It is very true that those who are fighting a hard battle, those who are sacrificing greatly in order to win a victory, appreciate victories and are more enthusiastic when victories are won. The whole country went wild. If any gentleman who is the father of daughters in this meeting went into his home and looked around at his wife and daughters, if he lived in England and was an Englishman, he couldn't tell whether some of his daughters were militants or non-militants. That would explain the whole situation. Tonight it is not to advocate a reform that I address a meeting in Hartford. Emmeline Pankhurst (1858-1928) was a tireless political activist, who led the Women's Social and Political Union, the militant faction of the movement for women's suffrage. Emmeline was born in Manchester in 1858. That book was written so that women should know. It is quite easy for you to understand - it would not be necessary for me to enter into explanations at all - the desirability of revolution if I were a man, in any of these countries, even in a part of the British Empire known to you as Ireland. Emmeline Pankhurst (1858-1928) | Towards Emancipation? They also broke the windows of many of the clubs, the smart clubs in Piccadilly. Well, they little know what women are. It doesn't matter whether you have practically every member of parliament on your side, you cannot get what you want unless the cabinet initiate legislation, a situation by which the private member has become almost of no account at all, the ordinary private member of parliament. The document below is the text of a speech that Pankhurst gave in New York in 1913 in defense of her organization's approach. Women have found a new kind of self-respect, a new kind of energy, a new kind of strength: and I think that of all oppressed peoples who might claim your sympathy and support, women who are fighting this fight unknown in the history of humanity before, fighting this fight in the twentieth century for greater powers of self-development, self-expression and self-government, might very well attract the sympathy and the practical help of American people. Emmeline Goulden was born on 14 July 1858 in Manchester into a family with a tradition of radical politics. I think they are making things extremely lively for the politicians up there, and I don't know whether every American woman knows what those two women, working in conjunction with others, are doing for the enfranchisement of American women at this moment. Emmeline Pankhurst Speech: Freedom or death - Hartford, Connecticut on November 13, 1913 Key Extracts "We women, in trying to make our case clear, always have to make as part of our argument, and urge upon men in our audience the fact - a very simple fact - that women are human beings." Then, the latest manifestation, the latest cause of militancy has been the breaking of the great conspiracy of silence with regard to moral questions and the question of social disease that we have had during the last few years. Emmeline Pankhurst | Biography & Facts | Britannica Germaine Greer on Emmeline Pankhurst's extraordinary 'Freedom or death First of all there is the condition of the working woman. Though often criticized for her strongly militant tactics, her contributions toward achieving women's suffrage in Great Britain are well-recognized. All these people have had to be moved in order to bring enough pressure to bear upon the government to compel them to deal with the question of woman suffrage. It is the only way. A good deal of the opposition to woman suffrage is coming from the very worst element in the population, who realize that once you get woman suffrage, a great many places that are tolerated today will have to disappear. Emmeline Pankhurst: Who was she and how did she lead the suffragette Her militant tactics earned her several imprisonments and stirred up controversy among various suffragist groups. Well now, we have had a royal commission on divorce and we have had a report, but there is no security for women that they are to have justice under a new law so long as men are chosen by men to legislate and those men are likely to register the moral opinions of men, not the moral opinions of women, in legislation. Many of you have expressed sympathy, probably even practical sympathy, with revolutionaries in Russia. Those women broke shopkeepers' windows, and what was the situation? They stand self-confessed failures, because the problems that perplex civilization are absolutely appalling today. Some of the guards - I think men who had never known what it was to earn a living, who knew nothing of the difficulties of a man's life, let alone the difficulties of a woman's life - came out, and they said: "Why did you break our windows? You see, in spite of a good deal that we hear about revolutionary methods not being necessary for American women, because American women are so well off, most of the men of the United States quite calmly acquiesce in the fact that half of the community are deprived absolutely of citizen rights, and we women, in trying to make our case clear, always have to make as part of our argument, and urge upon men in our audience the fact - a very simple fact - that women are human beings. There you have in itself an explanation of an uprising of a very determined kind to secure better conditions; and when you know that the government is the largest employer of all the employers and sets a horribly bad example to the private employer in the wages that it pays to women, there you have another explanation. www.theguardian.com. We know this, that whatever women's wishes might be, it is their duty for the sake of the race, itself, to save the race, to insist upon having this question of the moral health of the nation approached from the women's point of view and settled by women in cooperation with men. Great speeches of the 20th century: Emmeline Pankhurst's Freedom or I could go on tonight pointing out to you how in my country small crimes against property, small thefts, small injuries to property are punished more severely than are any crimes committed against the physical and the moral integrity of members of my sex. Just to give you an illustration of the effectiveness of these methods in waking the Britisher up, in conveying to him that women want the vote and are going to get it even if we do not adopt quite the men's methods in order to do so. Well, then that morning I was rung up over and over again by excited gentlemen who begged that those golf links should be spared, saying: "I don't know whether your followers know that we are all suffragists, on our committee, we are entirely in favor of