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Reviews / Comptes Rendus

June Purvis, Emmeline Pankhurst: A Biography (New York: Routledge 2002).

OVER THE LAST several years, historians have shown continued interest in the campaign for women's suffrage in early 20th-century Britain. Recent work by June Hannam, Karen Hunt, Laura E. Nym Mayhall, and Nicoletta Gullace has revisited in innovative ways the most important questions around the struggle for the women's vote, such as the involvement of working-class women, the meaning of militancy, and the impact of World War I. The Pankhursts — mother Emmeline and her warring daughters Christabel (the apple of her mother's eye who moved on to religious mysticism), Sylvia (whose commitment to the working classes, socialism, and sex reform made her a viper in the family nest), and Adela (the least-notorious Pankhurst, more of a Sylvia than a Christabel, who pursued a life of pacifist socialism in Australia) — remain at the heart of this narrative. In 2002, there appeared no less than three new biographical studies, one of the entire clan by Martin Pugh and two of the materfamilias, Emmeline, by Paula Bartley and June Purvis.

The attraction of the Pankhursts as a subject is understandable. At least within the parameters of 20th-century British history, their story has it all: the seething cauldron of late Victorian and Edwardian life; a domestic political campaign unmatched in its militancy and ferocity until the late 20th century, and, not least, an ongoing family opera, replete with love, betrayal, sibling rivalry, and hatred. Most importantly, the Pankhursts' story is entwined with the question of women's political and social equality, an issue that runs through the public life of 20th-century Britain. The questions brought up by the suffrage campaign — the meaning of gender equality, the relationship between class and gender, and the place of sexuality in politics — animated future generations of British feminists.

Above all of this stands the figure of Emmeline Pankhurst. After marrying a radical doctor, Emmeline became involved in socialist politics, rubbing shoulders with the likes of Keir Hardie and Ben Tillett. Women's suffrage was an early passion. Initially, she approached the question through socialism and gradualist suffrage organizations such as the Women's Franchise League. But, in 1903, frustrated with what she perceived as the indifference of socialist societies to the question of women's rights, Emmeline and her daughters, Sylvia and Christabel, founded the Women's Social and Political Union. The WSPU was a single-sex organization, aiming at obtaining the vote for women on the same basis as men without compromise. In 1905, in a strategy Christabel adopted from the history of working-class protest in Britain, the WSPU took the route of militant political action. From that point until the outbreak of World War I, suffragettes waged a war against successive Liberal governments. The intensity of that struggle is still remarkable. Tens of thousands of women gathered for suffragette rallies throughout Britain. WSPU activists were arrested, went on hunger strikes, and were violently force-fed in prison. Empty houses and public buildings were bombed. Purvis recounts some of the more minor acts of a single month in 1912: "an orchid house at Kew Gardens was burned, the refreshment house at Regent's Park was destroyed, pillar boxes set on fire, and a railways carriage set ablaze; in addition, telegraph and telephone wires were cut, a jewel case at the Tower of London smashed, and windows at London clubs broken." (209) Pankhurst herself was jailed several times. And, then, with the outbreak of war in August 1914, she made an abrupt volte-face. From waging war against the government of the day, Pankhurst and the WSPU became the fiercest advocates of waging war against Germany. Patriotism, nationalism, and later anti-Bolshevism became ideological cousins to women's equality in Pankhurst's mind. After both suffrage and the war were won in 1918, she endured a varied life. For a time, she promoted a single-sex party, the Women's Party. When this failed, Pankhurst became a campaigner for social purity in Canada. She ended her life far from where she had started politically, as a parliamentary candidate for the Conservative party in London.

Purvis's biography of Pankhurst is a major achievement, capturing the scale and immensity of her subject's life with wide-ranging research and scholarship. As with other new work on the suffrage question, we are lucky to have this book. There is much valuable new material and discussion. Purvis's contextualization of Pankhurst's "patriotic feminism" during World War I is very striking for example, as is the exploration of the links made between sexuality and suffrage before 1914.

But, even with Purvis's achievement, there remain unanswered questions about Pankhurst, which concern her political ideology, the effectiveness of the militant campaign, and her personality in private and public life. Purvis's sympathy for her subject sometimes clouds her assessment of Pankhurst in these respects.

Purvis wishes, first of all, to defend Pankhurst's valorization of sex over class in the suffragette campaign. While others (her daughter Sylvia especially) wished to explore the intersections between the plight of women and the disadvantage of class through the framework of socialist feminism, Emmeline focused strictly on the question of sex equality. Early in her biography, Purvis insists upon the legitimacy of Emmeline's position, which she said recognized "the power of men over women in a male-defined world ... and the primacy of putting women rather than the consideration of say, social class, political affiliation or socialism, first." (6-7) Purvis also argues for a socialist continuity in Pankhurst's outlook, at least until the Russian Revolution of 1917 after which she became a rabid anti-Bolshevik. Pankhurst's position on class and socialism comes across, however, less as a considered acknowledgement that class and gender might compete than an unthinking dismissal of, for example, the complexity of the position of working-class women, disadvantaged by both class and gender. Pankhurst's intellectual rigidity on this question made her blind to the varied meanings of equality. In this way, it is not that surprising that Pankhurst found herself isolated after 1918, when many other feminists tried to think through the relationship between gender and class. Similarly, Purvis provides excellent background on Pankhurst's socialist lineage, but it is hard to see much of this left by 1914. Pankhurst may have been socialist in her own mind, but this had little reference to rigorous considerations of class position or state action on social issues.

Questions also dog the effectiveness of Emmeline's uncompromising and militant strategy on suffrage. Purvis has done an admirable job in conveying the passion and commitment of WSPU activists before 1914. Quite rightly, she argues that without the militant campaign it is possible that male politicians might have postponed dealing with women's franchise. But she also suggests that the WSPU had reached an impasse by 1914, with no clear way forward. In simple terms, the vote for women was not being won by Emmeline and Christabel's refusal to give up the militant campaign and their dismissal of alliances with other groups. In many ways, Emmeline was an extraordinary political figure, able to inspire a great mass of women around the world, but a poor politician, whose very passion and intensity blunted the acumen necessary to achieve her goals through timely compromise and the building of alliances. The bad feeling Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst left in their wake did little to sustain the feminist movement in Britain during the 1920s.

A recurring charge against Emmeline Pankhurst in this regard is that she was an autocrat. Despite its sympathetic stance, Purvis's biography bears out this indictment. It is ironic that the commitment to women's involvement in democracy and a proclivity for autocracy were the constant poles of Emmeline's life. She was an autocrat within the WSPU, the Women's Party, and most other organizations in which she was involved. She was no less an autocrat with those close to her. Emmeline's ruthless dismissal of long-time friends such as the Pethick-Lawrences, Ethel Smyth, and her own daughters, Sylvia and Adela, when they dared to disagree with her politically, is quite breathtaking, to say nothing of the sheer nastiness of Christabel, the favoured scion.

These comments should not detract from Purvis's achievement with this biography. She has provided us with an invigorating study of a major figure of early 20th-century Britain, whose legacy continues to be debated. This biography makes a critical intervention in those debates.


Stephen Brooke York University

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