On April 3rd 1913, Emmeline Pankhurst stood trial at the Old Bailey for causing an explosion at Lloyd George's house. She offered no defence, preferring to make a political speech about the rights of women and the wrongs of the British government: "I come to stand my trial from the bedside of one of my daughters who has come out of Holloway Prison, sent there for two month's hard labour for breaking a small pane of glass . . . she is so weak that she cannot get out her bed." Emmeline's sentence, three years' penal servitude, was harsh, particularly for a 56-year-old woman but she remained defiant: "I look on myself as a prisoner of war". Once inside Holloway, she went on hunger strike while her colleagues took up vigil outside the prison.
The justice of their cause - votes for women - makes it easy to romanticise the lives of Emmeline Pankhurst and her three daughters, Christabel, Sylvia and Adela. The trend started with their own writings, which always minimised the role of non-militants and any others who disagreed with them while underlining Pankhurst activity and importance.
Subsequent writers have tended to take them at their own evaluation or, according to Martin Pugh, recoiled in horror on discovering the truth about this complex, dysfunctional family: that "the explosive mixture of idealism, self-sacrifice and strategic insight that enabled to contribute so notably to national life also made them ruthless, high-handed and self-righteous". Contemporary feminists find Emmeline and Christabel's swing to the right during the first World War particularly unpalatable, while at the personal level, Emmeline's rejection of Sylvia when pregnant and her banishment of Adela to Australia are disconcerting.
Including the perspective of Adela, the forgotten daughter, is one of two factors that make this book a significant advance on any previous Pankhurst biographies. The second is Martin Pugh's sound historical method. Pugh, research professor in History at Liverpool John Moores University, has written elsewhere that female suffragists' "suffering and sacrifice made an indelible impression. . . but history is an unsentimental business." Here he takes his unsentimental scalpel to the extravagant claims and heated opinions that have long clouded Pankhurst historiography, and slices out the facts.
With care, clarity and insight we are steered through the well-known events: Emmeline's formation of the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) in Manchester in 1903; the emergence of her eldest daughter, Christabel, as a leader and the concomitant emphasis on militant tactics; the increasing attacks on property and the arrests, hunger-strikes and force-feeding that followed; the death of Emily Davison under the King's horse at Epsom; the Cat and Mouse Act (Prisoner's Temporary Discharge of Ill Health Act) by which the campaigners were released as soon as ill from hunger-striking but re-arrested as soon as recovered.
By the summer of 1914, the struggle between suffragists and government was at stalemate: all the leading members of the WSPU were either in prison, in poor health or in exile. When England declared war on Germany, Christabel quickly perceived the chance to withdraw from an untenable position without loss of face. The Pankhursts' direct influence on the suffrage question virtually ended at this point. After the war came limited female enfranchisement, surprising suffragists as much as anyone, a similar offer to that rejected in 1912 but now meekly accepted. This, then, was the most noticeable effect of the war upon the suffragist cause: the defeat of militancy.
From this point forward, the paths followed by the Pankhursts fluctuated wildly. Christabel and Emmeline became gung-ho militarists, Christabel stating: "as suffragettes we could not be pacifists at any price". Her sisters both disagreed, and involved themselves in anti-war organisations. In the 1920s, Christabel repudiated politics altogether, becoming involved in Second Adventism; Adela shifted from ardent socialism to flirting with fascism in inter-war Australia. Only Sylvia stood steadfast to the liberal ideals, her interest in suffragism moving out to embrace socialism, then communism and anti-fascism, culminating in her fight against colonialism in Africa.
While rightly emphasising the political in this biography, Pugh never neglects the personal. The vexed, often bitter, relationships between these volatile women are fairly dissected as each of them is followed through her life. This is a measured history, meticulously researched through a variety of sources, carefully composed and elegantly written: one of those biographies that takes all the previous works on its subject and nudges them off the shelf.
┴ine McCarthy is a freelance writer and lecturer. She teaches women's studies at WERRC (Women's Education Research and Resource Centre), University College Dublin