The Pankhursts Martin Pugh Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, 608pp, £20 ISBN 0713994398

This book sparks into life on page 128. As a general election approached, Christabel Pankhurst and her acolyte Annie Kenney took their seats at the back of the Free Trade Hall in Manchester on 13 October 1905 for a Liberal meeting. Annie interrupted Sir Edward Grey's oration: "Will the Liberal government give women the vote?" Eyewitnesses described the pair climbing on to their chairs and yelling. The chief constable of Manchester persuaded them to sit down and submit a question to be answered after the speeches. No response being forthcoming from Grey, Annie and Christabel began shouting again, and unfurled a banner with the newly adopted slogan "Votes for Women". When they were removed to an ante-room, Christabel spat in the face of one policeman, then spat at and hit another. Showing remarkable forbearance, the policemen escorted the women off the premises, whereupon Christabel struck the unfortunate Inspector Mather again and began shrieking, quickly attracting a crowd. The women were finally seized and charged. Annie is claimed to have said: "Never mind, we have got what we wanted." Christabel replied: "Yes, I wanted to assault a policemen."

With the onset of militancy, it feels as though the story of the Pankhursts is finally under way. Everybody knows about their struggle against the forces of prejudice, in which audacious tactics, superiority in debate and an eagerness to embrace physical suffering finally won the day. Except, as Martin Pugh points out, it wasn't quite like that. The militants won all the headlines and subsequently took the glory, but victory in the struggle for women's suffrage was by no means their prize alone. The non-militants were working just as assiduously by different means. The trouble for the reader is that the sober version, which strips out the Pankhursts' own enthusiastic myth-making, isn't quite so racy.

By the time MPs voted for limited suffrage for women in 1917, bringing 8.4 million new voters into the system, the Pankhursts themselves had largely lost interest in their life's work. Emmeline, the mother, was out of synch with the new generation of women, both sexually liberated and keen, especially after the war, to set up homes with men. Christabel had frittered away her influence in the movement by becoming increasingly autocratic and aloof. Sylvia was inspired by the Russian revolution and more interested in class struggle than the sex war. And Adela had been banished to Australia, where she, too, became involved in left-wing activism.

Emmeline and Christabel, in this steely, detailed analysis, were almost all clay, their political nous a strange mixture of naivety and cunning. They were arrogant, emotional and undemocratic. They were also shining-hearted and incorrupt; the persistent confusion between their own finances and that of the Women's Social and Political Union looks like muddle-headedness rather than sleaze.

This was a family distorted by a mother's overweening love for one of her children. One of the most painful episodes related here is the split in 1913 between Emmeline and Christabel on the one hand, and Sylvia and Adela on the other. Ideological divergence meant divorce from the family. When Christabel suggested to Sylvia that they continue to meet "not as suffragettes but as sisters", Sylvia commented: "To me the words seemed meaningless; we had no life apart from the movement."

The poignant story of the only Pankhurst boy, Harry (another brother, Frank, died aged four), bears this out. He was knocked down in the street as a schoolboy, and taken home unconscious, for speaking out against the Boer war; at Manchester Grammar School, he stood as a women's suffrage candidate in a mock election, gaining 36 votes, and scampered out in the early hours to paste "Votes for Women" stickers on political posters. As Pugh points out, all this seems like a vain bid for attention. Before dying of polio aged 21, he fell in love with a young suffragette, much to Emmeline's disgust, though Sylvia abetted his passion. "It was as though, since Harry's whole life must necessarily be crammed into this brief interlude, she wanted him to enjoy his first, and last, love affair."

Although this book is monumental, it seems narrow in scope. Emily Wilding Davison, who threw herself under the King's horse on Derby Day, only makes an appearance after her death, and Pugh has little to say about the great spectacle of her funeral. The delightful figures who do pop up in the narrative, such as Yeats's friend Eva Gore-Booth, are summarily dismissed as soon as they move away from the Pankhursts. I wanted to hear more about Fred Pethick-Lawrence, a wealthy lawyer "ever ready to take root in any police station, his money bag between his feet", who bailed out the window-smashers. Eventually, Fred and his wife were imprisoned and went on hunger strike. He lost four stone and was force-fed five times. Treasury solicitors seized his assets, sold his home and made him bankrupt in order to pay for damages caused by the militants. Then Emmeline and Christabel decided to expel the Pethick-Lawrences from the WSPU, at which point they disappear from Pugh's story.

The two heroines of women's suffrage emerge tarnished from this account, but Pugh has filled out the picture with glimpses of other, equally remarkable, actors in the drama. I was glad to make the brief acquaintance of Colonel Blathwayt, who "classified suffragists as though they were akin to horticultural specimens" and designated part of his land "Suffragette Field", incorporating a summer house, "Suffragette Rest". Such tantalising characters add a pinch of spice to Pugh's huge slabs of detail.

Suzi Feay is literary editor of the Independent on Sunday

Post your comment

Please note: you will need to login or register before you can comment on the website