Organizing for Citizenship and Democracy
Is there more to be said about the militant women's suffrage movement in Britain? Some readers might feel dubious. After all, there has recently been a slew of Pankhurst biographies notably Martin Pugh's The Pankhursts (2001), plus two in 2002 both entitled Emmeline Pankhurst, one by June Purvis and the other by Paula Bartley.1 Delving a generation further back, Antonia Raeburn's Militant Suffragettes (1973) included interviews with many surviving elderly suffragettes shortly before they died, while Andrew Rosen's Rise Up, Women! (1974) offered useful tabulations including age of women on arrest (so often under thirty) and arson targets (date, location, object, estimated value). Meanwhile, Virago Press republished Sylvia Pankhurst's 1931 The Suffragette Movement (1977), upon which the BBC had drawn heavily for its television drama series, Shoulder to Shoulder (1974).2 Alongside ran more articles on militancy than you could shake a stick at including most recently a heated debate on 'The Suffragettes: Heroes or Terrorists?' (2007).3 HWJ readers restive at the prospect of yet further accounts might prick up their ears at the track record of the two authors reviewed here, experienced suffrage historians both. Laura E. Nym Mayhall, an American academic, is already familiar to UK suffrage historians, initially through her influential article on 'Creating the "Suffragette Spirit"' (1995), which exam ined how from the 1920s onwards the Suffragette Fellowship's 'inclusion in the community of militant suffragettes rested upon the defining act of imprisonment' and slanted the suffrage narrative by privileging one 'sequence of events... arrest and incarceration'.4 More recently Mayhall discussed how, for the generation of women coming to political conscious ness during the Boer War, two competing understandings of women's citizenship emerged: one a gendered model of service, the other insisting
The Militant Suffrage Movement
not on mere study of books, but on a first-hand acquaintance with the movement itself in England. In 1913 during part of July, August and October, and in 1914 from May 27 to July 14, I was in London investigating the woman suffrage movement in all its ramifications, marching in processions and pilgrimages, speaking in meetings both peaceful and militant, indoors and out of doors (the street is a grand place to study politics, especially in England), attending tax resistance auctions, escorting deputations to the House of Commons, witnessing the brutality of policemen and appearing in the police court to testify to what I saw, following Sylvia Pankhurst and East End working men and women to the House of Commons, accompanying Mrs. Pethick Lawrence to jail, hearing Miss Nellie Hall and Miss Grace Roe interrupt the course of their trial as a protest against an unjust system of justice, and interviewing and conversing with dozens of suffrage sympathizers and workers. In this brief paper it would be time wasted to criticise the militant methods-violence, destruction of property, etc.-as these methods have already been denounced more than sufficiently by the newspapers. I shall put the case somewhat from the standpoint of the militant suffragettes themselves, trying to give some idea of the philosophy and ethical principles underlying the militant propaganda and, above all, with the hope of making clear to American readers some of the radical differences between English and American conditions.
Continents of Liberty: Emerson and Gerald Vizenor’s Chair of Tears
Ralph Waldo Emerson protested what came to be known as the Trail of Tears in a public letter to President Martin Van Buren in 1838. Th e Cherokee Nation, he argued, had been cheated by a “sham treaty” (Emerson, “Letter” 50), the will of the people ignored, and a false acquiescence to removal written into law. In making a passionate appeal to the highest “chair” of the land, Emerson underscored the great political and moral stakes involved: