GAY L. GULLICKSON
When Death Became Thinkable: Self-Sacrifice in
the Women’s Social and Political Union
Abstract
Hundreds of British suffragettes, members of the Women’s Social and Political
Union, risked injury and even death as they campaigned for the right to vote in
the early twentieth century. This study asks why some women were willing to
take such risks and others were not. It focuses on Emmeline Pankhurst, Lady
Constance Lytton, and Emily Wilding Davison, the three most famous women
who were willing to die for the right to vote. The study argues that the answer to
the “why” question lies in the suffragettes’s decisions to engage in civil disobedience and go to jail. Denied classification as political prisoners, incarceration introduced them to the general population in women’s prisons–poor women and
children whose crimes ranged from abortion to theft of food, and who, likely as
not, had been abused by men in their lives. These prison encounters, combined
with the government’s decision to forcibly feed them if they went on hunger
strikes, transformed their pre-existing concern for the poor into an imperative to
end discrimination and justice against women. Danger did not deter them; they
could not not help. It is one of the ironies of history that the suffragettes sacrificed
themselves to make the sacrifice of women unnecessary.
Hundreds of British women, most of them members of the Women’s Social and
Political Union (WSPU), risked injury and even death as they campaigned for
the right to vote in the early twentieth century. Called suffragettes by their opponents and then by themselves, they were primarily young, well-educated
members of the middle class, although they ranged in age and some of them
were working-class and some were upper-class women. Expected by gender conventions to rely on men to protect their interests and, unless it was economically
impossible, to live quiet lives of domesticity, even their mildest public activities
challenged cultural norms for British women and provoked angry responses from
men. Often attacked and then arrested as a result of their activities, the women
went to jail rather than pay fines, and in 1909 began to engage in hunger strikes
and endure forcible feeding that could be even more dangerous than the street
battles. Between 1907 and 1914, 1085 suffragettes went to prison; 241went on
hunger strikes, many of them multiple times; and 130 were forcibly fed.1
C The Author 2016. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.
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Reactions to suffragette militancy and hunger strikes varied dramatically.
The women’s friends and comrades praised and honored them as heroines,
saints, and martyrs. Antisuffragists viewed them as fanatical, hysterical, suicidal,
insane, and menopausal, and accused them of seeking cheap martyrdom. The
suffragettes themselves responded with explanations of why women should have
the right to vote, descriptions of the beatings and assaults (frequently sexual)
they suffered on the streets from male bystanders and policemen, and accounts
of forcible feeding. Like the suffragettes’ contemporaries, historians have been
divided on their militant and self-sacrificial tactics. Books and articles abound
and opinions range from the hypercritical to the laudatory.
What remains elusive in this literature, as in the writings of the women’s
contemporaries, is why some women were willing to risk their lives. Did they
want to die and, if so, why? Were they suicidal? Were they acting out of religious
conviction? Were they making rational, political analyses that told them confrontation was the way to win the right to vote, or were they fanatics whose
judgment was impaired? Were their decisions a result of individual psychological
and emotional needs or of a shared sense of moral priorities and imperatives?
Were their goals collective or individual, cultural or psychological? Was it the
idea of political equality (i.e., the right to vote) that motivated them, or was it
something else? In short, how are we to understand their willingness to suffer
and possibly die?
This study seeks to answer these questions by analyzing the actions and selfexpressed motivations of three women: Emmeline Pankhurst, the founder of the
WSPU, whose repeated hunger strikes in jail raised the very real possibility that
she would die; Lady Constance Lytton, one of the most socially prominent
members of the WSPU, who disguised herself and endured forcible feeding to
demonstrate the inequitable treatment of rich and poor women in jail, despite
her weak heart; and Emily Wilding Davison, a college-educated woman who believed a death would be necessary before the vote could be achieved and who
died when she ran onto the racetrack at the Epsom Derby. I have selected these
women for analysis because we know more about them than we do about most
of the other women who risked their lives and, therefore, have a greater chance
of analyzing their motivations. If we can determine a common explanation for
their actions, we can then see if it applies to what we know about other women
who risked their lives.
To foreshadow my argument, I think the answer to the “why” question lies
in the suffragettes’ decisions to engage in civil disobedience and go to jail and
the government’s decision to deny them the status of political offender and then
to forcibly feed them if they engaged in hunger strikes. Like Thomas Laqueur,
who argues that Western Europeans developed a humanitarian consciousness
when they acquired detailed knowledge about the situation of others,2 and like
Kristen Monroe, who argues that a psychological identification of the self with
others, combined with a deeply held need to end injustice, explains such things
as why some non-Jews risked their own lives to protect Jews during the holocaust,3 I wish to suggest that the willingness of some suffragettes to risk their
lives, and even to die, grew out of prison experiences that gave them firsthand
knowledge of poor women and their need for help. These jail acquaintances and
experiences enhanced the social concerns that were part of the reason many of
them believed women should have the vote in the first place. In addition, the
When Death Became Thinkable
3
horrors of forcible feeding created a new desire—to stop the pain and suffering
and the possibility of death it was causing their friends. These jail experiences
set them apart from less militant suffragists in Britain, as well as in other countries, and moved some of them from humanitarian concerns to a sense of moral
outrage that overrode ordinary human concerns for self preservation and led
them into self-sacrificial altruism.
Emmeline Pankhurst4 (1858–1928)
When Emmeline Pankhurst founded the WSPU in October 1903, she was
45, widowed, and the mother of four children, a fifth having died in 1889. Selfsacrifice was not part of her plan. Instead, her intentions were to use the tactics
of the labor movement to pressure the members of Parliament to extend the
right to vote to women. It was to be an ambitious and joyous undertaking.
Women would speak for themselves (only women could join the WSPU) at political meetings, on street corners, and outside factory gates; they would parade
in the streets with brass bands and banners; they would lobby members of
Parliament to introduce a women’s suffrage bill; and they would campaign for
men who made public commitments to woman suffrage. These tactics succeeded
in winning the attention of the press and the reading public to such a degree
that it seemed reasonable to hope, perhaps expect, that the campaign would be
short.
That the vote would not be easily achieved was revealed on May 12, 1905,
when the House of Commons adjourned before a Women’s Enfranchisement
Bill, the first to be introduced in the House in six years, could be voted on.
Emmeline Pankhurst and suffragists from a variety of organizations waited in the
Strangers’ Lobby of the House while the bill was debated and an antisuffrage
MP talked until it was too late in the day to call for a vote.5 Angered, but undeterred, Pankhurst held an impromptu rally on the spot and then spent the summer seeking support at Labour meetings while her supporters held outdoor
meetings in towns and villages. It would turn out to be a typical response for
her—time and again, she would meet adversity with resistance and renewed activity, not retreat.
The year 1905 was especially important for the development of WSPU tactics. The talked-out bill revealed the short-comings of private members’ bills,
while a clash between unemployed male laborers and the police in Manchester
demonstrated the effectiveness of physical confrontation when it was followed
by the passage of the Unemployed Workmen Act two weeks later.6 The connection between protest, arrest, and government capitulation was not missed by
Pankhurst and her daughter Christabel, as became apparent on October 13,
when Christabel and Annie Kenney disrupted a political meeting at the Free
Trade Hall in Manchester. Women were allowed to attend political meetings
but were expected to remain silent, and when Christabel and Kenney repeatedly
asked, “Will the Liberal government give women the vote?” they were forcefully
removed from the hall. Outside, they were arrested when Christabel either spat,
or acted as though she would spit, at a policeman. In court the next day, the
two women refused to pay fines and were sent to jail for one week (Christabel
Pankhurst) and three days (Annie Kenney). Suddenly the press was again
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interested in the women’s suffrage movement, and woman suffrage became a hot
topic of conversation “from one end of Great Britain to the other.”7
Confrontation between the suffragettes and the government was now established. The women continued to ask questions about women’s suffrage at political meetings and to be ejected with enough force that some of them, plus a few
male supporters, ended up with broken bones.8 Where Emmeline Pankhurst
would have gone from here if she had not been pushed by others is impossible
to know, but in 1909, individual suffragettes began to take matters into their
own hands, and the conflict on the streets escalated. The initiators of action began by breaking windows and moved on to destroying the mail in sidewalk pillar
mailboxes, carving “Votes for Women” in golf greens, damaging works of art, destroying orchid collections, setting fire to unoccupied country houses and other
buildings, and cutting telephone and telegraph wires. Pankhurst embraced all of
her followers’ tactics and accepted responsibility for them. Not the kind of
leader who directed activity from the sidelines, she continued to lead delegations
to the House of Commons (delegations that often resulted in the women being
roughed up by the police and bystanders), campaigned for prosuffrage men,
broke windows, made speeches even when she knew the police were looking for
her, and was repeatedly arrested.
