Welcome back
Ready to start The Suffragette: The History of the Women's Militant Suffrage Movement, 1905-1910?
Start readingRead
Recent Conversations
View allThe Suffragette: The History of the Women's Militant Suffrage Movement, 1905-1910
Pankhurst
1911
Year by year, the militant campaign for the vote, told by one of its own.
The Suffragette: The History of the Women's Militant Suffrage Movement, 1905-1910
E. Sylvia Pankhurst · 1911
Sylvia Pankhurst wrote this history in 1911, in the middle of the fight she is describing — daughter of the WSPU's founder, sister of its chief strategist, and a participant in the deputations and arrests she narrates. It is a chronicle in the truest sense: year by year from 1905 to 1910, it tracks how a small group of women's escalating tactics — heckling, arrest, hunger strike, forcible feeding — turned a decades-old, stalled political demand into a national crisis the Government could no longer ignore. Read as history, it is a case study in how a movement decides, again and again, to escalate; read as memoir, it is an insider's account of a family and a cause that were, for Pankhurst, inseparable.
24 chapters · 138,207 words · ~10.5 hr read
Contents
Origins, 1905-1906
The founding of the Women's Social and Political Union, the first militant tactics, and the 1906 general election that put women's suffrage on the national stage.
Escalation, 1906-1907
A year of deputations, arrests, and by-elections, as the WSPU tests how far confrontation can carry the cause.
The Freedom League and Renewed Militancy, 1907-1908
A split within the movement produces the Women's Freedom League, even as militant tactics against the Government intensify through 1908.
Forcible Feeding and the Fight to 1910
Window-breaking, mass arrests, hunger strikes, and forcible feeding carry the campaign through 1909 into the general elections of 1910.