The Agitator EMMELINE PANKHURST

The Victorian Englishwoman marshaled the suffragist movement, which won women the vote

Not even the noisiest proponents of women's proper place back in the home could seriously suggest today that women should not have the vote. Yet "the mother half of the human family," in Emmeline Pankhurst's phrase, was fully enfranchised only in this century. In Britain, so proud to claim "the Mother of Parliaments," universal suffrage--including women's--was granted only in the year of her death, 1928. Mrs. Pankhurst was born a Victorian Englishwoman, but she shaped an idea of women for our time; she shook society into a new pattern from which there could be no going back.

The struggle to get...

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