Like other women, she faced hostile mobs and harsh policemen. In January
1908, a group of young male workers pelted her and another suffragette with
clay, rotten eggs, and rock-laden snowballs. Trying to rescue her companion
from them, Emmeline was hit “a staggering blow” on the back of her head and
fell to the muddy ground. When she regained consciousness, she was surrounded
by a ring of men whose intentions did not appear to be friendly. The police arrived in time to rescue her, but her ankle was injured and bothered her for
months.9 Other times, the police were the problem. On March 9, 1909, she was
injured by the police despite, or perhaps because, she was being guarded by a
group of women who tried to protect her. Once the police had control of her,
she was grabbed and shoved into a car. A doctor reported that she had “numerous bruises over her ribs and on her limbs; both her ankles were cut, and the left
one was swollen and discoloured.”10 On another occasion, she was arrested in
Glasgow in a melée that one man, observing events from the balcony, described
as including “a big constable strik[ing] her deliberately over the head with a baton . . . I emphasise the word deliberate,” he said, “from the size of the officer he
could have lifted the little, frail woman by one hand.”11 Even normally respectful police could become a problem. In May 1914, Police Inspector Rolse, who
knew her well, wrapped his arms around her rib cage and carried her upright,
her feet about a foot above the ground, away from Buckingham Palace, where
she and others were trying to deliver a petition to the King. It was not a playful
act.12
As her biographer Paula Bartley points out, Emmeline had been ready “to
sacrifice her freedom for her political principles” since she was 27 years old.13 By
1913, she was willing to sacrifice her life, as she made clear in speech after
speech and hunger strike after hunger strike. Unlike other hunger-striking prisoners, she was never forcibly fed. The prison authorities tried once, but she
fought them off and they never tried again. Instead, the government watched
her initiate hunger strikes every time it put her in jail. By 1913, she had been arrested, jailed, and allowed to starve herself so many times, she had come within
When Death Became Thinkable
5
“touching distance of death,” as Rebecca West put it.14 Her supporters stood
vigil around Holloway whenever she was imprisoned or wherever she was recuperating after being released. On one of the latter occasions in April 1913, her
friend Ethel Smyth reported that
She was heartrending to look on, her skin yellow, and so tightly drawn over
her face that you wondered the bone structure did not come through; her eyes
deep sunken and burning, and a deep dark flush on her cheeks. With horror I
then became acquainted with one physical result of hunger-striking that still
haunts me. It is due, I suppose, to the body feeding on its own tissue; anyhow,
the strange, pervasive, sweetish odour of corruption that hangs about a room in
which a hunger-striker is being nursed back to health is unlike any other
smell.15
Between May 26, 1913, and July 16, 1914, Pankhurst was arrested, went on
hunger strikes, and was released nine more times.16
Pankhurst knew she was putting her life in danger, as she acknowledged in
the docket, in newspaper articles, and in letters to friends, but she was unwilling
to back off or change tactics.17 In May 1913, when she attended a WSPU meeting and was re-arrested before she had fully recovered from her last hunger
strike, she told the presiding magistrate who was deciding whether to reincarcerate her that he should do so “with a full sense of responsibility . . . I shall
resume the protest I made before which led to my release,” she declared, “and I
shall go on indefinitely until I die or until the Government decide . . . that they
must recognize women as citizens and give them some control over the laws of
this country.”18 On July 14, 1913, she expounded on the same theme in a
speech at the London Pavilion. “I would rather be a rebel than a slave,” she declared. “I would rather die than submit; and this is the spirit that animates this
movement. Well, we are not going to die, at any rate the movement is not going
to die [a clear reference to the possibility of her own death], and that is all that
matters.” If that were not clear enough, she ended by declaring “what we are
teaching [the Government] is . . . that they will have to give votes to women or
kill women . . . . my challenge to the Government is: Kill me or give me my freedom: I shall force you to make that choice.”19
While she was willing to die, she denied all suggestions that she was suicidal. As she explained in her 1914 autobiography,
I want to say right here, that those well-meaning friends on the outside who say
that we have suffered these horrors of prison, of hunger strikes and forcible
feeding, because we desired to martyrise ourselves for the cause, are absolutely
and entirely mistaken. We never went to prison in order to be martyrs. We went
there in order that we might obtain the rights of citizenship. We were willing
to break laws that we might force men to give us the right to make laws.20
Pankhurst’s zeal to live and fight on was evident in her periodic escapes from
the British Isles to the United States, Canada, and France, where she could recover her health, give speeches, and raise funds for the WSPU. The last of these
trips was to France in July 1914, where she went to evade a tenth arrest under
the Cat and Mouse Act.21 She was there when Germany declared war on
France. She immediately sent word to the WSPU that they were to stop all
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militant activity until the present crisis was over. On August 1, the government
announced that all suffrage prisoners would be released unconditionally, and the
militant suffragette movement was over.22 Whether Emmeline Pankhurst would
have survived more arrests and hunger strikes, had the war not happened, is impossible to know, but many women thought she would not. When Rebecca
West wrote a eulogy for Emily Davison in 1913, she was so sure Emmeline
Pankhurst would be the next to die that she devoted part of her eulogy to her.
“Before us,” she wrote, “stretch the long intolerable weeks during which they are
going to murder Mrs. Pankhurst.”23 Nothing Pankhurst said or did between
then and August 1914, when the beginning of World War I led to a truce between the women and the government, indicates she had anything but a firm resolve to continue the struggle, despite the risks.
Emily Wilding Davison24 (1872–1913)
Emily Wilding Davison was also willing to die for women’s right to vote.
When she joined the WSPU in 1906, she was thirty-four, well-educated, single,
a member of the Anglican Church, politically committed to both the labor and
the women’s causes, and employed as a teacher. She had received honors and a
first-class pass in English literature and language from Oxford University
(Oxford allowed women to take exams, but did not grant them degrees until
1920), and a BA with honors in classics and mathematics from London
University. She juggled teaching and the WSPU for three years before she decided to devote all of her time to the movement. The decision allowed her to
participate in the kinds of civil disobedience that entailed arrest and incarceration. Davison threw herself into Union activities with enthusiasm. In 1909
alone she was arrested five times and went to jail four. The second and third
times she joined other women on hunger strikes to protest the government’s refusal to classify them as political prisoners. By the time of her fifth arrest, the
government had adopted the practice of forcible feeding. Over the next few
years, Davison refused to eat and was forcibly fed numerous times but only when
she was part of a group. When she was the only suffrage prisoner, she would eat
small amounts and serve her full sentence. For her, at least, hunger striking and
being forcibly fed were collective, not individual, activities.
Part of the psychological ordeal of forcible feeding was listening to other
women fight the doctors and wardresses and moan in pain when they lost the
fight. Davison found this intolerable and more than any other suffragette took
actions that she hoped would stop the forcible feeding altogether, even though
they might also kill her. In jail in November 1909, she realized she could use
the two beds that were in her cell to barricade her door. Unable to force her
door open with crowbars, the guards threatened to turn a fire hose on her.
