Well, that was the problem we had to face, and we faced it, a mere handful of women. Pankhurst was born on July 15, 1858, in Manchester, England, to politically active parents. But it didn't happen so at all: instead of the women giving it up, more women did it, and more and more and more women did it until there were three hundred women at a time, who had not broken a single law, only "made a nuisance of themselves" as the politicians say. It is certain that in the course of the Irish rebellion women have taken a very prominent part; and it is rather a notable point to which I should like to call your attention, that when the imprisonments of Irishmen took place in the course of their political rebellion they were put almost invariably, after a certain amount of struggle, in the first division, and were treated as political offenders; but when women, helping the men, got into the coils of the law, all those women in Ireland who were helping the men to get home rule, were invariably treated as ordinary criminals and got ordinary criminals' treatment. There is a part of Ireland which prefers to be governed from London. They are all urging us to consider the serious position into which we have brought the cause of woman suffrage. Now, if you say that, it shows you do not understand the meaning of our revolution at all, and I want to show you that when damage is done to property it is not done in order to convert people to woman suffrage at all. Here we have a political system where no reforms can get onto the statute book of the old country unless it is initiated by the government of the country, by the cabinet, by the handful of people who really govern the country. At that time, both American and British women were working to gain the right to vote. Audience In this speech Pankhurst is talking to a primarily American audience. Why should we alienate the sympathy of the shopkeepers? A speech delivered at Parsons Theater in Hartford, Connecticut, on November 13, 1913. It is quite evident you do not all realize we are human beings or it would not be necessary to argue with you that women may, suffering from intolerable injustice, be driven to adopt revolutionary methods. It got through the British House of Commons because the home secretary assured the House of Commons that he wanted the bill passed in the interests of humanity. Now then, let me say something about what has brought it about because you must realize that only the very strongest of motives would lead women to do what we have done. (modern). Well, that book is here tonight: that book is here on sale. They are too weak to speak, but they go amongst their fellow workers just to show that their spirits are unquenched, and that their spirit is alive, and they mean to go on as long as life lasts. That is the industrial situation. Freedom or death - Emmeline Pankhurst - Google Books Christabel Pankhurst speech - The British Library Well, can you wonder that all these things make us more militant? We are not going to prison to get the vote, merely to say we have the vote. Freedom or Death Emmeline Pankhurst The Connecticut Women's Suffrage Association invited radical suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst to speak. Then came the legislation to which I have referred, the legislation which is known in England as the "Cat and Mouse Act". Now even in China and Japan, in India, in Turkey, everywhere women are rising up and asking for these larger opportunities, which modern conditions demand that women should have: and we women think that we have helped. Well, then that morning I was rung up over and over again by excited gentlemen who begged that those golf links should be spared, saying: "I don't know whether your followers know that we are all suffragists, on our committee, we are entirely in favor of woman suffrage." Includes a transcript of the 1908 trial of the suffragette leaders, their speeches, and major pamphlets of the Women's Social and Political Union. It has come to a battle between the women and the government as to who shall yield first, whether they will yield and give us the vote, or whether we will give up our agitation. When women asked questions in political meetings and failed to get answers, they were not doing anything militant. That is the way in which we women of England are doing. So much for the industrial situation. So I make no apologies for coming, and I make no apologies, Mrs. Hepburn, for asking this audience if any of them feel inclined to help me to take back some money from America and put it with the money that I know our women are raising by desperate personal sacrifice at home, so that when we begin our next year's campaign, facing a general election, as probably we shall face next year, our anxieties on the money side will not be so heavy as they would have been if I had not found strength and health enough to come and carry out this somewhat arduous tour in the United States of America. Women are trying to alter it, have tried for generations, but they cannot because the legislatures have no time to listen to the opinions and the desires of people who have no votes. Then there is the legal situation. Well now, that really became the testing time. Well now, I want to argue with you as to whether our way is the right one: I want to explain all these things that you have not understood: I want to make you understand exactly what our plan of campaign has been because I have always felt that if you could only make people understand most people's hearts are in the right place and most people's understandings are sound and most people are more or less logical - if you could only make them understand. If you are dealing with an industrial revolution, if you get the men and women of one class to rising up against the men and women of another class, you can locate the difficulty; if there is