Twice before here I have shared interviews with famous figures from the past (Bram Stoker and Charles Dickens) – this week, I give you another, but very different, this time with the British suffragette Christabel Pankhurst.
Christabel was born in 1880 into a campaigning family – her mother, Emmeline (1858–1928, née Goulden), also grew up in a politically active family, and as a teenager joined the women’s suffrage movement. She was a friend of Labour Party founder Keir Hardie (who we’ve also met before) and founded the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) in 1903 – a group more than ready to embrace civil disobedience to get its point across: women should have the vote. (Context: the first European country to give women the vote was Finland, and even that wasn’t until 1906; Britain lagged shamefully behind.)
Meanwhile, Emmeline’s husband Richard Pankhurst (1834–1898) – 24 years older than her – was a socialist barrister and the original author of the first British law to give married women property rights. “Why are women so patient? Why don’t you force us to give you the vote?” he would often say. Between them they had three daughters and two sons. The daughters, of whom Christabel was eldest, all became suffragists (the two sons sadly died young).
Christabel was smart from a young age, learning to read by herself, and went on to take a law degree from the University of Manchester, her home city (although she had grown up partly in London) – but despite her flying colours, she was not allowed to practise. She was quick to follow in her mother’s campaigning footsteps, and was first arrested in 1905 (for spitting at a policeman after disrupting a Liberal Party meeting). With Emmeline often travelling to spread the word, Christabel was soon mostly running the WSPU.
In this interview, we meet her quite early in her career – in November 1910.1 At this point, she was based in London again; known as ‘Queen of the Mob’, she had already made a name for herself through her wit and oratory during court appearances (she was jailed on more than one occasion) and her writing for the WSPU’s journal Votes for Women, which had a circulation of 30,000 a week.
The interview speaks for itself – but let’s remember that there are two people in every interview. And as far as I can tell, nobody has ever told the story of her interviewer. But that’s what I’m going to try to do next time, so I won’t say anything more for now!
A finely balanced combination of brains, enthusiasm, and confidence characterizes the Votes-for-Women movement. Its organization is near to perfection, and its vitality is as unquestionable as it is unquenchable.
When I went the other day to the headquarters of the Women’s Social and Political Union, at Clement’s Inn, just off the Strand, to see Miss Chrisbabel Pankhurst, it was with the idea not only of glancing, through her eyes, at the present position of affairs, but of trying to inveigle her into divulging the future ‘surprises’ awaiting Cabinet Ministers should they prove recalcitrant during the coming session. Dreams of the siege of the Houses of Parliament, of megaphone messages, of Suffragette airships, and all the rest of it, had assailed me. But in this last particular Miss Christabel, like a good strategist, was wily and reticent.
“Plans! Yes; lots of them. But I am not at liberty to unfold them before the time. Week by week, you know, our doings and fixtures are chronicled in Votes for Women.”
Miss Pankhurst looked singularly young as she sat there in her private room, the signs and impedimenta of business all around her. She looked the picture of health, too, with her frank, mobile face, clear pink and white complexion, blue-grey eyes, and soft brown hair; and was gowned simply and artistically in green. To a stranger it would have been a surprise to realize her self-possession and dignity. And many a man would have envied the ease with which she could switch herself off from the conversation in train to answer equally ably the queries of all and sundry that came intermittently over the telephone by her side. She is level-headed, confident, well-informed, and she is deadly in earnest. You cannot draw her with chaff. She squashes the least note of levity with a reproachful: “This is a serious movement. We are strictly political.”
“Our business now is to get this Conciliation Bill passed,” she said; “and a very important event is the monster meeting to be held at the Albert Hall on November 10th. All the speeches that night will be in support of the Bill, and among the speakers will be Mr Israel Zangwill and Mr Gerald Arbuthnot, MP, a member of the Conciliation committee. Mrs Pankhurst will be in the chair.”
“And after?”
“After that meeting the various resolutions asking for facilities towards the passing of the Bill will be presented by a deputation of leading women to Mr Asquith. If his answer is ‘No’, a very much larger deputation of women will go to Westminster on November 22nd.”
From the tone of Miss Pankhurst’s voice something like a serious revolution of women Suffragists may be anticipated if this Bill – which, it will be remembered, was carried by a majority of 110 on its second reading – is not allowed to go further.