When she continued to resist, they carried out their threat, raised a ladder,
broke the window of her cell, inserted the hose, and turned it on. The water
came straight at her full force. “I had to hold on like grim death,” she later reported. “The power of the water seemed terrific, and it was as cold as ice. For an
age it seemed to play on me, though it may have been only a quarter of an hour,
and my gasps for breath were getting more and more spasmodic. At last the operator halted for a moment, and a voice called out quickly, ‘Stop! No more! No
more!’” Then she waited, wet, freezing cold, and dazed, as men worked to open
When Death Became Thinkable
7
her door. She realized, she said, “that if the door fell it would kill me on the
spot.” Still, she did not move, thinking perhaps “the moment for the sacrifice
which we have all agreed will probably be demanded, was at hand.” When the
door was finally opened without hitting her, she was wrapped in blankets and
rushed to the hospital ward.25
Much of the rest of Davison’s life is revealed in this incident. Her life had
been spared, but she had been fully willing to die, indeed to suffer and die. Her
explanation of her behavior was that the sacrifice of a life might be necessary to
end the conflict, defeat the government, and stop the forcible feeding of the
women. She would take similar action twice more, the second time with fatal results. The first repetition occurred two and one half years later in June 1912,
when she again attempted to stop the “torture” of her friends by sacrificing her
life. Again she listened as the guards and wardresses worked their way toward
her cell, forcibly feeding the prisoners. This time she had no way to barricade
her door, but when she was let out of her cell so they could clean it, she threw
herself off the balcony to stop “the hideous torture” of her friends. A wire net
stopped her fall twice; the third time, she jumped from the net and fell about 10
feet onto her head. She felt “a fearful thud” and lost consciousness. Her goal was
not to escape the torture through death but to save her friends. She told the
prison governor the next day that she had thought “one big tragedy may save
many others.”26 In September, she reiterated the point in a letter to the Pall
Mall Gazette. “I did it deliberately and with all my power,” she wrote, “because I
felt that by nothing but the sacrifice of human life would the nation be brought
to realise the horrible torture our women face. If I had succeeded I am sure that
forcible feeding could not in all conscience have been resorted to again.”27
A year later on June 4, 1913, Emily Davison made her final protest. The
WSPU was consumed with concern for the health of Emmeline Pankhurst, who
was recovering from a hunger strike and being watched by police detectives lest
she try to escape. Davison borrowed two flags from WSPU headquarters and
bought a round-trip ticket to Epsom for the running of the English Derby. She
stood quietly at the rail as the first group of horses passed her. The king and
queen were in the stands. As a second group rounded the corner, she slipped under the rail and ran onto the track. Newsreel films show her running toward the
king’s horse and throwing up her hands, perhaps to stop the horse, perhaps to
protect herself. In an instant, woman, jockey and horse were on the ground.
The horse walked off the track and the jockey, Herbert Jones, recovered quickly
from his injuries. Kicked in the head, Davison died four days later.28 She left no
note for her friends in case her protest had this outcome, but everyone assumed
that she had “given her life to call attention to the intolerable grievances of
women,”29 among which was the forcible feeding of women in jail that she had
been trying to stop for years. Neither her earlier protests, nor her death, accomplished that goal, but the WSPU publically proclaimed her a martyr and held a
public funeral.
Lady Constance Lytton30 (1869–1923)
Constance Lytton met Emmeline Pethick Lawrence and Annie Kenney,
two leaders of the WSPU, in the fall of 1908. She was fascinated by them and
their discussions about the importance of woman suffrage.31 She argued “at every
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turn,” she said, but she was quickly hooked, and in January 1909 she joined the
Union.32 She was unmarried, thirty-nine years old, and suffering from a serious
heart condition. As the daughter of the first Viceroy to India and the sister of
the current Earl of Lytton, she was the highest ranking member of the WSPU.
A child of privilege, she was constrained by family expectations, lack of wealth
(although the family was not poor, it was not as wealthy as it once had been),
and a sense of responsibility for her mother (her father having died in 1892). At
the same time that she met Pethick Lawrence and Kenney, she witnessed a
scene with an old sheep that came to have enormous significance for her. “One
morning, while wandering through the little town of Littlehampton,” she wrote,
I came on a crowd. All kinds of people were forming a ring round a sheep
which had escaped as it was being taken to the slaughterhouse. It looked old
and misshapen. A vision suddenly rose in my mind of what it should have been
on its native mountain-side with all its forces rightly developed, vigorous and
independent. There was hideous contrast between that vision and the thing in
the crowd. With growing fear and distress the sheep ran about more clumsily
and became a source of amusement to the onlookers, who laughed and jeered
at it.
Feeling sorry for the sheep, Lytton upbraided the men (“its two gaolers”), who finally caught the sheep and then “gave it a great cuff in the face.” “You are taking it to be killed,” she said, “you are doing your job badly to hurt and insult it
besides,” at which point the men “seemed ashamed,” and the crowd “slunk
away.” With a flash of insight, she perceived the old, clumsy sheep as a metaphor for women who were often “held in contempt as beings outside the pale of
human dignity, excluded or confined, laughed at and insulted because of conditions in themselves for which they are not responsible, but which are due to fundamental injustices with regard to them, and to the mistakes of a civilisation in
the shaping of which they have had no free share.”33 Lytton was ready to become a militant suffragette.
Three events in her career as a suffragette reveal Lytton’s willingness to risk
her own life in pursuit of the enfranchisement of women. On February 24, 1909,
she volunteered to join a small deputation of women who would walk from
Caxton Hall to the House of Commons to try to deliver a resolution to the
prime minister. It was a cold evening, and Lytton, already ill before the deputation set out, was in danger from the outset. The leaders of the group had assigned her a companion to assist her. “There is only one thing you must
remember,” her companion said as they got ready to set out, “it is our business
to go forward, and whatever is said to you and whatever is done to you, you
must on no account be turned back.” It was, as Lytton later observed, the essence of the WSPU’s militant tactics.34 One may add, it also was advice that
took no account of her health.
From the beginning, Lytton wrote later, she was “so incapacitated by
breathlessness I could not lift my chest and head. I had repeatedly to stop, and,
but for the kindly assistance of my companion and an unknown man and
woman of the crowd, I should have been unable to get any further.” As the police and the crowd continued to jostle the women, Lytton was unable to
breathe. “Being doubled up for want of breath, I could scarcely see where I was
going . . . I was during most of the time physically incapable of speech.” Three
When Death Became Thinkable
9
times a policeman grabbed her around the ribs with both of his hands and
squeezed “the remaining breath” out of her body and then, lifting her completely
into the air, threw her with all his strength. Several times she said to an unknown woman who helped her, “I can’t go on; I simply can’t go on,” and yet
she did. Once she was arrested, Lytton’s identity became known, her weak heart
was perceived, and she was put in the hospital ward, until her repeated entreaties that she should be treated like everyone else resulted in her being put in a
regular cell.35 She may have been physically weak, but she was strong willed.
Seven months later, Constance Lytton gambled with her life once again.
Paired with Emily Wilding Davison and armed with a rock wrapped in paper,
she “attacked” a car in which she thought David Lloyd George was riding on his
way to deliver a speech. As events turned out, she threw the stone at the wrong
car, but it resulted in her arrest and one-month’s imprisonment anyway. Emily
Davison was dismissed from the trial because she had had no chance to do anything. By now, hunger striking and forcible feeding had begun in the prisons.
Knowing full well the possible consequences, Lytton and the other arrested suffragettes embarked immediately on a hunger strike. Almost as quickly, Lytton
and Jane Brailsford, wife of a well-known radical journalist, were released.36
Lytton was convinced that she and Brailsford had been released, not because of
their health but because they were from prominent families.
Lytton now took steps to demonstrate that the prison officials would not
“recognise [her] need for exceptional favours without [her] name,”37 by which
she meant without knowledge of her social class. In January 1910, she traveled
to Liverpool and Manchester on a political mission for the WSPU. She seized
the occasion to demonstrate that the treatment of prisoners was class-based. She
asked the local WSPU organizers to arrange a protest meeting outside the jail
for the evening of January 14. Then she gave herself a new identity. Having observed that “prisoners of unprepossessing appearance obtained least favour,” she
“determined to put ugliness to the test.” She bought cheap clothing, an unfashionable hat, a purse, a scarf, and glasses; removed her initials from her underwear; cut her hair in an unflattering and old-fashioned style; and adopted the
name “Jane Warton.”38
Lytton was not the first woman to disguise herself for political purposes.
Mother Jones adopted the persona of an older woman to avoid capture by the
police who wanted to stop her labor organizing; Harriet Tubman wore men’s
clothing to lead other slaves to safety in the American north; and Annie
Kenney and other suffragettes wore disguises so they could travel back-and-forth
between England and France to meet with Christabel Pankhurst in Paris. All of
these disguises were successful, but Lytton’s goal was different from the others’.
She wanted to be arrested and to go on a hunger strike, not to escape capture.
