Reflections on Two Speeches by Emmeline Pankhurst

Emmeline Pankhurst (1858-1928) 

photographed in 1913

'I am by nature a law-abiding person - one hating violence, hating disorder - but from the moment 

we began our militant agitation to this day, I have felt absolutely guiltless. 

For in Great Britain there is no other way ...'

 

 

I. 

 

For some reason, the figure of suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst continues to haunt my imagination [1]. 

 

And so I thought I would take a look at a couple of her speeches, both from 1913, and perhaps find a clue as to why I find her so unsympathetic (although, actually, I know precisely what it is that irritates: her self-righteous moral and political idealism; i.e., her fascism with a human face, as BHL might say). 

 

 

II. 

 

Freedom or Death [2]

 

In a famous speech given in the United States in 1913, Emmeline Pankhurst identifies herself as a revolutionary and a soldier on the field of battle, waging civil war on behalf of women.

 

She wishes to make it clear to her American audience that she is not merely a spokesperson or an advocate - that the time for talking has been surpassed by a time for action: Deeds Not Words is the suffragette motto and if her deeds make her a dangerous person in the eyes of the authorities, well, she seems to revel in that.

 

Forced to choose between two evils - either having to "submit indefinitely to an unjust state of affairs" or rise up and adopt violent methods - Pankhurst chose the latter on the grounds that political (and maternal) history shows which option is most effective: 

"You have two babies very hungry and wanting to be fed. One baby is a patient baby, and waits indefinitely until its mother is ready to feed it. The other baby is an impatient baby and cries lustily, screams and kicks [...] until it is fed. Well, we know perfectly well which baby is attended to first."

 

Pankhurst could have refused this binary and opted for neither/nor, but instead she decided that she would make more noise and be more obtrusive - be more of a big baby - than anybody else, throwing her explosive toys out of the pram.

 

Initially, she says, the term militant was was wrongly applied to her and her cohorts. But after brutal ill-treatment at the hands of men simply for asking questions in public, they were now quite willing to accept the description and begin to terrorise the nation. 

 

And if shit happens, and the non-combatants suffer as well as the combatants, well, that's okay with her; "you cannot make omelettes without breaking eggs; you cannot have civil war without damage to something." 

 

Similarly, if suffragettes are killed for the cause (or die whilst on hunger strike in prison), well, that's unfortunate, but might also be viewed as one way of escaping male power; for the dead cannot be enslaved or denied their rights. And whilst human life is sacred, says Pankhurst, the sacrifice of life in the name of Freedom, Justice, and Equality is the greatest thing of all and she would fight for any of these noble ideals. 

 

And so we see how moral idealism turns deadly and collapses into the black hole of fascism ... 

 

 

III.

 

Why We Are Militant [3]

 

The Freedom or Death speech, as it is known, was not the only speech that Pankhurst made whilst on her fund-raising tour of the US in 1913. Why We Are Militant was another speech that is often cited and reproduced by her admirers today.

 

It opens by taking on her critics who argue that human emancipation is an inevitable evolutionary process and that women will therefore be given the vote sooner or later, thus making the violent campaign of the suffragettes unnecessary and unjustifiable. Such critics argue that educating women and preparing them for citizenship would be time better spent than smashing shop windows, burning down churches, and sending letters bombs in the post. 

 

Pankhurst, however, rejects this argument and sees little virtue in patience. Indeed, she sees patience as "something akin to crime when our patience involves continued suffering on the part of the oppressed" and argues that political change has only come at the point of a sword, i.e., via rioting, revolution, and war - not peaceful evolution. She reminds her listeners that the Reform Acts of 1832 and 1867 which extended the vote first to middle class men and then the urban male working class, were passed in response to violence and the threat of still greater violence to follow.   

 

Pankhurst thereby defends the arson attacks carried out by her suffragette comrades and suggests that if half of England needs to be burned down in a single night so that she might be able to put her X on a ballot paper, then so be it. Peaceful marches and meetings were having no effect - even if on a large scale - and appeals made fell on deaf ears - violence was unfortunate, but necessary.   

 

And the right to behave in a violent manner was part and parcel of female emancipation and equality; women should be free like men to behave in a non-constitutional and criminal manner - to break heads and destroy property - when the time called for direct action. They had the human right to do so when all other available means to bring about social and political change had failed. 

 

IV.

 

So, I think it becomes clear from these speeches why I don't like Emmeline Pankhurst. 

 

During the years she, her daughters, and the rest of her gang were particularly active on the UK political scene - from the founding of the Women's Social and Political Union in 1903 until the advent of the First World War in 1914 - there was, as Foucault would say, a certain style of political discourse and a certain ethics of the intellectual [4] - a style and an ethics that justified violence in the name of certain high ideals (such as freedom and equality). 

