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The W.S.P.U. adopted a French Revolutionary sense of crowd management, public spectacle and symbolic ceremony. They would greet one of their number on release from prison and draw her triumphantly in a flower-decked wagon through the streets, and they staged elaborate allegorical pageants and torchlight processions, with Mrs. Pankhurst proudly walking at their head (if she wasn't in jail). Her example was followed internationally: the U.S. suffragist Alice Paul, who had taken part in suffragist agitation when she was a student at the London School of Economics, imported Pankhurst militancy to the U.S., leading a march 5,000 strong in 1910.
The political leaders of Edwardian Britain were utterly confounded by the energy and violence of this female rebellion, by the barrage of mockery, interruptions and demands the suffragists hurled and, later, by the sight of viragoes in silk petticoats, matrons with hammers, ladies with stones in their kid gloves, mothers and mill girls unbowed before the forces of judges, policemen and prison wardens. Many suffragists in Britain and the U.S. argued that the Pankhursts' violence--arson, window smashing, picture slashing and hunger strikes--was counterproductive to the cause and fueled misogynistic views of female hysteria. Though the question remains open, the historical record shows shameless government procrastination, broken pledges and obstruction long before the suffragists abandoned heckling for acting up.
Mrs. Pankhurst took the suffragist thinking far and wide: she even managed to slip in a lecture tour of the U.S. between spells of a Cat & Mouse jail sentence. In her tireless public speaking, suffrage meant more than equality with men. While she was bent on sweeping away the limits of gender, she envisioned society transformed by feminine energies, above all by chastity, far surpassing the male's. In this, she is the foremother of the separatist wing of feminism today: the battle for the vote was for her a battle for the bedroom. She wrote, "We want to help women...We want to gain for them all the rights and protection that laws can give them. And, above all, we want the good influence of women to tell to its greatest extent in the social and moral questions of the time. But we cannot do this unless we have the vote and are recognised as citizens and voices to be listened to." Her plea to the court in 1912 ringingly concluded, "We are here, not because we are lawbreakers; we are here in our efforts to become lawmakers."
It is hard today not to sigh at the ardor of her hope in what voting could achieve, not to be amazed at the confidence she showed in political reform. But heroism looks to the future, and heroes hold to their faith. Joan of Arc was the suffragists' mascot, Boadicea their goddess, and Mrs. Pankhurst the true inheritor of the armed maidens of heroic legend.
Marina Warner's latest book is No Go the Bogeyman: Scaring, Lulling and Making Mock