On the evening of the fourteenth, she joined the demonstration in Liverpool
and called upon the crowd to march with her to the prison governor’s house
and demand release of the prisoners. To her apparent surprise, the crowd and
two or three policemen followed her, and she was duly arrested. She was sentenced to two weeks in the third division. Cold, fatigued, short of breath, and
anxious from the outset, that she might die was clearly on her mind. When the
matron tried to talk her out of hunger striking, she told her that “it seemed a little thing that some women should die for the sake of the others.”39
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No one made any attempt to examine her physically (although they would
later claim that she had refused to let them examine her), and on the fourth
day, she was forcibly fed. It was an ordeal that would be repeated eight more
times and which she would describe in Votes for Women and in her memoir
Prisons and Prisoners.40 As the feeding continued and she grew weaker, the doctor treated her more kindly, but he continued the feeding. At one point, she fell
into “a sort of shivering fit and [her] teeth chattered when the gag was removed.” The doctor “seemed surprised and alarmed” and asked a junior doctor
to examine her heart, who, after listening briefly, declared, “Oh, ripping, splendid heart! You can go on with her.”41 And go on, they did, until Saturday evening when someone alerted the Press Association that Lytton was in jail under a
false name and the association called her sister Emily Lutyens who, in turn,
called the Home Office. The doctor told Emily Lutyens that “in all his experience, he had never seen such a bad case of forcible feeding” and that he had advised that she be released but still she had not been.42
Lytton had proven her point but at considerable physical and mental cost.
More than once she thought she would die in prison. “I supposed I had only a
little while to live. The prospect of release [death] was inexpressibly welcome,”
she wrote in her memoir.43 Once she was out of prison, she could not sleep at
night because she was so cold and terrified of the forcible feeding. She had lost
so much weight, she could not sit on a chair without pain (so she knelt on a
cushion instead), and she spent the next six weeks primarily in bed.44 That she
could have died in prison is crystal clear in the report of a doctor called by her
sister to examine her after she was released.45 She suffered a stroke later that
year and a more severe one in 1911, which left her paralyzed on her right side,
whereupon she taught herself to write with her left hand so she could write
Prisons and Prisoners. She died in 1923 at age fifty-four.
Reactions
The WSPU’s use of demonstrations and hunger strikes to keep pressure on
the government to enfranchise women pushed the Liberal government into a
corner. Even politicians who supported woman suffrage were bothered, if not
enraged, by the women’s activities and persistent pursuit of them. In 1909, at
the beginning of militancy, Home Secretary Herbert Gladstone, a supporter of
woman suffrage, opined that some of the suffragettes were “half crazy, or wholly
hysterical.”46 In 1911, David Lloyd George, chancellor of the exchequer and future prime minister, refused to meet with Emmeline Pankhurst because talking
to the suffragettes was “like going to a lunatic asylum and talking to a man who
thinks he’s God Almighty.”47
Pankhurst, Lytton, and Davison came in for particular attention as they
risked their lives. Pankhurst was regularly accused of having brought her suffering on herself, and the newspaper boards questioned Lytton’s sanity in a headline that read “Lady Constance Lytton’s Latest Freak,” when she was released
from her time in prison as Jane Warton. Most severely criticized was Davison,
whose death went far beyond cultural expectations of female behavior. The
antisuffrage press questioned her sanity and characterized her actions as suicidal,
“reckless fanaticism,” “desperately wicked,” “entirely unbalanced,” “mad,” “demented,” and “an act of criminal folly.”48 In contrast, Pankhurst’s, Lytton’s, and
When Death Became Thinkable
11
Davison’s friends and comrades loyally defended them. When Pankhurst was accused of having brought her suffering on herself, the WSPU declared that she
was “giving her life for the womanhood of the nation,”49 and Rebecca West accused the government of trying to “murder” Mrs. Pankhurst.50 When the conservative press attacked Lytton, the WSPU’s welcome of her made it clear to one
and all that she was the most revered of suffragettes.51 When Davison died, the
WSPU embraced her as a martyr and declared that she had sacrificed her life to
save other women.52
Historians have taken both sides in this debate. Like the antisuffragists of
the early twentieth century, critical historians have tilted toward psychological
and psychosexual analyses, beginning with George Dangerfield in 1935, who regarded the suffragettes as the embodiment of a “pre-war lesbianism” that yearned
to “abandon the role of “the Perfect Wife” and “recover the wisdom of women.”
Courageous, amusing, and admirable as the goal of these “skirted warriors” might
be, he thought their militant tactics were “irrational,” “obsessive,” “melodramatic,” and “hysterical.” He analyzed Emily Wilding Davison, for instance, as “a
very unbalanced girl” (age forty when she died, she was hardly a girl), who was
“always in a fit either of gayety or of despondency” (i.e., manic-depressive or
bipolar).53 Most disturbing of all to him was his belief that many of the militant
suffragettes desired martyrdom.
Dangerfield’s approach was followed by several other historians. In 1974,
Andrew Rosen suggested that Davison may have found “a quasi-sexual fulfilment in the contemplation of self-destruction.”54 In 2001, Martin Pugh continued to portray Emmeline Pankhurst as “an opportunist” and a “bad mother” and
attempted to discredit her by again hinting that she was a lesbian.55 Perhaps
proving her point about the importance of class, Lady Constance Lytton has
largely escaped the “psychological” analysis of the “anti” historians although
Pugh characterized her in 2000 as having achieved “notoriety,” rather than fame
from her time in jail.56
Even some generally sympathetic historians have presented Davison and
Lytton as “psychological aberrations.”57 Marie Mulvey-Roberts, for instance, has
argued that while Constance Lytton was “a powerful role model of moral courage,” she also was psychologically drawn to masochism and “harboured an active
desire to suffer for the cause through acts of self-deprivation and self-harm.”58
Fran Abrams’ explanation of Emily Wilding Davison’s behavior is less harsh, but
nevertheless suggests psychological peculiarity. For her, Davison had a “slight
oddity in her character.” She was both “deeply religious” and obsessed with a
“desire to win.”59
The most positive analyses of the suffragettes, and especially of Emmeline
Pankhurst and Emily Wilding Davison, have seen them not as aberrations, fanatics, and mentally ill, but as complicated women who were in a hurry to win
the right to vote, end sweated labor, stop the sexual exploitation of women and
girls, improve women’s wages, and so on.60 Most importantly, June Purvis and
Paula Barkley, who have written major biographies of Emmeline Pankhurst, present her as strong-willed, complicated, and contradictory. She was, Purvis notes,
“a woman of extraordinary beauty, a fighter for the women’s causes in which she
passionately believed, a charismatic leader and speaker who inspired the fiercest
devotion and charmed most of those who heard her. . . . She could be gentle
and fiery, idealistic and realistic, creative and destructive, kind and ruthless,
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Winter 2017
democratic and autocratic, invincible and vulnerable, courageous and afraid.”61
Similarly, on the one hundredth anniversary of her death, Purvis portrayed
Emily Wilding Davison as “a sensible, level-headed, religious woman,” who also
was “courageous,” “a risk taker,” and not “an unbalanced, suicidal fanatic.”62
How Death Became Thinkable
So, we return to the question: Why were these women willing to die? Why
were they willing to suffer physically, be ridiculed in the press, and risk their
lives for the right to vote? The personal stories of the suffragettes indicate that a
variety of personal and cultural factors made the idea of risk-taking and suffering
acceptable for many women in the movement, but it was the decision to engage
in civil disobedience and go to jail that tipped the scales from risk taking to selfsacrificial altruism for women like Pankhurst, Lytton, and Davison.
To understand this transition, it is important to note that women’s initial
experiences in the WSPU were joyous and exciting. Margaret Haig, later
Viscountess Rhondda, for instance, described the suffrage movement as “a thrilling discovery. It supplied the answer to a thousand puzzling problems. And it
gave a chance of activity.”63 By 1909, however, many of the suffragettes’ activities called for enormous courage. When women gave public speeches; held rallies, meetings, and parades; and tried to deliver petitions to the House of
Commons or the prime minister, young men (frequently referred to by the press
as hooligans and toughs and including medical students among others), often
with the assistance of the police, taunted, chased, and beat them up. Hannah
Mitchell, a working-class member of the movement, recounted several of these
attacks in her memoirs. At one attempt to hold a public meeting, she recalled
The mob played a sort of Rugby football with us. Seizing a woman they pushed
her into the arms of another group who in their turn passed her on. An elderly
reporter protected me at first, but he soon collapsed. . . . two youths held on to
my skirt so tightly that I feared it would either come off or I should be dragged
to earth on my face . . . . Later I came across [Kier] Hardie . . . He tried to help
me, but we were violently separated and the game went on. At last a group of
men fought their way to me and Adela [Pankhurst], having to beat off our assailants with their bare fists in order to get us out of the Clough. The crowd followed, yelling like savages. Someone opened the door of their house and drew
us inside. We were glad to take shelter, but the crowd seemed so dangerous,
booing and yelling round the door and windows, that I feared they would break
in and wreck the place . . .64
What is especially noteworthy is that experiences like these did not deter the
women; they stepped willingly into battle again and again.