a great industrial strike, you know exactly where the violence is, and every man knows exactly how the warfare is going to be waged; but in our war against the government you can't locate it. That would explain the whole situation. That book was written, not for people of my age, not for people who if there are dangers to be faced have either escaped or suffered from them: that book was written for young people. If you really want your golf links spared you had better intimate to Mr. Asquith that you think it is high time he put his principles into practice and gave the women the vote." Well then, when it comes to the question of how people are to get out of marriage, if they are unhappy, under the laws of divorce, the English law of divorce is the most scandalous divorce law in the civilized world. How different the reasoning is that men adopt when they are discussing the cases of men and those of women. It is perhaps a hard saying for many men that there will have to be self-control and an equal standard of morals, but the best men now, the scientists of every country, are supporting the woman's point of view. Well then they felt they must do something else, and they began to legislate. The two things go hand in hand. We had to get the electors, we had to get the business interests, we had to get the professional interests, we had to get the men of leisure all unitedly saying to the government, relieve the strain of this situation and give women the vote; and that is a problem that I think the most astute politician in this meeting would find very difficult. She fought hard for equal voting rights for women. BBC - History - Emmeline Pankhurst One woman broke the windows of the Guard Club, and when she broke those windows she stood there quietly until the Guard hall porter came out and seized her and held her until the policemen came to take her to prison. Well, it is quite possible that it has happened. Well now, let me come to the situation as we find it. Tonight it is not to advocate a reform that I address a meeting in Hartford. After the event, the WSPU submitted the. Probably that broken window of the Guard Club did a good deal to rouse men to the defense of women and to the injustice of their situation. That war was fought to get votes for white men in South Africa, a few years sooner than they would have had them under existing conditions, and it was justified on those grounds, to get a voice in the government of South Africa for men who would have had that voice in five or six years if they had waited. (63 votes) Very easy. And yet I find in American newspapers there is a great deal of misunderstanding of the fact that one of the chief minds engaged in conducting the women's revolution is, for purposes of convenience, located in Paris. I dare say you have followed with considerable interest the story of how the Chinese revolutionary, Sun Yat-sen, conducted the Chinese revolution from England. 3 /5. Emmeline. November 13: One of the 20th Century's Greatest Speeches - "Freedom or Suffrage and the Pankhursts - Routledge Historical Resources You see, ladies, even in a rebellion, there is an advantage in being a voter, and if you are not a voter you are liable to get very much worse treatment than the voters, even the law-breaking voters, get. Many of you have expressed sympathy, probably even practical sympathy, with revolutionaries in Russia. So far from it having that effect more and more women have been doing these things and I had incited them to do, and were more determined in doing them: so that the long determinate sentence had no effect in crushing the agitation. Women have found a new kind of self-respect, a new kind of energy, a new kind of strength: and I think that of all oppressed peoples who might claim your sympathy and support, women who are fighting this fight unknown in the history of humanity before, fighting this fight in the twentieth century for greater powers of self-development, self-expression and self-government, might very well attract the sympathy and the practical help of American people. Emmeline and Christabel were the founders of the Women's Social and Political Union, directing a campaign that included mass rallies, hunger strikes and physical . What did he say? I am not going to tell you how the women got to the mains and cut the wires; but it was done. We had enough of sympathy for fifty years; it never brought us anything, and we would rather have an angry man going to the government and saying, my business is interfered with and I won't submit to its being interfered with any longer because you won't give women the vote, than to have a gentleman come onto our platforms year in and year out and talk about his ardent sympathy with woman suffrage. Matters have become sadly worse; we have scratched on the surface instead of cutting out the root of the evil. Thousands upon thousands of these women - because there are over five million wage earners in my country - thousands of these women have dependents; they are women with children dependent upon them, deserted wives with children dependent on them, or wives with sick husbands; they are unmarried mothers, or they are unmarried women who have old parents or younger brothers and sisters, or sick relatives dependent upon them. Part of the militant movement for woman suffrage has had that effect, that women have learned to look facts in the face; they have got rid of sentimentalities; they are looking at actual facts: and when anti-suffragists talk about chivalry, and when they talk about putting women on pedestals and guarding them from all the difficulties and dangers of life, we look to the facts in life as we see them and we say: "Women have every reason to distrust that kind of thing, every reason to be dissatisfied; we want to know the truth however bad it is, and we face that truth because it is only