woman suffrage." We are not working to get the vote. Suffrage Speeches from the Dock - Google Books And so this "Cat and Mouse Act" which is being used against women today has failed: and the home secretary has taken advantage of the fact that parliament is not sitting, to revive and use alongside of it the forcible feeding. We had a disease which was called Mafeka, because when the victory of Mafeking was declared everybody in the country, except a few people who tried to keep their heads steady, went absolutely mad with gratification at the sacrifice of thousands of human beings in the carrying on of that war. Suffragettes, 1912: 'Rather broken windows than broken promises' Have you read about American dollars that have been given the Irish law-breakers? I have always said human life is sacred, and in a woman's revolution we respect human life, and we stop short of injury to human life. They couldn't vote the legislature out. When his daughters went out to post a letter, he couldn't tell if they went harmlessly out to make a tennis engagement at that pillar-box by posting a letter, or whether they went to put some corrosive matter in that would burn all the letters up inside of that box. He decides absolutely the conditions in which that child is to live; he decides how it is to be educated; he can even decide what religion it is to profess, and the mother's consent is not obtained to any of these decisions. A speech delivered at Parsons Theater in Hartford, Connecticut, on November 13, 1913. Well, then the shopkeepers who could not understand why we should break the shopkeepers' windows. When they put us in prison at first, simply for taking petitions, we submitted; we allowed them to dress us in prison clothes; we allowed them to put us in solitary confinement; we allowed them to treat us as ordinary criminals, and put us amongst the most degraded of those criminals: and we were very glad of the experience, because out of that experience we learned of the need for prison reform; we learned of the fearful mistakes that men of all nations have made when it is a question of dealing with human beings; we learned of some of the appalling evils of our so-called civilization that we could not have learned in any other way except by going through the police courts of our country, in the prison vans that take you up to prison and right through that prison experience. "Well," I said, "don't you think your greater safety is to keep the women in the club as a sort of insurance policy against anything happening to your links?". If there had been a stock broker in Adrianople who wanted to communicate with a customer in London, he could have done it; there might have been a little delay, but he was able to do it, but we, without the loss of a single life in our war, in this effort to rouse business men to compel the government to give us the vote, because they are the people who can do it in the last resort, we entirely prevented stock brokers in London from telegraphing to stock brokers in Glasgow and vice versa: for one whole day telegraphic and telephonic communication was entirely stopped. Now whether you approve of us or whether you do not, you must see that we have brought the question of women's suffrage into a position where it is of first rate importance, where it can be ignored no longer. We were determined to press this question of the enfranchisement of women to the point where we were no longer to be ignored by the politicians as had been the case for about fifty years, during which time women had patiently used every means open to them to win their political enfranchisement. Not by the forces of civil war can you govern the very weakest woman. Hartford Speech November 1913 | Suffragettes and Vote. Those women have taken up this fight for their own sake, it is true, because they wish to be free, but chiefly for the sake of the women less fortunate than themselves. This speech was given on November 13th, 1913 by Emmeline Pankhurst, who has been called the mother of British suffragette movement, in Hartford, Connecticut. Now then, let me say something about what has brought it about because you must realize that only the very strongest of motives would lead women to do what we have done. Human life for us is sacred, but we say if any life is to be sacrificed it shall be ours; we won't do it ourselves, but we will put the enemy in the position where they will have to choose between giving us freedom or giving us death. Includes a transcript of the 1908 trial of the suffragette leaders, their speeches, and major pamphlets of the Women's Social and Political Union. That is a homely truth that all of us have to learn. That is what happened in the old days. There may be a few states in America, and I believe in Canada, where the same law obtains, but the English divorce law is in itself such a stigma upon women, such a degradation to women, such an invitation to immorality on the part of the married man, that I think that divorce law in itself would justify a rebellion on the part of the women. I do not care very much even whether you really understand, because when you are in a fighting movement, a movement which every fiber of your being has forced you to enter, it is not the approval of other human beings that you want; you are so concentrated on your object that you mean to achieve that object even if the whole world was up in arms against you. Emmeline Pankhurst. If the child of two parents has any property inherited from relatives, and that child dies before it is of age to make a will, or without making a will, the only person who inherits the property of that child is the child's father; the mother does not exist as her child's heir at all; and during the father's lifetime she not only cannot inherit from her child but she has no voice whatever in deciding the life of her child. When your forefathers threw the tea into Boston harbor, a good many women had to go without their tea. They have had to pass special legislation, and now they are on the point of admitting that that special legislation has absolutely failed. Women are refusing, men in this meeting, even if that were true, to have their lives made safe at the expense of their sisters. 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. Emmeline Pankhurst, "Speech from the Dock," 1908 Emmeline Pankhurst (1858-1928) was a famous British suffragette. Her husband can give the child away to be educated somewhere else or he can bring whomever he pleases into the house to educate the child. When you think of the object of that war it really makes some of us feel very indignant at the hypocrisy of some of our critics.