Sometimes the police watched as the women were attacked; other times,
they joined in. Hannah Mitchell’s most frightening experience involved a menacing crowd of young men that she later compared with “the sadism of the Nazi
young men.” In this case, she said, what made the situation so dangerous was
the inactivity of the police who “just stood round, some of them openly grinning,” ignoring the women’s appeals for protection.65 The worst encounters
with the police may have occurred on Black Friday (18 November 1910).
Scores of women were injured and three women died within the year. Emmeline
When Death Became Thinkable
13
Pankhurst’s younger sister Mary Clarke died on Christmas day 1910 at age fortyseven; Henria Williams died in January 1911, seven weeks after the demonstration, at age forty-four; and Cecilia Wolseley Haig died a year later in December
1911 at age forty-nine.66 Williams’ account of her experiences reveals how dangerous the police behavior was for the women.
One policeman after knocking me about for a considerable time, finally took
hold of me with his great strong hand like iron just over my heart. He hurt me
so much that at first I had not the voice power to tell him what he was doing.
But I knew that unless I made a strong effort to do so, he would kill me. So collecting all the power of my being, I commanded him to take his hand off my
heart . . . he was the third or fourth who had knocked me about.67
Sexual assaults were also an issue on Black Friday and quite likely other
times. When Haig died, she was memorialized as having suffered for a year after
she was “not only subjected to assault of a most disgraceful kind, but was also
trampled upon.”68 The exact role that the treatment of the women on Black
Friday played in the deaths of Clarke, Williams, and Haig is impossible to determine, but the suffragettes were convinced of the relationship. Votes for Women
declared unequivocally that they had “given their lives for the cause of women’s
emancipation.”69 The WSPU did not want women to die, however, and abandoned many of the activities that put the women in danger of being beaten up
on the streets.
Women were also in danger in prison. Imprisonment began in October
1905, when the suffragettes began to challenge political speakers on the issue of
votes for women. In July 1909, they began to refuse to eat in jail. Six weeks
later, the government began to forcibly feed them. Hunger striking and forcible
feeding, as Lytton’s and Davison’s writings demonstrate, could be even more
dangerous than the mauling women were receiving from the public and the police. In February 1913, Lilian Lenton was released from prison, suffering from
pleurisy after food was poured into one of her lungs rather than her stomach.70
More than once in jail, Mary Richardson feared she was having a mental breakdown, the treatment of which could be even more dreadful than forcible feeding.71 Sylvia Pankhurst, like her mother, endured hunger strikes, thirst strikes,
and forcible feeding until her friends and mother feared for her life;72 and on it
went.
Not all members of the WSPU were willing to brave injury, starvation, and
forcible feeding. Most notably, Christabel Pankhurst, the second most important
leader of the WSPU, never went to prison after hunger striking and forcible
feeding began. There were practical reasons for her to remain out of jail (and in
Paris), but it is pretty clear that her personality made the idea of suffering, as her
mother and sister Sylvia were doing, terribly undesirable. This difference does
not mean that women like Emmeline Pankhurst, Emily Wilding Davison, and
Constance Lytton were suicidal. Like most women they had experienced discrimination and frustration. Davison could not find a job that would use her talents and pay a living wage, Lytton suffered from ill health and a failed romance,
and Pankhurst encountered sexual discrimination as she struggled to honor her
husband’s memory and support herself and her children after his death. Far from
discouraging them, these and other struggles inspired them to create and join
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Winter 2017
the WSPU, not to end their own lives. Indeed, their focus was not with the difficulties of their own lives but with the hardships and discrimination faced by
women in general and by poor women in particular. Saving other women was
an important aspect of the suffrage movement and one for which personal sacrifices might be appropriate, but it was not a goal for which most women believed
they should die. Even Davison was not entirely intent on death. After all, when
she was in prison alone, she did not engage in hunger strikes, and she had saved
the return portion of her round-trip train ticket from London to Epsom for the
Derby.73
Family, demographic, and economic factors must have played roles in the
women’s decisions,74 but it is difficult to determine exactly how. Age and health
may have made the thought of death more or less threatening. Demographically,
Pankhurst, Lytton, and Davison were not young. At the peak of militancy in
1912, life expectancy for women was fifty-five. In that year, Pankhurst was fiftyfour; Lytton, forty-three; and Davison, forty. Lytton was not in good health, and
Davison was still suffering from the injuries she had incurred in jail. Perhaps
these factors made death easier to contemplate, but age did not necessarily make
it easier to risk injury and humiliation, as Rhondda recalled in her memoir.
To take part in a raid on the Houses of Parliament might very well mean to be
battered, bruised, insulted for hours around the precincts of Westminster, and
then fail to get arrested in the end. The older women dreaded it almost intolerably. Later on, when the W.S.P.U. introduced stone-throwing [after Black
Friday], the thing became much simpler and less torturing . . . . Still, even then
it required an almost unbelievable effort of will before a woman brought up
with all the inhibitions of the decent Victorian “lady” could bring herself to
throw stones through a street window.”75
Pankhurst, Davison, and Lytton were single (Pankhurst was widowed) and
they had no husbands or young children to consider in making decisions. Their
economic circumstances varied considerably, but they had grown up in middleand upper-class families and were among the women Pankhurst identified as
“fortunate” because they had “good fathers, good husbands and good brothers.”76
Like many unmarried women, they struggled to survive, but they were not impoverished. Pankhurst was supported by the WSPU between 1903 and 1914,
raised money by giving speeches, and lived with one friend after another because
she could not afford a home of her own. For awhile Davison received a small salary from the WSPU, but that support ended and she was looking for a job when
she died. Even Lytton had little spending money, despite her high social standing, and she occasionally earned a little money by writing. But they were freer
to participate in the WSPU and to go to jail than poorer women who needed to
work or women with families who needed their care. Had they had greater
wealth, they also might have been less likely to consider self-sacrifice as an acceptable tactic, although that, too, is hard to determine. Rhondda, one of the
wealthiest women in the movement and daughter of a Liberal minister, went to
prison and engaged in a five-day hunger strike. Whether she would have submitted to forcible feeding is unknowable because, under the provisions of the Cat
and Mouse Act, she was let out of prison, and someone paid her fine before she
could be incarcerated again.77
When Death Became Thinkable
15
Finally, and most importantly, saving poor women and girls, not just the
right to vote, lay at the heart of the suffrage cause and ultimately was why the
suffragettes risked injury, arrest, and forcible feeding and why some women
found death acceptable. Their sense of who needed saving varied from one
woman to another, but they all inhabited a moral universe that placed high
value on ending the suffering of other women and children. For Pankhurst and
Davison these interests predated the WSPU. Pankhurst’s parents encouraged
her to be aware of injustice from a young age and, as a Poor Law Guardian, she
had seen graphic examples of poverty. In jail for her suffrage activities, she encountered these women again and spoke repeatedly about them. Davison was
active in the labor movement and supported workers when they were on strike,
but it is clear that ending the suffering of other suffragettes from forcible feeding
became the overriding moral cause for her. Lytton found it difficult to find
meaningful activities before she joined the WSPU but then she became fully
committed to the suffrage cause and helping poor women. All three met women
and girls in prison whose crimes were the result of poverty, and Lytton worked
hard to rescue and support one girl in particular.
But still, why embrace self-sacrifice, when self-sacrifice for women had a
long history and was something feminists generally wanted to end? Florence
Nightingale, for instance, was utterly opposed to the sacrifices bourgeois culture
expected of women. Helena Swanwick objected mightily to “certain of the militants” who, she believed, “made a policy of martyrdom,” which she thought was
“dishonest and cynical.”78 Elizabeth Cady Stanton in the United States declared
that “self-development” was “a higher duty than self-sacrifice” and that “the
thing that most retards and militates against woman’s self-development is selfsacrifice.”79 In contrast, the WSPU supported many kinds of sacrifice. In addition to braving confrontations with antisuffrage “hoodlums” and police, going to
jail, and enduring hunger strikes and forcible feeding, the women annually dedicated a week to self-denial during which they saved money, primarily on food,
and donated it to the organization.80 Since most of these women had very little
money, this was a significant sacrifice.
