Emmeline Pankhurst : The Right to vote for womens 

(Before you read this article just your FYI this is my first ever written article so please go easy on me ! ) 

As you may not know my dear readers but this article will concern you somehow. If your are a woman  read this article veryyyy carefully and if your are a man you should also read this veryyy carefully for your own sake ( I’m kidding, well not really … ) . Let’s talk about Emmeline Pankhurst, I can tell you that she really marked the British history as well as women, let me explain myself ... 

So fist of all, who exactly was Emeline Pankhurst ? 

Emeline was born in England  on the 15 th of July in 1858 in the city of Manchester.

She was a British political activist and the leader of the suffragettes .

 Emmeline’s childhood is actually quite interesting because she was born in a family who was already active in politics . Her family had a tradition of practicing radical movements . Also Emmeline was the oldest of her nine siblings and a very bright child who learned to speak at the age of three. 

She learned to be socially conscious at an early age, FYI thanks to her parents, who were both strong supporters of the antislavery movement and women’s rights.

At only 14 years old, I mean that’s pretty young … Emmeline went to her first suffrage meeting with her mother and came away inspired by the speeches she had heard.

She was a  pretttyyy a shy girl who was afraid to talk in public but she was not timid about telling her parents that she felt they treated her unfairly in comparison to her brothers, whose education they put a lot of importance on. ( I can’t rely to that I have two devilish sisters ) 

But let me remind you of something quite important …At the time, girls attended a local boarding school that taught social skills that would enable them to become good wives . And so of course Emmeline didn’t want to go to that type of school. So she  convinced her parents to send her to a progressive women’s school in Paris. When she returned five years later at the age of 20, she had become fluent in French and had learned not only sewing and embroidery, but chemistry as well (WOW you could say that it was pretty impressive at the time  right ? ) 

Btu what did Emmeline achieve  ? 

Well in 1889, Emmeline set up the Women's Franchise League( W.F.L), which aimed to give married women the right to vote in local elections. ( she got help from her very well looking  husband, Richard Pankhurst …) But unfortunately the W.F.L didn’t work because the government refused. 

So on October 10th in 1903 she founded the Women's Social and Political Union ( btw : the WSPU ) which was a women-only political movement and leading militant organisation campaigning for women's suffrage in the United Kingdom from 1903 to 1918.

 

She used many methods to do that such as marching, direct action ( that meant that she threw rocks like a savage to the government’s shops.  Like DAM girl  go for it ! ) and the last kind of repulsive method was hunger strike. 

Yeah already form the name you pretty much guess that it’s not  going to be very delicate … The suffragettes mostly used hunger strike, which means that when they were in prison they refused to eat. But the government didn’t want the women to starve so they forced them.

 

By 1913, the government had to respond to the prison hunger strikes of the Suffragettes. They passed an act which  became well-known as the 'Cat and Mouse' Act. This meant that prisoners on hunger strike were released until they had recovered their strength, at which point they would be re-arrested and put back into jail.

But thankfully after all these efforts form the Suffragette movement, they were rewarded at the end of the war in 1918, the Prime Minister David Lloyd George passed a law whereby married women over the age of 30 were allowed to vote. But of course Emmeline still thought it was unfair because why did men have the right to vote at 21 and women have the right to vote at 30 and would have to also be  married. So she continued to fight. 

Later on the Equal Franchise Act of 1928, gave all women from the age of 21 years old the right to vote. 

Finally, women had equal rights with men.

I wrote this article about Emmeline Pankhurst because she is really inspiring, and I find that what she did , everything she sacrificed just so that women could simply be on the same level as men is absolutely wonderful. And I am very thankful that women like that have existed and still exist … 

Thank you for reading my article I hope you enjoyed it !

Esther Mesropian’