some bad men, some unjust men, don’t you agree with me that the law ought to be altered so that those men could be dealt with? … By English law, no married woman exists as the mother of the child she brings into the world. In the eyes of the law she is not the parent of her child. The child, according to our marriage laws, has only one parent who can decide the future of the child, who can decide where it shall live, how it shall live, how much shall be spent upon it, how it shall be educated and what religion it shall profess. That parent is the father. These are examples of some of the laws that men have made, laws that concern women. I ask you, if women had had the vote, should we have had such laws? If women had had the votes men have had, we should have had equal laws. We should have had equal laws for divorce, and the law would have said that as nature has given to children two parents, so the law should recognise that they have two parents.
Passion does not always have to be exclaimed. This is a passionate case, fired by deep conviction, but articulated sotto voce. The extended litany of rhetorical questions skirts the border between forensic analysis and mockery but the effect is to focus on the injustice. It was common in 1908 as it is now for men to denigrate women with the slur that they were high on passion but low on reason. This is the exordium of a lawyer before the judge, patiently assembling the rudiments of the case, seeding the important questions, leading the jury towards the inevitable answer to each rhetorical question.
The contrast with Pankhurst’s tolerance of violent protest could hardly be more total. During her trip to New York five years later, she defended herself in a speech called ‘Why We Are Militant’. Bending historical accuracy to breaking point, she argued that the extensions of the franchise in 1832, 1867 and 1884 would never have happened if not for violent protest. Victory, she said, was won by resistance. In her autobiography she was thoroughly unrepentant, claiming that ‘militancy never set the cause of suffrage back but, on the contrary, set it forward at least half a century’. The debate about method split the women’s movement just as every civil rights campaign has been split. Is violence permissible or not? In pre-independence India, apartheid South Africa and the segregated states of America, the same argument takes place. The choice for women in the early twentieth century was Millicent or militant. Pankhurst’s militant line was opposed by the more moderate National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS), under the slogan ‘Law-abiding suffragists’ and led astutely by Millicent Fawcett, whose statue will soon adorn Parliament Square in London. Fawcett argued that the violent outbursts of WSPU members harmed the case for the suffrage because they turned public opinion against the cause and alienated sympathetic members of Parliament. The NUWSS had 50,000 members compared with the 2,000 members of the WSPU, so the moderate line held for most campaigners.
But this shows the perennial power of spectacle and theatre in politics. The suffragettes left us with dramatic moments and fine speeches. Though the moderate and the immoderate campaigners are always at loggerheads, they may well need each other. Fawcett’s suffragists gained their reputation for moderation partly because they were a contrast to Pankhurst’s suffragettes. The analytical and measured tone of this speech shows that there was a meeting point between the two factions. Besides, their objective was the same. Fawcett did not want to break the law, but Pankhurst only wanted to break the law so that she could make the law.
I have spoken to you about the position of the married woman who does not exist legally as a parent, the parent of her own child. In marriage, children have one parent. Out of marriage children have also one parent. That parent is the mother – the unfortunate mother. She alone is responsible for the future of her child; she alone is punished if her child is neglected and suffers from neglect. But let me give you one illustration. I was in Herefordshire during the by-election. While I was there, an unmarried mother was brought before the bench of magistrates charged with having neglected her illegitimate child. She was a domestic servant, and had put the child out to nurse. The magistrat
es – there were colonels and landowners on that bench – did not ask what wages the mother got; they did not ask who the father was or whether he contributed to the support of the child. They sent the woman to prison for three months for having neglected her child. I ask you women here tonight, if women had had some share in the making of the laws, don’t you think they would have found a way of making all fathers of such children equally responsible with the mothers for the welfare of those children? … If it ever was important for women to have the vote, it is ten times more important today, because you cannot take up a newspaper, you cannot go to a conference, you cannot even go to church, without hearing a great deal of talk about social reform and a demand for social legislation. Of course, it is obvious that that kind of legislation – and the Liberal government tells us that if they remain in office long enough we are going to have a great deal of it – is of vital importance to women. If we have the right kind of social legislation it will be a very good thing for women and children.
