Word: pankhurst
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...Richard Pankhurst, whom she married in 1879, when she was 20 and he was 40, was a brilliant lawyer, selflessly dedicated to reform, who drafted pioneering legislation granting women independent control of their finances. Emmeline bore five children but lost two sons, and when Richard died suddenly in 1898, she was left to bring up her children alone, with no private means...
...surviving Pankhurst women formed an intrepid, determined, powerfully gifted band. In 1903 they founded the Women's Social and Political Union. It was, Emmeline Pankhurst wrote later, "simply a suffrage army in the field." The charismatic, dictatorial eldest daughter Christabel emerged in her teens as the W.S.P.U.'s strategist and an indomitable activist, with nerves of tungsten. Mrs. Pankhurst's second daughter Sylvia, the artist, pioneered the corporate logo: as designer and scene painter of the W.S.P.U., she created banners, costumes and badges in the suffragist livery of white, purple and green. Though the family split later over policy, their...
...W.S.P.U. adopted a French Revolutionary sense of crowd management, public spectacle and symbolic ceremony. They would greet one of their number on release from prison and draw her triumphantly in a flower-decked wagon through the streets, and they staged elaborate allegorical pageants and torchlight processions, with Mrs. Pankhurst proudly walking at their head (if she wasn't in jail). Her example was followed internationally: the U.S. suffragist Alice Paul, who had taken part in suffragist agitation when she was a student at the London School of Economics, imported Pankhurst militancy to the U.S., leading a march 5,000 strong...
...Pankhurst took the suffragist thinking far and wide: she even managed to slip in a lecture tour of the U.S. between spells of a Cat & Mouse jail sentence. In her tireless public speaking, suffrage meant more than equality with men. While she was bent on sweeping away the limits of gender, she envisioned society transformed by feminine energies, above all by chastity, far surpassing the male's. In this, she is the foremother of the separatist wing of feminism today: the battle for the vote was for her a battle for the bedroom. She wrote, "We want to help women...
...sigh at the ardor of her hope in what voting could achieve, not to be amazed at the confidence she showed in political reform. But heroism looks to the future, and heroes hold to their faith. Joan of Arc was the suffragists' mascot, Boadicea their goddess, and Mrs. Pankhurst the true inheritor of the armed maidens of heroic legend...