The suffragettes’ devotion to self-sacrifice was bolstered by the use of religious imagery. They regularly invoked the concepts of “holy war,” “crusade,”
“ransom,” and “the knighthood of the holy ghost.” They regarded their leaders
as infused with “a noble passion of the soul” and revered them as having “the
spirit of the martyrs in them.”81 These concepts were readily available to all of
the women and expressed their sense of the seriousness and significance of the
movement, whether they were religious or not.82
Davison was among the religious members of the movement. In 1912, she
wrote an essay while she was in Holloway Prison, in which she argued that, for
two thousand years, people had failed to see “the real meaning” of Christianity.
A truly Christian world would be one in which “men and women hand in hand
not bound but free” would march forward “both necessary, both of equal value,
both the ultimate sources of life and power.” It was the suffragettes’ role to reveal
this part of God’s design and to lead the way to a better world.83 A bit later, she
told the Newcastle Weekly Chronicle that the suffragettes were enduring “as great
suffering for us as had to be faced by the early Christians,” and they were able to
endure it only because they knew “right” and “moral force” were on their side.84
In yet another piece, published posthumously as “The Price of Liberty,” she
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Winter 2017
retold Jesus’s parable of the Pearl of Great Price and said, “To lay down life for
friends, that is glorious, selfless, inspiring! But to re-enact the tragedy of Calvary
for generations yet unborn, that is the last consummate sacrifice of the
Militant.”85 She was willing to make that sacrifice, and the WSPU was willing
to honor her as “A Christian Martyr.”86
Lytton was also religious. When she saw visions in prison, they were full of
Biblical imagery. While she was in Walton Gaol, she lay facing her window as
the sun went down. Later she wrote,
I saw the shadow of the wooden mouldings fall across the glass,—three crosses,
and they were the shape of the three familiar crosses at the scene of Calvary,
one in the centre and one on either side. It looked different from any of the
pictures I had seen. The cross of Christ, the cross of the repentant thief, and
the cross of the sinner who had not repented—that cross looked blacker than
the others, and behind it was an immense crowd. The light from the other two
crosses seemed to shine on this one, and the Christ was crucified that He might
undo all the harm that was done. I saw amongst the crowd the poor little doctor and the Governor, and all that helped to torture these women in prison,
but they were nothing compared to the men in the Cabinet who wielded their
force over them. There were the upholders of vice and the men who support
the thousand injustices to women, some knowingly and some unconscious of
the harm and cruelty entailed. Then the room grew dark and I fell asleep.87
Religious belief may have buttressed women’s acceptance of sacrifice and
martyrdom, but it was not essential to that acceptance. Most significantly perhaps, Emmeline Pankhurst was not a religious woman.88 Nevertheless, she used
the same religious imagery and language as Davison and Lytton and other
women did, and she was willing to sacrifice her life. In a letter written
from prison and read in public on May 26, 1913, ten days before the Derby,
she rallied her supporters with the familiar concept of holy war. “We are soldiers
engaged in a holy war, and we mean to go on until Victory is won,” she
declared.89
What tipped the scales toward a willingness to sacrifice one’s life was the
decision of Christabel Pankhurst to create a disturbance that not only got her
and Annie Kenney thrown out of a political meeting but also resulted in their
arrest and incarceration. It set the standard for the WSPU’s confrontational politics for the next decade. Denied classification as political prisoners, incarceration introduced the suffragettes to the general population in women’s prisons—
poor women and children whose crimes ranged from prostitution to attempted
suicide to abortion to theft of food and who, likely as not, had been abused by
men in their lives.90
Knowing about these women intellectually and getting to know them personally, even if the personal acquaintance was fairly brief, gave the women a
new sense of moral outrage. They could imagine themselves in their place if
their economic circumstances had been different. They also knew that these
poor women were often given longer sentences than men who had committed
similar crimes, just as men involved in political and economic agitation, like labor union strikes, were given little or no sentences compared with the militant
suffragettes. Hunger-striking and forcible feeding added to the emotional and
psychological toll of incarceration. They were trapped in a situation they could
When Death Became Thinkable
17
not escape without sacrificing their moral principles, just as the other prisoners
were trapped by gender and poverty.91 A powerful identification with these
women led to a heightened sense of urgency. It seemed imperative that they get
women the vote so they could stop the suffering and improve their lives, even if
it cost their own lives.
From Suffrage to Self-Sacrificing Altruism
Both their friends and the WSPU tried to prevent Pankhurst, Davison, and
Lytton from endangering their lives. Ethel Smyth and Rebecca West tried to
stop Emmeline Pankhurst from going on hunger strikes. Emily Davison’s friends
tried to talk her out of the idea that “one great sacrifice” was needed and that it
should be hers. Constance Lytton’s sisters tried to talk her out of going to jail
and submitting to a hunger strike and forcible feeding. Such efforts were powerless in the face of the women’s determination to right a moral wrong. All three
embraced the WSPU’s culture of self-sacrifice and its belief that the vote was
the way to save poor women and children from lives of drudgery and mistreatment. Each experience in prison increased their sense of the desperate situations
women faced because they had no voice in the passing of laws and, thus, no way
of ending the discrimination endured by poor women and children. Each prison
experience made her and other women, like Davison and Lytton, more aware of
injustice and more, rather than less, willing to sacrifice their lives to end it.
The exact content of the moral imperative varied from woman to woman,
but it always had to do with what was happening to others and a desire to save
them. For Emily Wilding Davison, the forcible feeding of the suffragettes was
the unbearable fact. For Constance Lytton, the privileges automatically granted
to women of high political and social standing were unfair and immoral and
needed to be changed. For Emmeline Pankhurst, the success of the movement
and all of the discrimination against women that it would end, remained the
major cause and led her to engage in one hunger strike after another.
With her usual quick perception, Pankhurst began to urge women who had
led sheltered lives to go to prison “to see the depths of bitterness and hardship
there,” as soon as she herself had been to prison.92 “Give us not only your
money, but your lives,” she entreated the women in her audience. “Come and
fight with us to win freedom for women.”93 This appeal to other women to acquire personal experience and knowledge of poor, imprisoned women makes her
an intuitive proponent of the theories that lie at the heart of Thomas Laqueur’s
and Kristen Monroe’s work on humanitarianism and altruism. In his 1989 study
of the rise of humanitarianism in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries,
Laqueur identifies an eclectic group of new narratives—autopsy reports, coroner’s verdicts, parliamentary inquiries, and industrial novels—that described
“particular suffering” and offered “a model for precise social action” as the key to
the development of humanitarianism. By providing an extraordinary number of
hitherto untold stories of human suffering, these narratives produced compassion for others and a sense that ameliorative action was possible and morally imperative.94 Like Laqueur’s eighteenth- and nineteenth-century readers,
most, if not all, of the women who joined the WSPU in the early twentieth century had acquired a humanitarian conscience. They were no strangers to the
plight of the poor or to feeling a moral obligation to help them.95 For them,
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Journal of Social History
Winter 2017
obtaining the vote was a civil right, but it also was a way to help poor women
and children.
Monroe’s studies take Laqueur’s question one step further by asking how humanitarianism turns into self-sacrificing altruism for some people. She, too, emphasizes the importance of detailed knowledge about the suffering or potential
suffering of others but argues that more than knowledge is necessary for people
to risk their lives. In her view, risk taking is not a practical or moral calculation
but flows naturally out of a person’s perception of her or himself in relationship
to others. The idea that they should take responsibility for others forms a central
component of altruists’ self-image. If what was a kind of generalized concern for
another’s suffering is transformed into an imperative to help, they cannot not
act. Monroe’s most powerful case involves non-Jews who rescued Jews from the
Holocaust despite the great danger to themselves.96 The plight of poor women
and children in Victorian and Edwardian England is different in significant ways
from that of European Jews during the Holocaust and so is the danger encountered by the suffragettes and holocaust rescuers. But the prison experiences of
women like Emmeline Pankhurst, Constance Lytton, and Emily Davison tipped
the scales from humanitarianism to altruism. They could not not help the poor
women whom they met there and their friends whom they perceived as being
tortured by forcible feeding. What they learned in prison made risking their
health and lives no longer a choice. It had become a moral imperative from
which they could not turn back. Dying seemed a small thing in comparison with
the injustices they saw. To end the injustice was imperative.
