History questions on Emmeline Pankhurst.

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                                                                        Kashmala Khan

History questions on Emmeline Pankhurst

  1. What was distinctive about the methods used by the WPSU in the campaign for women’s suffrage? The text calls this terrorism. Does this seem fair?

A:  The methods used by the WSPU for its campaign for women’s suffrage were fairly extreme. They chained themselves to railings, wrote ‘Votes for Women’ in acid on golf courses, disrupted the postal service (by making arson attacks on post boxes) attacked MPs physically and verbally, wrote graffiti on church walls and government buildings, broke windows, and burnt down empty buildings. Emmeline Pankhurst motto was ‘ Deeds not Words’. She encouraged militant like approach to the government but it would be debatable to call these methods terrorism.  

In fact, the Suffragettes started off relatively peacefully. It was only in 1905 that the organisation created a stir when Christabel Pankhurst and Annie Kenney interrupted a political meeting in Manchester to ask Winston Churchill and Sir Edward Grey if they believed in women should have the right to vote. Neither of them replied. As a result, the two women got out a banner, which read ‘ Votes for Women’ and shouted at the two politicians to answer the question. Pankhurst and Kenney were thrown out of the meeting and arrested for causing an obstruction and assaulting a police officer. Pankhurst later wrote in her auto biography: "this was the beginning of a campaign the like of which was never known in England, or for that matter in any other country.....we interrupted a great many meetings......and we were violently thrown out and insulted. Often we were painfully bruised and hurt." When a speaker in the House of Commons refused to allow a women’s suffrage amendment to be brought forward their methods became more militant. I would claim it unfair to say that they practiced terrorism. They tried before to be constitutionalists but it failed. There methods didn’t terrorise members of the public, it was aimed at property, they were few fatalities in their struggle for women’s suffrage. Emily Davidson is probably the most famous, she threw herself under the kings horse in the June 1913 Derby. To an extent their methods were more so vandalism than terrorism.

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  1. To what extent was the campaign co-ordinated?

A: The campaign was fairly co-ordinated, as some attacks were done simultaneously. When Emmeline made the argument that the Liberal Government cared more for property than human life. Militants responded with a window-smashing raid on West End shops, followed by a five-day nationwide pillar-box attack. In just one offensive large numbers of pillar-boxes in Westminster, the suburbs of London and in Nottingham and Birmingham were attacked with obliterating and corrosive substances. Newcastle and Bradford also suffered heavily from these attacks. Other places attacked included Bath, Southampton, Richmond, Edinburgh, Kirkcaldy, Southport, ...

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