 

This radical moral philosophy appealed to a wide variety of political ascetics, angry militants, and potential terrorists - those who may claim to act in the name of Love, but are actually motivated by hate and resentment and seem to be particularly gripped by the molecular fascism that is in us all (in our speech and our everyday actions; in our thoughts and our desires). 

 

Paraphrasing Foucault once more, I would remind those who continue to admire Pankhurst and still think that revolutionary violence is justified by some greater good, that even if what you are fighting for is noble - and even if those you oppose are base and deplorable - you do not have to terrorise in order to be militant. 

 

And, further, don't think that politics is only and always about (defending or granting) individual rights as defined in liberal humanist philosophy.  

V.

 

It's worth noting, finally, that it was Emmeline's eldest daughter Christabel who was the real black shirt of the family. It was only after she took over leadership of the WSPU that the real violence began and the group resorted to terrorism as a legitimate political tactic - much to the horror of more moderate members who either spoke out against the bombings and arson attacks. 

 

In 1913, when Emmeline gave her speeches in America, several prominent individuals left the WSPU, including Pankhurst's younger daughters, Adela and Sylvia. 

Somewhat ironically, it was only with the outbreak of war the following year that Emmeline and Christabel called an immediate halt to their militant campaign and lent their full support to the British government in the conflict with Germany. Not only that, but they encouraged all women to assist in the war effort and all men to fight for king and country - happily handing out white feathers to those who had no wish to do so.   

 

After the War ended, Emmeline became more concerned with what she perceived as the threat posed by Bolshevism and joined the Conservative Party; her daughter Christabel, along with other more radical one-time suffragettes, chose to support the British Union of Fascists [5].   

 

 

Notes

 

[1] I have recently published two posts on Pankhurst and the insufferable suffragettes and their far-right political affiliations: click here and here. 

 

[2] This speech was delivered in Hartford, Connecticut on 13 November, 1913. It can easily be found in full online. An edited version was also reproduced in The Guardian (27 April 2007) as part of a series of great speeches of the 20th century: click here.     

 

[3] This speech is also from the US tour of 1913 and can also be found easily enough online: click here, for example. 

[4] See Michel Foucault's preface to Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus, trans Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane, (The Athlone Press, 1994), pp. xi-xiv. 

[5] Again, see the post 'On Suffragettes and the British Union of Fascists' (17 Feb 2024): click here. 

In Memory of Glenda Jackson

Glenda Jackson as Gudrun Brangwen in Women in Love (1969) 

and as Cleopatra in The Morecambe and Wise Show (1971)

 

 

I. 

 

I wouldn't say I was a huge fan of the actress Glenda Jackson [1], who died a few days ago, aged 87. But I do remember with a certain degree of fondness her appearances on the Morecambe & Wise Show - particularly the cod-classical Cleopatra sketch, in which she delivered the immortal line: "All men are fools and what makes them so is having beauty like what I have got." [2]

 

And, of course, I also admire her Academy Award winning performance as Gudrun, in Ken Russell's Women in Love (1969) [3]. The critic Brian McFarlane was spot on to describe Jackson's "blazing intelligence, sexual challenge and abrasiveness" [4] in the superbly written role; I think even Lawrence might have been impressed by her fearlessness.  

 

 

II. 

 

Born, in 1936, into a solidly working-class family from Birkenhead, Glenda was named after the wise-cracking Hollywood blonde Glenda Farrell. 

 

A politically-conscious and talented teenager, Miss Jackson won a scholarship to study at RADA in 1954. 

 

Prior to this, she spent two years working at Boots, which she hated; as she did the series of soul-destroying jobs she was obliged to take whilst unable to land roles in the early years of her acting career [5].

 

Fortunately, fame, fortune, and critical success were just around the corner and Jackson became a huge star of stage and screen in the 1960s, 70s and 80s.

 

However, she decided to quit acting in 1991, in order to devote herself to politics full-time as the Labour Party candidate for Hampstead and Highgate. 

 

Entering Parliament the following year, Jackson declared her determination to do anything legal to oppose the Tory government, still led at this time by Margaret Thatcher, whom she despised. 

 

(As a staunch republican, she wasn't a great supporter of the British monarchy either.)

 

In 2015, having retired from politics, Jackson returned to her first love; even treating us to a magnificent (gender-transcending) interpretation of King Lear, in Deborah Warner's 2016 production at the Old Vic: 

 

 

 Photo: Tristram Kenton (2016)

 

 

Notes

 

[1] As lengthy obituaries for Jackson have (rightly) appeared in every major news publication, I'm not going to recap her life and career in detail here. Primarily, I wanted simply to remind readers of her roles as Cleopatra and Gudrun Brangwen. However, I will add a few biographical details in part two of this post discussing her later years.    