Endnotes
I would like to thank Joseph Carens, Claire Moses, George Callcott, Sonya Michel, and
the readers for the Journal of Social History for their helpful comments and advice. Address
correspondence to Gay L. Gullickson, Department of History, University of Maryland,
College Park, MD 20742. Email: [email protected].
1. Andrew Rosen, Rise Up, Women! The militant campaign of the Women’s Social and
Political Union 1903–1914 83–115, (London, 1974); Martin Pugh, The March of the
Women: A Revisionist Analysis of the Campaign for Women’s Suffrage, 1866–1914 (Oxford,
2000), 212; Elizabeth Crawford, Women’s Suffrage Movement: A Reference Guide
(London, 1999), 567.
2. Thomas W. Laqueur, “Bodies, Details, and the Humanitarian Narrative,” in
The New Cultural History, ed. Lynn Hunt (Berkeley, 1989), 176–204. Also helpful is
Thomas L. Haskell, “Capitalism and the Origins of the Humanitarian Sensibility, Part 1,”
American Historical Review 90 (1985): 339–61; and Thomas L. Haskell, “Capitalism and
the Origins of the Humanitarian Sensibility, Part 2,” American Historical Review 90
(1985): 547–66.
3. Kristin Renwick Monroe, The Heart of Altruism: Perceptions of a Common Humanity
(Princeton, 1996); Kristin Renwick Monroe, The Hand of Compassion: Portraits of Moral
Choice during the Holocaust (Princeton, 2004); Kristin Renwick Monroe, Ethics in an Age
of Terror and Genocide: Identity and Moral Choice (Princeton, 2012).
4. Her autobiography is Emmeline Pankhurst, My Own Story (New York, 1914). The
most recent biographies of her include Paula Bartley, Emmeline Pankhurst (London &
New York, 2002); Martin Pugh, The Pankhursts (London, 2001); June Purvis, Emmeline
Pankhurst: A Biography (London & New York, 2002); June Purvis, “Emmeline Pankhurst
When Death Became Thinkable
19
(1858–1928) and Votes for Women,” Votes for Women, eds. June Purvis and Sandra
Stanley Holton (London, 2000), 109–34. For speeches and articles by and about
Emmeline Pankhurst, see the appendices in Gertrude Colmore, Suffragette Sally, ed.
Alison Lee (Canada, 2008); Cheryl R. Jorgensen-Earp, ed., Speeches and Trials of the
Militant Suffragettes (Madison & London, 1999); Jane Marcus, ed. Suffrage and the
Pankhursts (London & New York, 1987); Joyce Marlow, ed., Votes for Women: The Virago
Book of Suffragettes (London, 2001). Also see, Gay L Gullickson, “Militant Women:
Representations of Charlotte Corday, Louise Michel and Emmeline Pankhurst,” Women’s
History Review 23 (2014): 837–52. All histories of the militant suffrage movement contain information about Emmeline Pankhurst.
5. Purvis, Emmeline Pankhurst, 72.
6. Ibid., 74.
7. Ibid., 76; Bartley, Emmeline Pankhurst, 78.
8. Christabel Pankhurst, “Personal Violence,” Votes for Women, September 13, 1912:
800; “Our Comrade,” Editorial, Votes for Women, November 21, 1913: 112.
9. Purvis, Emmeline Pankhurst, 101–2; Pankhurst, My Own Story, 92–93.
10. The Times, March 19, 1914: 5; Bartley, Emmeline Pankhurst, 157.
11. Andrew Sloan, “Deliberately Struck Over the Head,” Letter to the Editor, The
Suffragette, March 13, 1914: 493. The letter was initially sent to the editor of the Evening
News. The event took place on March 9, 1914.
12. “Petition to the King,” Shoulder to Shoulder, ed. Midge MacKenzie (New York, 1975),
262–68. The text is from Pankhurst, My Own Story. The photograph, originally published
in the Daily Sketch, May 21, 1914, is on 263. It frequently appears in histories of the suffragettes and on the cover of books.
13. Bartley, Emmeline Pankhurst, 159.
14. Rebecca West, “A Reed of Steel,” (1933); repr. in The Young Rebecca: Writings of
Rebecca West 1911–17, selected and introduced by Jane Marcus (Bloomington, 1982),
243.
15. Ethel Smyth, Female Pipings in Eden (London, 1933), 213–14.
16. For dates and numbers, see Bartley, Emmeline Pankhurst, 99, 152–53.
17. See note 4 for sources on Pankhurst’s speeches.
18. Ethel Smyth, “Mrs. Pankhurst’s Departure from Coign, Woking,” The Suffragette, May
30, 1913: 541.
19. Emmeline Pankhurst, “Kill Me, Or Give Me My Freedom!” The Suffragette, July 18,
1913. Repr. in Jorgensen–Earp, Trials and Speeches, 313–16.
20. Pankhurst, My Own Story, 187–88. Italics added.
21. The official name of the Cat and Mouse Act was the Prisoners Temporary Discharge
for Ill-Health Bill. It allowed the government to discharge hunger-striking suffragettes to
recover their health and then to re-arrest them. The time spent out of jail did not count
toward the time of their sentence. It became law in April 1913.
22. Pugh, Emmeline Pankhurst, 267.
23. Rebecca West, “Life of Emily Davison,” The Clarion, June 20, 1913, repr. in The
Young Rebecca, ed. Juliet Gardiner (London, 1993), 178–83.
20
Journal of Social History
Winter 2017
24. For more information on Emily Wilding Davison, see Gertrude Colmore, The Life of
Emily Davison (London, 1913), reprinted in Liz Stanley and Ann Morley, The Life and
Death of Emily Wilding Davison (London, 1988); Gay L Gullickson, “Emily Wilding
Davison: Secular Martyr?” Social Research 75 (2008): 461–84; June Purvis, “Remembering
Emily Wilding Davison,” Women’s History Review 22 (2013): 353–62; John Sleight,
“One-Way Ticket to Epsom: A Journalist’s Enquiry into the Heroic Story of Emily
Wilding Davison,” (Morpeth, 1988); West, “Life of Emily Davison.”
25. Emily Wilding Davison, “The Outrage in Strangeways Gaol. Miss Davison Released
After the Use of the Hose-pipe,” Votes for Women, November 5, 1909: 85.
26. Emily Wilding Davison, “A Year Ago. A Statement Made by Miss Emily Wilding
Davison on Her Release from Holloway, June, 1912,” The Suffragette, June 13, 1913: 577.
27. Emily Wilding Davison, “Letter to the Editor,” Pall Mall Gazette, September 19, 1912: 4.
28. Colmore, Life of Emily Davison, 56–58; Stanley and Morley, The Life and Death of
EWD, pp. ; Mary Richardson, “Derby Day,” and “A Funeral,” Laugh a Defiance (London,
1953), 19–26; West, “Life of Emily Davison.”
29. Emmeline Pankhurst, “Our Brave Comrade,” The Suffragette, June 13, 1913: 580.
30. The major sources for Constance Lytton include Betty Balfour, ed., Letters of
Constance Lytton (London, 1925); Constance Lytton and Jane Warton, Spinster, Prisons
& Prisoners: Some Personal Experiences (London, 1914); Marie Mulvey-Roberts,
“Militancy, Masochism or Martyrdom?: The Public and Private Prisons of Constance
Lytton,” in June Purvis and Sandra Stanley Holton, eds., Votes for Women (London,
2000): 159–80; Michelle Myall, “‘Only be ye strong and very courageous’: The Militant
Suffragism of Lady Constance Lytton,” Women’s History Review 7 (1998): 61–84; Cheryl
R. Jorgensen-Earp, “‘The Waning of the Light’: The Forcible-Feeding of Jane Warton,
Spinster,” Women’s Studies in Communication 22 (1999): 125–51; Lyndsey Jenkins, Lady
Constance Lytton: Aristocrat, Suffragette (London, 2015).
