Women Erased: Emmeline Pankhurst
The Suffragette leader posthumously demonised by the radical left
The name Emmeline Pankhurst is synonymous with women’s rights. She began her political life on the left, but later became an anti-communist activist and British patriot. Arguably, this is the cause of her modern-day demonisation. In 2020, Black Lives Matter supporters urged authorities to dismantle memorials dedicated to Emmeline Parkhurst as punishment for her purported collusion with an “imperial” and “supremacist” state at the peak of the British Empire.
The latest snippet from my upcoming book..
{NOTE: The paragraphs below do not appear as written in my book, but are very brief summaries of the topics discussed}
Born Emmeline Goulding in Manchester, England, in 1858, the future Suffragette leader was raised by political parents heavily involved in left-leaning movements. From age 14, Emmeline was active in campaigning for women’s suffrage. As an adult, she attempted to join the Independent Labour Party, which would go on to become the Labour Party of today, but was barred because of her sex.
An unapologetic militant, Pankhurst subsequently signed up to the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), a revolutionary group that often clashed with police and was frequently reviled by its contemporaries.
An affluent barrister named Richard Pankhurst became her husband in 1879 and the couple had five children. Mr. Pankhurst also promoted women’s suffrage and stood (unsuccessfully) for a UK Parliament seat, representing the upmarket Russell Square area of London. The husband-and-wife team mingled with the left-wing hierarchy of the day, including Keir Hardie, the first Parliamentary leader of the Labour Party.
WSPU activists delivered powerful speeches at raucous rallies; they protested loudly outside Parliament, and when in 1908, Pankhurst broke through barriers, she would experience her first taste of imprisonment.
Cunningly, the Manchester firebrand believed that the dismal conditions in jail would likely illicit sympathy for the Suffragette cause, and she therefore ensured she was arrested again and again.
In all, Pankhurst went to prison seven times, and used this as a campaigning tool. The ploy was effective, particularly when the group introduced a hunger strike policy and refused to eat while incarcerated. When authorities decided to employ force-feeding as a solution, doctors, journalists and others in public life ferociously opposed it.
Press coverage of the women was mixed. Some sympathised, others mocked and ridiculed. A number urged Pankhurst to adopt a less antagonistic approach. When Pankhurst ally Emily Davison died after hurling herself under a horse in 1913, it made global headlines and inspired unprecedented sympathy for the Suffragettes, and women’s suffrage more broadly.
As the years rolled on, Emmeline Pankhurst’s husband died, she sold her house and devoted the remainder of her life to traveling and speaking, particularly through the UK and the United States.
In 1926, she joined the Conservative Party and publicly declared that her exposure to socialism and communism during travels to Russia had radically transformed her political views, as had her time in the capitalist and democratic United States. She believed in the US and what it stood for and was convinced that communism produced misery while the American system delivered freedom and progress. Her new political views caused a vast chasm with her daughters, principally Silvia, who remained a socialist and anarchist.
When the Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests of 2020 erupted, activists tore down statues of historic figures in the US and Europe, claiming they celebrated “racists” who had engaged in, or been connected with, the Atlantic slave trade. Emmeline Pankhurst monuments located outside the UK Parliament building in London, and at St. Peter’s Square in Manchester, were soon made a target, prompted by the purported collusion between the Suffragettes’ and the British political establishment, which BLM supporters insisted amounted to complicity with imperialism and colonialism.
An academic article from a University of Edinburgh student in August 2020 claimed, “The history of suffrage was no less racist or imperialist than any other aspect of American or British history.”
The statement implies that American and British history is characterized solely by racism and imperialism and ignores the very many individuals who valiantly fought for the advancement of human freedom in the 19th and 20th centuries. Today, they are condemned for fighting their cause in a context (and a world) that the left-wing despises and judges by contemporary standards. Heroic figures from years ago battled in the world they were in, what else could they do?
Next time: JK Rowling. Herself a left-leaning figure, Rowling nevertheless opposes the radical left’s gender views, and for this, has paid a high price.