This document provides a summary of Emmeline Pankhurst's 1913 speech titled "Freedom or Death" delivered in Hartford, Connecticut. Pankhurst was a leading figure in the British suffragette movement who used militant tactics like hunger strikes to advocate for women's right to vote. Her speech justified these tactics by comparing them to strategies used in important historical events like the American Revolution. It also aimed to gain support from American suffragists to help advance women's suffrage in other countries. While controversial, Pankhurst's speech highlighted ongoing issues of gender inequality and helped propel the international suffrage movement.
This document provides a summary of Emmeline Pankhurst's 1913 speech titled "Freedom or Death" delivered in Hartford, Connecticut. Pankhurst was a leading figure in the British suffragette movement who used militant tactics like hunger strikes to advocate for women's right to vote. Her speech justified these tactics by comparing them to strategies used in important historical events like the American Revolution. It also aimed to gain support from American suffragists to help advance women's suffrage in other countries. While controversial, Pankhurst's speech highlighted ongoing issues of gender inequality and helped propel the international suffrage movement.
This document provides a summary of Emmeline Pankhurst's 1913 speech titled "Freedom or Death" delivered in Hartford, Connecticut. Pankhurst was a leading figure in the British suffragette movement who used militant tactics like hunger strikes to advocate for women's right to vote. Her speech justified these tactics by comparing them to strategies used in important historical events like the American Revolution. It also aimed to gain support from American suffragists to help advance women's suffrage in other countries. While controversial, Pankhurst's speech highlighted ongoing issues of gender inequality and helped propel the international suffrage movement.
This document provides a summary of Emmeline Pankhurst's 1913 speech titled "Freedom or Death" delivered in Hartford, Connecticut. Pankhurst was a leading figure in the British suffragette movement who used militant tactics like hunger strikes to advocate for women's right to vote. Her speech justified these tactics by comparing them to strategies used in important historical events like the American Revolution. It also aimed to gain support from American suffragists to help advance women's suffrage in other countries. While controversial, Pankhurst's speech highlighted ongoing issues of gender inequality and helped propel the international suffrage movement.
[“FREEDOM OR DEATH”, BY EMMELINE PANKHURST] “Freedom or death”, by Emmeline Pankhurst
This text was delivered on a speech by Emmeline Pankhurst in Hartford, Connecticut,
the 13th of November, 1913. She talked in front of a big audience, as thousands of suffragist people were assembled at Parsons Theatre by the CWSA (Connecticut Women´s Suffrage Association), in the frame of a fundraising campaign carried out in United States.
Considering this, it can be classified as a political text, which was addressed to an
American audience, in order to explain them why women in Britain were fighting for their political rights and why they were doing so through militant tactics.
Emmeline Pankhurst (1858-1928) was a barrister from Manchester and a radical
feminist leader, who played a very significant role in the fight for women´s right to vote in Britain.
Coming from a family with a tradition of radical politics, she started taking part in political events at very young ages, and later on she became a political activist as well. She founded the Women´s Franchise League in 1889, with the aim of achieving the right to vote for married women in local elections. Afterward she launched the WSPU (Women´s Social and Political Union), a more militant organisation.
Married Richard Pankhurst, a lawyer who backed women´s suffrage, and with her three daughters Christabel, Sylvia and Adela actively implicated in the fight for women´s vote, not only her, but her whole family could be considered as a reference in the history of the suffragist movement.
In the beginning of the 20th century women could not vote, although men were within their voting right since 1832 Reform Act, which expanded this right to worker and borough men, and different campaigns were asking for women´s suffrage since 1866. Even in the parliament an amendment was proposed by John Stuart Mill in 1877 to give women the right to vote in the same terms as men, but it was rejected.
However, the women´s suffragist movement was divided into two wings, a moderate one and a radical one known as suffragettes. In 1897 the National Union of Women´s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS) was founded with the aim of achieving the right to vote for middle class property-owning women, although they soon realized the need of working-class women support. Being critical of their strategy, E. Pankhurst withdrew from the NUWSS to found the WSPU in October 1903 in Manchester, with the principal slogan “deeds not words”. They carried through law-breaking, violent acts and hunger strikes.
The text explains the revolutionary nature of women´s endeavour to win their right to vote and it justifies the roughness of their acts with the view that there is no other effective way of reaching revolutionary goals as history has demonstrated. In that sense, this fight is compared with other historical events like the War of Independence, the Boston Tea Party or the Civil War, considering that in all those cases damaging aftermaths were necessary in order to reach their goals.
Furthermore, how women from all walks of life suffer from discrimination it is also mentioned within the text, as well as how they are usually overshadowed, and therefore obliged to make more noise than men when they face a grievance.
It also makes clear the determination and strength of women to bring their fight right up to the end, far from giving up after British Government´s repressive answers. Besides, it points out the uselessness of those oppressive acts and lows, and warns the government that it is obliged to choose between liberating women and killing them.
It ends up asking Americans for help to win this fight, claiming that an eventual winning of this battle will make easier achieving women´s right in other countries in the future.