31. Lytton, Prisons and Prisoners, 9–14.
32. Ibid., 15.
33. Ibid., 12–13.
34. Ibid., 30–38.
35. Ibid., 44–48, 72–74, 138.
36. Ibid., 201–33.
37. Ibid., 235.
38. Ibid., 237–39.
39. Ibid., 262.
40. Ibid., 268–70; Votes for Women, January 28, 1910: 276.
41. Lytton, Prisons and Prisoners, 275.
42. Ibid., 296–98. I know of no evidence that supports the doctor’s statement.
43. Ibid., 282.
44. Ibid., 299–300.
45. Ibid., 301–2.
46. Cited in Rosen, Rise Up, Women!, 126–27.
When Death Became Thinkable
21
47. Cited in Purvis, Emmeline Pankhurst, 175.
48. “A Memorable Derby,” The Times, June 5, 1913: 9; “The Distracting Derby,” editorial, Pall Mall Gazette, June 5, 1913: 8; “The Derby Suffragette,” editorial, The Standard,
June 5, 1913: 8.
49. The Suffragette, March 3, 1913, p. 321. For further discussion of this issue, see Cheryl
R. Jorgensen-Earp, “The Transfiguring Sword”: The Just War of the Women’s Social and
Political Union (Tuscaloosa, 1997), 100–10.
50. West, “The Life of Emily Davison,” in The Young Rebecca, 182.
51. Balfour, ed., Letters, Emily Lutyens to Betty Balfour, January 24, 1910.
52. The Suffragette, June 13 and 20, 1913; Votes for Women, June 13, 1913.
53. George Dangerfield, The Strange Death of Liberal England (1935; repr., New York,
1961), 145, 149, 159, 153, 155, 166, 167, 208.
54. Rosen, Rise Up Women!, 200.
55. Pugh, The Pankhursts, 15; V. Thorpe and A. Marsh, “Diary Reveals Lesbian Love
Trysts of Suffragette Leaders,” The Observer, June 11, 2000. For further analysis of what is
called the masculinist interpretation of suffrage history, see Purvis, Emmeline Pankhurst, 3–
5; Sandra Stanley Holton, “The Making of Suffrage History,” in Votes for Women, eds.
June Purvis and Sandra Stanley Holton (London, 2000),13–33; Stanley and Morley, Life
and Death of Emily Wilding Davison, 78–79,172.
56. Pugh, March of the Women, 114.
57. Jorgensen-Earp, “‘Waning of the Light,’” 149.
58. Mulvey-Roberts, “Militancy, Masochism or Martyrdom?” 171, 176.
59. Fran Abrams, Freedom’s Cause (London, 2003), 162–63. For consideration of this
judgment, see Purvis, “Remembering Emily Wilding Davison,”: 359–60.
60. Cf. Martha Vicinus, Independent Women (Chicago, 1985), 251–52; Lisa Tickner, The
Spectacle of Women: Imagery of the Suffrage Campaign, 1907–14 (Chicago, 1988), 208;
Stanley and Morley, Life and Death of Emily Wilding Davison, 172, 184–85.
61. Purvis, Emmeline Pankhurst, 7; Bartley, Emmeline Pankhurst. Bartley’s summary of
Pankhurst’s character and appeal is very similar to Purvis’s. See Bartley, 232–41.
62. Purvis, “Remembering Emily Wilding Davison (1872–1913)”: 354, 361. Davison’s
death has led both contemporaries and historians to single her out from Lytton and
Pankhurst, who survived their encounters with danger. Only she was identified and honored by the WSPU as a martyr. Lytton and Pankhurst were regarded as virtuous, even
saintly, but they were not martyrs. Despite the differences in how their lives ended, I
think their willingness to die and the steps they took that put their lives at risk are more
important than the fact that Davison died and the others did not.
63. Viscountess Rhondda, This Was My World (London, 1933), 118–19. Born Margaret
Haig, she inherited her father’s title when he died in 1918.
64. Hannah Mitchell, The Hard Way Up (London, 1977), 150–51.
65. Ibid., 153.
66. “The Outlook,” Votes for Women, January 6, 1911: 221; Emmeline Pankhurst, “The
New Year,” Votes for Women, January 6, 1911: 228; Votes for Women, January 5, 1912: 219.
22
Journal of Social History
Winter 2017
67. Cited in Crawford, “Henria Helen L. Williams,” in her Women’s Suffrage Movement,
710–11; For Williams’ complete statement and other personal accounts of women’s experiences on Black Friday, see Dr. Jessie Murray and H. N. Brailsford, The Treatment of the
Women’s Deputations by the Police (London, 1911), 10, 30–31. Caroline Morrell, “Black
Friday”: Violence Against Women in the Suffragette Movement (London, 1981).
68. “In Memoriam,” Votes for Women, January 5, 1912: 219. For other accounts of sexual
assault, see Murray and Brailsford, The Treatment of the Women’s Deputations.
69. “In Memoriam,” and “The Outlook,”Votes for Women, January 5,1912: 219.
70. “Forcible Feeding Scandal: Grave Case of Miss Lenton–Opinions of Eminent
Doctors–Home Office Between Two Fires,” Votes for Women, March 7, 1913: 321; “Miss
Lenton Released,” The Suffragette, February 28, 1913: 314; Agnes Savill, M.D., Chas
Mansell Moullin, F.R.C.S. and Victor Horsley, F.R.S., “The Case of Miss Lenton,” The
Times, March 18, 1913: 6.
71. Richardson, Laugh a Defiance, 154–55, 170–71.
72. Purvis, Emmeline Pankhurst, 210–13, 226–28.
73. Recent scholarship has shown that all tickets from London to Epsom were round-trip
tickets on that day.
74. For additional analysis of the cultural and personal factors of the women who went to
prison and for their experiences there, see June Purvis, “The Prison Experiences of the
Suffragettes in Edwardian Britain,” Women’s History Review (1995): 103–33.
75. Rhondda, This Was My World , 162.
76. Pankhurst, My Own Story,
77. Rhondda, My World, 156–61.
78. H. M. Swanwick, I Have Been Young (London, 1935), 188–89.
79. Florence Nightingale, Cassandra (1860; repr., Old Westbury, 1979); Swanwick, I
Have Been Young, 188–89; Elizabeth Cady Stanton, cited in Nine Women, ed. by Judith
Nies (Berkeley, 2003), 67.
80. Purvis, Emmeline Pankhurst, 52.
81. Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence, “The New Crusade,” London, 1907; Emmeline Pethick
Lawrence, “A Calendar of Saints,” Votes for Women, November 5, 1909: 89; “The
Released Prisoners,” Votes for Women, July 12, 1912: 568; “Christians, Awake!” Votes for
Women, December 27, 1912: 194; Jorgensen-Earp, “The Transfiguring Sword.”
82. In 1912, the actress and playwright Elizabeth Robbins likened the women’s suffrage
cause to a religion and stressed that it was its adherents’ faith and self-denial that gave it
strength. (The Times, March 7, 1912), cited in Crawford, Women’s Suffrage Movement, 601.
83. Emily Wilding Davison, “The Real Christianity,” written in Holloway Prison,
February 10, 1912. Unpublished ms., National Women’s Library, “EWD A4/3.”
84. Emily Wilding Davison, “Letter to the Editor,” Newcastle Weekly Chronicle,
September 21, 1912.
85. Emily Wilding Davison, “The Price of Liberty,” The Suffragette, June 5, 1914: 129.
86. The Suffragette, June 27, 1913: 623.
87. Lytton, Prisons and Prisoners, 276.
When Death Became Thinkable
23
88. When her husband became an agnostic, she followed in his footsteps, although later
in her life, she wondered if she had made a mistake. Purvis, Emmeline Pankhurst, 296.
89. Emmeline Pankhurst, “Letter from Prison,” The Suffragette, May 30,1913: 541.
90. Even in the Third Division of the prisons, the suffragettes were sometimes segregated
from the other prisoners for chapel and exercise. Purvis, “Prison Experiences,” 109. For
crimes committed by the other prisoners, see Ibid., 110.
91. It was not new for women to be trapped by their gender and economic circumstances,
but this strong cross-class identification was new.
92. Mrs. Pankhurst, Votes for Women, April 1908: 113. Cited in Purvis, Emmeline
Pankhurst, 105.
93. Ibid.
94. Laqueur, “Bodies, Details, and the Humanitarian Narrative.”
95. Ellen Ross, ed., Slum Travelers: Ladies and London Poverty, 1860–1920 (Berkeley, 2007).
96. Monroe, Heart of Altruism; Monroe, Hand of Compassion.