My Own Story: Inspiration for the major motion picture Suffragette Paperback – 24 Sept. 2015

This is the autobiography of the great suffragette leader, written on the eve of the First World War when the struggle for women's right to vote was not yet won, and just at the time when she had a great falling out with her daughter Sylvia and others over some of the militant tactics of the Women's Social and Political Union. There is comparatively little about the author's early life here. She was born Emmeline Goulden, and grew up in a highly politicised family, acquiring experience of the poverty and injustice of working women's lives when became a Poor Law Guardian. She married a prominent suffrage supporter, barrister Richard Pankhurst, who drafted the first women's enfranchisement parliamentary bill in 1870. The bulk of the book recounts the increasingly bitter and militant struggles of the WPSU from around 1906 onwards, starting from rejections of the repeated petitions and requests for meetings with Campbell-Bannerman, Asquith and other Liberal government figures, suffrage bills being passed at second reading in the Commons, only to be dropped or have further progress frustrated by filibustering. This led to frustration and adoption of more militant tactics including window breaking, letter bombs and arson of (empty) buildings: "We had exhausted argument. Therefore either we had to give up our agitation altogether, as the suffragists of the eighties virtually had done, or else we must act, and go on acting, until the selfishness and the obstinacy of the Government was broken down, or the Government themselves destroyed". Pankhurst justifies these tactics by comparing them to the violence in earlier campaigns for democracy through the 19th century and earlier: "The militancy of men, through all the centuries, has drenched the world with blood, and for these deeds of horror and destruction men have been rewarded with monuments, with great songs and epics. The militancy of women has harmed no human life save the lives of those who fought the battle of righteousness". This bitter period was also marked by shocking violence of the police towards the suffragettes, the horrible force feeding of suffragettes and the hunger strikes, which provoked further acts of militancy.Looking back from the perspective of 2018, a century after women first won the vote (albeit only those over 30 until 1928), it is easy to see Pankhurst as a great pioneer in achieving a simple and obvious measure of basic justice, for which she is rightly lauded. Yet some of the militant tactics increasingly adopted by the WSPU alienated some of the most prominent suffragettes and other supporters, and few would defend the use of such tactics by campaigning groups today. Pankhurst's philosophy was total dedication to the cause of women's suffrage, avoiding all distractions of getting involved in other social issues and causes ("No member of the W.S.P.U. divides her attention between suffrage and other social reforms. We hold that both reason and justice dictate that women shall have a share in reforming the evils that afflict society, especially those evils bearing directly on women themselves. Therefore, we demand, before any other legislation whatever, the elementary justice of votes for women". This tactic can be justified against the illiberalism on this issue of the leaders of the Liberal Party, which many early suffragettes supported ("our long alliance with the great parties, our devotion to party programmes, our faithful work at elections, never advanced the suffrage cause one step. The men accepted the services of the women, but they never offered any kind of payment".); nevertheless, it does seem to have become very narrow and Pankhurst's leadership of the organisation stifling and autocratic to the extent of her viewing it as more akin to a paramilitary organisation ("we have no annual meeting, no business sessions, no elections of officers. The W.S.P.U. is simply a suffrage army in the field. It is purely a volunteer army, and no one is obliged to remain in it. Indeed we don’t want anybody to remain in it who does not ardently believe in the policy of the army"). In some ways, despite her arguably fanatical determination, she was pessimistic about her ultimate chances of success: "Universal suffrage in a country where women are in a majority of one million is not likely to happen in the lifetime of any reader of this volume". She died in 1928 just before true universal suffrage was achieved, and women and men over 21 could both vote.

This book is written in a clear, lucid and serious style, as befits a work a hundred years old. It is full of interest. For example, I had not realised how opposed to women's suffrage WE Gladstone was, and the lengths he went to to prevent it. But his efforts were minor league compared to that of Asquith, who comes out of this book very badly. Mrs Pankhurst herself has an interesting history. She was obviously influenced by her liberal parents and upbringing. But her work as a Poor Law Guardian made her conclude that the unfair laws and practices of the time were unlikely to change unless women got the vote.This book was written in 1914, in part for an American readership, before the struggle for votes for women was finally won. So it largely avoids the benefits of hindsight and revisionism. It contains a lot of personal feelings. But it is also of great interest historically. There are some remarkable aspects to the struggle, such as police brutality and government obduracy, paralleled in other movements in the relatively recent past.There is perhaps a degree of polemic about the book, but it is a heartfelt and worthy polemic and it is difficult to disagree with the points which Mrs Pankhurst makes. Also the reader might find the parliamentary and legal aspects a bit dry, lengthy and complex, but they are necessary and important. However, towards the end she spends undue time reproducing speeches, but omits to tell us the (more interesting) details of how "The Suffragette" continued to be produced when the authorities did all they could to close it down.I was left feeling how odd it was that within a relatively short time of all this violence and oppression by the authorities, womens' suffrage was achieved and all was well. The "forces of law and order" must have felt decidedly non-plussed and there must have been a lot of egg over plenty of faces.This is a book which needed to be written. And it ends on a note of justified optimism.

The great thing about this autobiography is the way it brings to life the years before the first world war when the battle for women's suffrage was at its height. Emmeline Pankhurst was a driven person and this was written in 1914 when the battle for suffrage was still not won so do not expect a balanced account of the events. Driven people do not generally see both points of view. There is, for example, no acknowledgement here that the Liberal government against which she was fighting was actually one of the great radical reforming governments of the 20th century. Nor is there much recognition that within the suffrage movement there were several groups with different views about how the struggle should be taken forward. Even her daughter Sylvia, who had, by the time this book was written, broken away from her mother's organisation because she felt that women's suffrage should be part of a wider social campaign, gets very few mentions. But the book is a vivid and exciting account of the powerful force of the suffrage movement and the way it came close to dominating British political life in the decade before the first world war. Towards the end the book is 'padded' a bit with long verbatim reports of Mrs Pankhurst's speeches, but make no mistake it is a compelling story and anyone interested in the social history and development of our society should not fail to read it.