 

[2] See The Morecambe & Wise Show (S5/E5), dir. John Ammonds, written by Eddie Braben, which aired on 3 June, 1971. Click here to watch the lengthy (14:32) Cleopatra sketch on the Facebook page Classic TV Moments. The line quoted begins at 5:57.  

 

[3] Interestingly, Jackson was pregnant whilst filming Women in Love - though I'm not sure if this fact helped, hindered, or made no difference to her astonishing performance. 

      Click here to watch the famous scene in which Jackson - as Gudrun - dances in front some (bemused and increasingly agitated) Highland cattle, whilst her sister Ursula (played by Jennie Linden) watches on fightened of what might the beasts might do. Eventually, Gerald Crich (Oliver Reid) arrives to put a stop to her fun and games, demanding to know why she wished to drive his cattle mad.

 

[4] Brian McFarlane (ed.), The Encyclopedia of British Film, (Methuen / BFI, 2003), p. 339.

 

[5] These jobs included: waitress in a coffee shop; receptionist for a theatrical agent; and a shop assistant at British Home Stores. Being a woman with an artistic temperament from a traditional working class background, surely helped Jackson in the role of Gudrun.   

 

 

War Post

Statue of Ares, God of War 

(Roman Copy of a Greek original at Hadrian's Villa) 

Today, in Parliament, a government motion to extend the British military campaign against the Islamic State - to bomb targets in Syria as well as Iraq - is very likely to be passed with a majority assembled from both sides of the House. For some MPs, in the wake of Paris and other recent atrocities, there clearly exists a strong argument for doing so. For others, including the leader of the Opposition, a convincing case for further military intervention in the Middle East hasn’t been made. In fact, for Jeremy Corbyn, British bombs dropped over Syria would only serve to make a grave and ghastly situation far worse.

If I’m honest, I have no idea who’s right and who’s wrong. But I do know that Lawrence vehemently opposed modern warfare and regarded murderous weapons of mass destruction, which bring death to anonymous victims, as refinements of evil. Not that Lawrence was a pacifist or opposed to violence. In fact, he fetishized the male as essentially a fighter and tied his own philosophy of power to notions of conflict and combat. But he also hated the idea of turning a primary physical activity, such as war, into an abstract and ideal process.

Real war, writes Lawrence, is a type of passionate relationship between men and to die in battle is a type of blissful consummation or great crisis of being. Unfortunately, it's become "a ghastly and blasphemous translation of ideas into engines" [159] and men have been turned into cannon-fodder. To be blown to smithereens by a bomb from the blue, dropped by an invisible enemy while you are eating your supper or sitting on the toilet, is a horrible and monstrous state of affairs.

So, on the one hand, Lawrence celebrates mortal combat and wants to see fierce naked men fighting face-to-face; able to exercise what he terms the choice of war. But, on the other hand, they must not be given the chance to use automatic rifles, grenades and poison gases - the deadly fruits of our own moral idealism and will to universal love.

In a manner far more radical than anything advocated by the CND crowd, Lawrence calls on the British people to make a unilateral destruction of all guns, explosives and chemical weapons - as well as the means of their production. Were we to do this, he says, we’d be able to breathe a collective sigh of relief and come to our senses once more as a nation. It would constitute an act of "reckless defiant sanity" [162].

Then, when all the mechanical weapons were destroyed, we could arm our soldiers with swords once more and "introduce a proper system of martial training in the schools" [161], ensuring every boy is turned into a fighter; as swift as a greyhound, as tough as leather, and as hard as Krupp’s steel as another lover of struggle and fearless youth once put it.

Of course, for ardent supporters of Lawrence, the use of this famous line from a speech made by Hitler, might be seen as something of a cheap shot, or a low blow aimed at their hero. They would angrily object to the implication that Lawrence was a fascist. And, to be fair, they’d be right to do so. For, in historical terms, Lawrence certainly wasn’t a fascist, or a fascist sympathizer.

Nevertheless, there are clearly what might be termed molecular elements of fascism within his thinking which allow for the construction of a highly dubious cratology and a rather less-than-liberal education policy. And the job of a critic who cares is to counter these elements; to refuse to become enamoured of power and resist the urge to glorify war, heroism, strong leadership and all the other militant-militaristic bullshit that - post-Serpent - Lawrence himself decisively rejected in favour of tenderness.

See: D. H. Lawrence, 'Education of the People', in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, (Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 85-166.

Raise the Scarlet Standard High

Sartre declared that anyone who isn't a communist is a filthy swine. 

I don't think that's true. However, it's undeniably the case that there is shit in the hearts of all Tories, extending from members of parliament to those who vote for them or offer financial support.

And it also includes those useful idiots in the Liberal Democrats who collaborate with and, indeed, maintain the present government and its shameful policies.