through knowing the truth that you ever will get to anything better." They forced their way out of prison. I am not only here as a soldier temporarily absent from the field at battle; I am here - and that, I think, is the strangest part of my coming - I am here as a person who, according to the law courts of my country, it has been decided, is of no value to the community at all: and I am adjudged because of my life to be a dangerous person, under sentence of penal servitude in a convict prison. "How are they going to persuade people that they ought to have the vote by breaking their windows?" Freedom or Death - Nov. 13, 1913 Emmeline Pankhurst November 13, 1913 Hartford, Connecticut Print friendly Speeches Mrs Hepburn, ladies and gentlemen: Many people come to Hartford to address meetings as advocates of some reform. And I am always glad to remind American audiences that two of the first women that came to the conclusion that they would not submit to unjust imprisonment any longer were two American girls who are doing some of the most splendid suffrage work in America today up in Washington. I am going to talk later on about the grievances, but I want to first of all make you understand that this civil war carried on by women is not the hysterical manifestation which you thought it was, but was carefully and logically thought out, and I think when I have finished you will say, admitted the grievance, admitted the strength of the cause, that we could not do anything else, that there was no other way, that we had either to submit to intolerable injustice and let the woman's movement go back and remain in a worse position than it was before we began, or we had to go on with these methods until victory was secured; and I want also to convince you that these methods are going to win, because when you adopt the methods of revolution there are two justifications which I feel are necessary or to be desired. Well, I can assure you that if most women made a study of the laws before they decided to get married, a great many women would seriously consider whether it was worthwhile, whether the price was not too heavy, because, according to English law, a woman may toil all her life for her husband and her family, she may work in her husband's business, she may help him to build up the family income, and if he chooses at the end of a long life to take every penny of the money that woman has helped to earn away from her and her children, he can do it, and she has no redress. Absolutely impossible. I knew before I came here that for one whole day telegraphic and telephonic communication between Glasgow and London was entirely suspended. Well, our women decided to terminate those unjust sentences at the earliest possible moment by the terrible means of the hunger strike. Now, I want to come back to the point where I said, if the men of Hartford had a grievance and had no vote to get their redress, if they felt that grievance sufficiently, they would be forced to adopt other methods. It has become the subject of revolution and civil war, and so tonight I am not here to advocate woman suffrage. Not by the forces of civil war can you govern the very weakest woman. First of all there is the condition of the working woman. Those women have taken up this fight for their own sake, it is true, because they wish to be free, but chiefly for the sake of the women less fortunate than themselves. They also broke the windows of many of the clubs, the smart clubs in Piccadilly. So here am I. I come in the intervals of prison appearance: I come after having been four times imprisoned under the "Cat and Mouse Act", probably going back to be rearrested as soon as I set my foot on British soil. Life is sweet to all of us. We were determined to press this question of the enfranchisement of women to the point where we were no longer to be ignored by the politicians as had been the case for about fifty years, during which time women had patiently used every means open to them to win their political enfranchisement. Freedom or death - part 3. It is very frequently said that every woman who wants a vote, wants a vote because she has been disappointed, because she has not been chosen to be a wife. Emmeline Pankhurst - Archives of Women's Political Communication Their average income, taking the highly skilled woman teacher and averaging her wage with the unskilled home worker, the average income is less than two dollars a week. I don't know, Mrs. Hepburn, whether I have used the domestic illustration in Hartford, but it is a very good one: it is quite worth using again. Now whether you approve of us or whether you do not, you must see that we have brought the question of women's suffrage into a position where it is of first rate importance, where it can be ignored no longer. We felt we had to rouse the public to such a point that they would say to the government, you must give women the vote. And so it happens in civil war. It means, you refuse food until you are at death's door, and then the authorities have to choose between letting you die, and letting you go; and then they let the women go. She may at the end of a long, hard life find herself and her children absolutely penniless because her husband has chosen to will the money away from her. People have said: "Why does Mrs. Pankhurst come to America? Great speeches of the 20th century | Theguardian | The Guardian Then, the position of the wife. They put women in prison for long terms of imprisonment, for making a nuisance of themselves - that was the expression when they took petitions in their hands to the door of the House of Commons; and they thought that by sending them to prison, giving them a day's imprisonment, would cause them to all settle down again and there would be no further trouble. It was done, and it was proved to the authorities that weak women, suffrage women, as we are supposed to be, had enough ingenuity to create a situation of that kind. I am here as a soldier who has temporarily left the field of battle in order to explain - it seems strange it should have to be explained - what civil war is like when civil war is waged by women. But since I am a woman it is necessary in the twentieth century to explain why women have adopted revolutionary methods in order to win the rights of citizenship. 