In order to understand the background of this text it is important to consider some key events. One of those took place the 12 th of May, 1905. Frustrated by the lack of improvement and seeing that dialogue failed as a useful tactic when a women´s suffrage bill had been obstructed in the House of Commons, suffragettes rallied in front of the Parliament building. Police forces tried to break up the protest by arresting and beating up its participants, whereas protesters ended up throwing stones.
After that, suffragettes started carrying through rough acts, such as disrupting political meetings, window breaking, chaining to railings, and so on. Once arrested and jailed, they protested with hunger-strikes in prison. Before the dilemma of liberating them or letting them dye, the government responded force-feeding suffragettes. Such was the social rejection sparked off by this inhuman measure that the government eventually got rid of it. Instead, the Prisoners (Temporary Discharge for Ill Health) Act was implemented, better known as Cat and Mouse Act. This allowed authorities to re-arrest suffragettes once their health was recovered.
E. Pankhurst herself had been imprisoned 12 times within the previous 18 months, although she only served 30 days, all of them in hunger strike. She travelled to United States after being released under the Cat and Mouse Act, hence she was going to be re-arrested soon, as it is mentioned in her speech.
In 1912, when E. Pankhurst´s eldest daughter Charlote took over the WSPU, the violence in its act increased considerably. They used bombs, arson, physical harassment, etc. Those tactics had been widely criticised even within the WSPU and it caused internal division not only within the union but also within the Pankhurst family, as E. Pankhurst´s daughters Sylvia and Adela had been dismissed from WSPU. They both, along with other militants like Pethic-Lawrences who claimed the need of re- building social support for women´s endeavour, questioned the tactics the WSPU was using. Besides, the fact that Sylvia took part in the East London Federation of Suffragettes was publicly rejected by her mother.
Along with this, E. Pankhurst´s speech came also marked by the death of the militant Emily Davison some months before, after having thrown herself under the king´s horse at the Derby.
All this considered, it is easy to understand why Pankhurst justifies their militant tactics and compares them with strategies used by American´s when fighting for their freedom over their own history.
Furthermore, she points out that those tactics are not equally judged if they are made by men or by women, as well as it is necessary for women to explain their causes.
The attempt to gain sympathy from American suffragists as a way of making easier to achieve women´s political rights in other countries, including their own one, also represents other purpose of the text. In 1914 the British Liberal government opened negotiations with suffragists, and although the WSPU was excluded, its influence upon government´s change of position is undeniable.
The First World War prevented this attempt to prosper and the suffragettes put their fight in stand-by. Meanwhile, after negotiations with the government, all the suffragettes were released and E. Pankhurst encouraged women to go for jobs traditionally taken by men under the motto “men must fight and women must work”.
Once the war was finished, in 1918, the Representation of the People Act was implemented so that women over 30 were given the right to vote. Later in 1928 women´s suffrage was extended to all women over the age of 21. This change cannot only be seen as a consequence of the new roles taken by women during the war, for the reason that different movements for women´s voting right had been campaigning over decades, among which the role of E. Pankhurst and the significance of her speech in Hartford are inarguable.
In that sense, this text is considered to be E. Pankhurst´s most famous speech and it has taken a historical importance, since it marked the starting point of an increasing weight and repercussion of the Western feminist movement and its claim to achieve women´s voting right.
Even more, its influence goes far beyond its period, seeing that nowadays it can be found among the most famous speeches of modern history.
All in all, this speech has a lot to do with the fact that E. Pankhurst has been taken as an obvious reference in the movement for women´s voting right, not only by those people who have made her an idol, but also by those who despite being critical of her tactics, have recognized her influence and contribution in the long and unfinished way to go regarding gender equality.
From my personal view, although the text belongs to the last century, it contains current issues related to the continuity of a sexist society, such as the different way of judging and assessing women´s and men´s similar acts, the invisibility women suffer from, and hence the need of making more noise than men, and even the need to remain of our human being nature. Therefore, the need of fighting for women rights remains intense as well, but it is the courage and willingness E. Pankhurst represents which does not remain existing.
The double moral from which violence was judged at that time, which can be perceived by reading the text, is another issue that comes up to nowadays, now that not paying the same salary men and women doing the same job is totally legal while protesting against this fact by using some tactics like encircling the parliament could end up being illegal, and therefore punished by the law.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: BBC. http://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/higher/history/britsuff/suffrage/revision/1/. n.d. 11 November 2016.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/higher/history/democracy/changes/revision/2/. n.d. 7 November 2016.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/gcsebitesize/history/mwh/britain/votesforwomenrev_pri nt.shtml. n.d. 15 November 2016.
EL MUNDO. http://www.elmundo.es/la-aventura-de-la- historia/2015/12/18/5672b589ca474134438b4698.html. n.d. 7 November 2016.
http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/the-role-of-british-women-in-the-twentieth- century/womens-social-and-political-union/. 16 de August de 2016. 15 de November de 2016.
IOWA STATE UNIVERSITY.
http://www.womenspeecharchive.org/women/profile/index.cfm?ProfileID=356. 2016. 7 November 2016.
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