There is the shadow of something darker here. When the law offers no protection women are at the mercy of men. Not all women were as lucky in their marriages as Emmeline Pankhurst knew herself to be. The welfare of children was also a far bigger question than could be fixed by granting their mothers the vote, and Pankhurst knew that very well. Her experience in Manchester as a Poor Law guardian and the registrar of births and deaths and her various spells in prison gave her an acute sense of the social deprivation in which many women reared their children. She routinely returned to this question in her speeches, seeing the franchise as the first step towards a larger emancipation that would encompass better material conditions. She also campaigned for an end to female prostitution and the sexual exploitation of girls. Elsewhere in The Importance of the Vote Pankhurst lamented the plight of women who were forced, through servitude, to do back-breaking work at the behest of men and women who did the same work as men but were paid less.
This section of this speech also raises the question of what we would now call the culture in which men and women live. Those were days in which a child born out of wedlock created a scandal, as Pankhurst herself discovered. Late in Emmeline’s life her daughter Sylvia had a daughter by a man to whom she was not married. The prospect of the scandal it would cause if the nature of the birth was revealed ended the parliamentary ambitions that, even as a woman in her sixties, Pankhurst still nursed. She was never reconciled with her daughter.
Illegitimacy was a cultural norm given legal expression, and sometimes attitudes have to shift before the law can follow. Pankhurst’s argument, like that of Roy Jenkins when he was liberalising British life at the Home Office in the 1960s, is that the law is an important signal both of a cultural change that is happening and a cultural change that is desirable. Men will not all behave like Richard Pankhurst if the law decrees they should, but the blackguards among them can be more easily prevented from making women live at their mercy. Note, though, that Pankhurst has maintained throughout the tone of forensic rhetorical reasonableness. All of this is below the surface, deeply implicit.
The more one thinks about the importance of the vote for women, the more one realises how vital it is. We are finding out new reasons for the vote, new needs for the vote every day in carrying on our agitation. I hope there may be a few men and women here who will go away determined at least to give this question more consideration than they have in the past. They will see that we women, who are doing so much to get the vote, want it because we realise how much good we can do with it, when we have got it. We do not want it in order to boast of how much we have got. We do not want it because we want to imitate men or to be like men. We want it because without it we cannot do that work which it is necessary and right and proper that every man and woman should be ready and willing to undertake in the interests of the community of which they form a part.
The tone of moderation continues to the conclusion, which is an appeal to the powers-that-be to engage with the cause. After delivering this speech, Pankhurst then went on to the Peckham by-election where the WSPU’s hostility to the unyielding Liberal government made it, faute de mieux, a supporter of the Conservative Party. In Peckham a Liberal majority of 2,339 was converted into a Conservative majority of 2,494. The newspapers attributed the swing to the ‘lady suffragists’, as the Pall Mall Gazette described them.
Pankhurst’s heritage was on the Liberal and Labour Left, but she ended up in the Conservative fold. This was not the drift rightwards of a person growing older but a pragmatic search for success. Pankhurst’s patience with the Liberal Party, which had been stretched by Gladstone’s lack of interest, snapped when Asquith, a noted anti-suffragist, became prime minister in 1908, a fortnight after this speech. Labour she regarded as a bastion of male trade unionism and a party too preoccupied with questions of class to pay much attention to gender. Her sympathy for the Independent Labour Party had evaporated in 1903 when a hall built in her husband’s name for the meetings of members declined to admit women. Besides, she had no sympathy with the Labour Party’s pacifist and anti-imperial bent or its state socialism.
Pankhurst was also a distinctly enterprising radical. The extensive WSPU operation was funded by a commercial organisation that marketed suffragette china, jewellery, soap, handkerchiefs, board games and Christmas cards. The big London department stores sold coats, shoes and underwear in suffragette colours – purple for dignity, white for purity and green for hope.
