Suffragette (illustrated, annotated, with a timeline and an introduction)
My Own Story
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- $2.99
Publisher Description
Suffragette is now on release as a major motion picture starring Meryl Streep as Emmeline Pankhurst.
• Illustrated with nineteen photographs
• Introduction contextualizing Mrs Pankhurst and the path to women's suffrage
• Suggestions for further reading
• Timeline of events
• Annotations: 100 footnotes explaining concepts and characters.
Emmeline Pankhurst was the most well known of the activists striving for the right for women to vote in the early twentieth century.
This book is her story. It was first published in 1914 at the start of the First World War and before women received enfranchisement. In the text Mrs Pankhurst describes her path to radical politics and her life as leader of the suffragette movement. She does not hold back on her descriptions of the violent tactics employed or indeed the savage treatment of the women by the authorities. The accounts of the often sadistic cruelty of the British Establishment towards these women are not easy to forget.
The book contains the sixteen photographs from the original 1914 publication with three additional images from Mrs Pankhurst’s visit to the USA. The text has been annotated by the publisher with short footnotes giving explanations of terms and descriptions of the people mentioned.
The publisher is pleased to be able to include an introduction and a timeline written by Lesley Gray that provide an overview of the struggle for women to obtain the vote and of Mrs Pankhurst’s role in the suffragette movement.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Writing on the eve of the Great War, Pankhurst (1858 1928), the controversial leader of the Women's Social and Political Union, recounts the previous decade's rallies, window-breaking, arson, prison mutinies, and hunger strikes intended to incite the men of England's parliament to act on their longstanding overtures to women's suffrage. Born to abolitionists in Victorian Manchester, the author married the suffragist Richard Marsden Pankhurst, raised daughters who joined the cause, and served as a local administrator of Suffrage Society. "Deeds, not words" became the motto of the WSPU, who heckled MPs of the ruling Liberal government and campaigned against them; having "exhausted argument" with no vote to show for it, they used incrementally violent tactics aimed squarely at what Pankhurst perceptively understood as government's sacred keeping: property. The suffragists burned golf greens, set fire to unoccupied country houses, and interrupted the mail. For this they earned the ire of the government, stirring debates on the effectiveness of their militancy and the merits of Pankhurst's admittedly "autocratic" leadership that continue to this day. Pankhurst's mannered English occasionally amuses the contemporary ear, and American readers may not fully understand the parliamentary machinations that so riled her, but the shrieks of force-fed suffragist prisoners resonate all too clearly, and Pankhurst's political justification of property damage feels current.