13 November 1913, Hartford, Connecticut, USA I do not come here as an advocate, because whatever position the suffrage movement may occupy in the United States of America, in England it has passed beyond the realm of advocacy and it has entered into the sphere of practical politics. Well, then it was that women began to withhold their consent. She happened to be an actress, a woman who had come into our militant movement because she knew of the difficulties and dangers and temptations of the actress's life, of how badly paid she is, what her private sorrows are and her difficulties, and so she had come into the militant movement to get votes for actresses as quickly as possible, so that through the vote they could secure better conditions. I dare say, in the minds of many of you - you will perhaps forgive me this personal touch - that I do not look either very like a soldier or very like a convict, and yet I am both. Fawcett described their ethos in a speech . All that is now at an end. You can kill that woman, but she escapes you then; you cannot govern her. Well now, we have had a royal commission on divorce and we have had a report, but there is no security for women that they are to have justice under a new law so long as men are chosen by men to legislate and those men are likely to register the moral opinions of men, not the moral opinions of women, in legislation. Speech from http://www.emersonkent.com/speeches/freedom_or_death.htm. Emmeline Pankhurst | Biography & Facts | Britannica When they felt they couldn't wait any longer, when they laid all the arguments before an obstinate British government that they could think of, and when their arguments were absolutely disregarded, when every other means had failed, they began by the tea party at Boston, and they went on until they had won the independence of the United States of America. Have you heard loud condemnation from English newspapers echoed in your own papers? Emmeline Pankhurst Day: our records on women's suffrage It has always seemed to me an extraordinary thing that you did not follow it up by throwing the whiskey overboard; you sacrificed the women; and there is a good deal of warfare for which men take a great deal of glorification which has involved more practical sacrifice on women than it has on any man. 0 Reviews. That is the whole point of our agitation. It is rather notable that not only men signed that declaration, but women signed it also; the women of Ulster were invited to sign the declaration along with the men. Well, the last stage of this struggle, and the struggle is coming to a head, is this; that Sir Edward Carson has been making speeches in which he has gloried in having broken the law; he has challenged the British government to arrest him; arms have been shipped to Ireland; and there is not a club, a young men's club, a workingman's club, or the middle class or the upper class men's club, where they are not drilling and preparing for civil war. No; the newspapers and you have accepted quite calmly the fact that revolution is preparing in Ireland, and not one of you, whether you are a newspaper editor writing leading articles in your sanctum, or whether you are a business man or a professional man, not one of you has questioned the right of those men in Ulster, although they are voters and have a constitutional means for getting redress for their grievances, the right of those men to resort to revolution if everything else fails. I do not come here as an advocate, because whatever position the suffrage movement may occupy in the United States of America, in England it has passed beyond the realm of advocacy and it has entered into the sphere of practical politics. When you think of the object of that war it really makes some of us feel very indignant at the hypocrisy of some of our critics. November 13: Emmeline Pankhurst Delivers One of the 20th Century's Greatest Speeches - "Freedom or Death" kathyfoley21 November 13, 2020 00:00 00:00 Today in 1913, British suffragist Emmeline Pankhurst delivered her famous "Freedom or Death" speech to a crowd of supporters at the Parsons Theater in Hartford, Connecticut. And so this "Cat and Mouse Act" which is being used against women today has failed: and the home secretary has taken advantage of the fact that parliament is not sitting, to revive and use alongside of it the forcible feeding. This book was written to convince everybody of the danger, to point out the plain facts of the situation, and to convince thoughtful people that only through the emancipation of women, only through the uplifting of women, can you ever effectively deal with the situation. Mrs Pankhurst was i. The first people who were put out of a political meeting for asking questions, were women; they were brutally ill-used; they found themselves in jail before twenty-four hours had expired. A good deal of the opposition to woman suffrage is coming from the very worst element in the population, who realize that once you get woman suffrage, a great many places that are tolerated today will have to disappear. Those links had been respected because some of the prominent women suffragettes happened to be members of the club, and those women who destroyed the greens - I don't know who they were, but it was no doubt done by women - spared the links where these women, whom they admired and respected, played.
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