Pankhurst was selected by the Conservative Party in 1928 as the candidate for Whitechapel and St George’s. The same year, Baldwin’s Conservative government passed the Representation of the People (Equal Franchise) Act 1928, giving women over the age of twenty-one the right to vote on equal terms with men. Emmeline Pankhurst did not, alas, quite live to see that day. She died on 14 June 1928, three weeks before the bill that equalised the franchise passed into law. Her last days were sad ones, marked by the dispute with her daughter Sylvia. Pankhurst suffered greatly, as did La Pasionaria and Aung San Suu Kyi, from the common accusation that she was a bad mother. The accusation was all the more painful because it came from Sylvia in her book The Suffragette Movement.
Pankhurst here leaves us with the central question when she pledges that ‘we women, who are doing so much to get the vote, want it because we realise how much good we can do with it, when we have got it’. The question is whether women politicians are women first and politicians second. Most would find this idea patronising, to use the appropriately male term. The pivotal figure is Margaret Thatcher, who became Britain’s first female prime minister in 1979. Like the suffragettes, who were dismissed as mannish, Thatcher was often denigrated by her opponents as being in some way not really a woman. She was, for example, famously portrayed by the satirical programme Spitting Image standing in line for the urinals.
Pankhurst’s argument in this speech is that the vote is an instrument of power and that power is the handmaiden of progress. Yet she would surely have greeted two female prime ministers, both Conservatives, as a triumph irrespective of the character of their governments. Not that Margaret Thatcher and Theresa May mark the end of the road down which Emmeline Pankhurst embarked. Equality is never really finished. There are always injustices to be remedied. But we are some of the way down the road. Today, nations in the developing world are in every way held back because those societies have yet to learn to value properly the contribution their women make. As Vera Brittain put it, ‘more certainly than Latimer in the days of Mary, Mrs. Pankhurst lighted a candle in England which neither change nor circumstance is likely to put out’.
ISIDORA DOLORES IBÁRRURI GÓMEZ (LA PASIONARIA)
No Pasarán
Mestal Stadium, Valencia
23 August 1936
Isidora Dolores Ibárruri Gómez (1895–1989) both exemplifies why there are so few women in this, or any other, anthology of great speeches and also rebuts that idea. If it is true that the women who gain greatness have to be more remarkable than the men,
Isidora Dolores Ibárruri Gómez is in the first rank of the remarkable. She should be more famous than she is. Such fame as Ibárruri has is not under her given name but under her revolutionary sobriquet of La Pasionaria. The passion flower.
Dolores Ibárruri was the eighth of eleven children born into a mining family in the village of Somorrostro, in the mountains near Bilbao in the Basque country. As a child of delicate health, she was of disappointing economic value and so attended school until she was fifteen, two years longer than the law required. Her parents had hoped that she might become a teacher, but their poverty closed off that opportunity and Dolores was instead apprenticed to a dressmaker. She then worked for three years as a maid and, at the age of twenty, married a migrant miner from Asturias.
Ibárruri’s memoir, published in 1962 under the misleading translation of They Shall Not Pass (the Spanish title had been El Unico Camino – the only way), was written in exile in Russia, probably with the authorities looking over her shoulder. The book contains little in the way of detail about her husband or the six children she bore, including triplets, all girls, born in 1923. There must have been great pain in her life because all but two of her six children died in infancy. In one of the rare lapses into intimacy in her revolutionary boilerplate, La Pasionaria recalls her pain at seeing her two surviving children turn up at the prison gates every day trying to catch a glimpse of their mother. She asks herself: ‘Did I have a right to sacrifice my children, depriving them of a secure and warm home, of a mother’s care and affection that they needed so much?’ Ibárruri’s only son, Ruben, born in 1922, is believed to have died in the Second World War, fighting on the Russian side.
When They Go Low, We Go High Page 28