[The Conciliation Bill proposed to give property-owning women the vote. It passed its first reading and in fact the second had a majority of 135, but prime minister H. H. Asquith called an election for 18th November, scuppering the suffrage movement. He was also instrumental on the failure of subsequent bills in 1911 and 1912, and it would be 1918 when women over 30 owning property finally got the vote – and not until 1928 when it became universal… only two weeks after Emmeline Pankhurst died.]
“In the meantime,” Miss Pankhurst added, “we are, of course, circularizing all MPs to bring pressure to bear on Cabinet Ministers that they may give the Bill fair play.”
“Importunity is one of your watchwords, is it not?”
“Yes. The concession of the vote is a just measure; we women want the vote, and we shall go on pestering Parliament till we get it. If MPs would fight for us we should not need to be such a nuisance to them. But they don’t, even when pledged to our cause. They just knuckle under to Cabinet Ministers, instead of bringing the necessary pressure to bear upon them.”
“Men seem terribly frightened of doing anything so ‘revolutionary’ as giving women the Parliamentary vote,” I said. “They think it would mean a sex war. What is your view about that?”
“I don’t see how that could be,” said Miss Pankhurst. “It is a battle between women and the Government. A political war, not a sex war.”
“Still, some of them think it would lead to a sex war.”
“I don’t think so. Men are already getting less antagonistic towards the movement. Indeed, some of our best friends are men,” added Miss Pankhurst. “The fact is, men are afraid of change, although when the changes are made they accept them without any fuss. Look at the changes that have come to women in the last hundred years. And yet men like us still. They would not like us to be the fainting, weeping, weak-minded creatures we used once to be. They like us as we are now. If you come to think of it, changes made in defiance of men are always approved by them afterwards.”
New hope for women Suffragists lies in the changes in the Constitution involved in the movement towards ‘All Round Home Rule’ – Imperial federation beginning at home – which is creating so much attention just now, and being so eagerly discussed. These changes may come into the domain of practical politics sooner than we think. Commenting on this situation, Miss Pankhurst wrote the other day in a most interesting leader headed “Will Women Get Home Rule?” as follows:
“If the Constitution is to be made over again, women will clamour for admission with more insistence than ever before. If there is to be self-government for England, for Ireland, for Scotland, for Wales, then there must be self-government for women too. If there are to be local Parliaments in the various parts of the United Kingdom women will claim a share in electing them…
[Side note: self-government in Scotland and Wales only happened – at least in the limited form of devolution – in 1999; in Ireland – well, it’s complicated, and remember this interview took place a decade years before the Irish War of Independence.]
“These considerations may or may not have presented themselves to the mind of our party politicians, but they cannot remain blind to them for very long. Women are able nowadays to express their point of view in a manner which cannot well be overlooked, and, moreover, there are men who are determined to see even justice done between the sexes.”
“When did you first become interested in Women’s Suffrage?” I asked.
“I was brought up in the movement. My father, who was both a lawyer and a politician, drafted the first Women’s Suffrage Bill, and also the Married Women’s Property Act Bill. That association counts for a great deal, of course; yet I think one needs a kind of ‘personal conversion’ as well, and that came to me when I was organizing women in trades’ unions.”
“And how did you learn to become a public speaker?”
“By actually speaking. I made my maiden speech at college – Victoria University, Manchester – about ten years ago. I had no intention of speaking, but there was a debate and I felt strongly on the subject, so I just got up and spoke. That was the first plunge.”
Other claims on Miss Pankhurst’s time brought our interview to a close. So regretfully I departed, thinking out a hundred unasked questions which the interview had suggested.
Christabel never quite started that “serious revolution” after the Conciliation Bill was sidestepped, but certainly she scaled up her activism, endorsing the smashing of windows in government offices. But she had to flee to France, returning when the First World War broke out. She then channelled her energies into editing The Suffragette newspaper. In 1921 she emigrated to California and became more known as an ardent Christian evangelist. After brief periods in Britain and France again, she would die in Los Angeles in 1958.
In two weeks’ time… let’s meet her interviewer.
The interview was published in the 10th November 1910 issue of Hearth and Home, a magazine aimed at women and which ran from 1891 to 1914.