That is the north of Ireland, in the County of Ulster. That is the whole point of our agitation. They illustrate the complexity of the issue and the ambivalence of the court which found them guilty of damaging city property yet acknowledged the virtues of the cause for which they were fighting. In England, if you could understand it, there is the most pathetic and the most courageous fight going on, because you find the people whom you have been accustomed to look upon as weak and reliant, the people you have always thought leaned upon other people for protection, have stood up and are fighting for themselves. Every human being loves life and loves to enjoy the good things and the happiness that life gives: and yet we have a state of things in England that has made not two or three women but thousands of women quite prepared to face these terrible situations that I have been trying without any kind of passion or exaggeration to lay before you. We know this, that whatever women's wishes might be, it is their duty for the sake of the race, itself, to save the race, to insist upon having this question of the moral health of the nation approached from the women's point of view and settled by women in cooperation with men. At the present time there are women lying at death's door, recovering enough strength to undergo operations, who have had both systems applied to them, and have not given in and won't give in, and who will be prepared, as soon as they get up from their sick beds, to go on as before. But there came a time when we said: "It is unjust to send political agitators to prison in this way for merely asking for justice, and we will not submit any longer.". Pankhurst and her fellow suffragettes were frustrated . This speech was given on November 13th, 1913 by Emmeline Pankhurst, who has been called the mother of British suffragette movement, in Hartford, Connecticut. A number of the guards came out to see the kind of woman it was who had broken their windows, and they saw there a quiet little woman. Now, the situation today then is, that home rule for Ireland is to take effect early next year, or in the course of next year. They were able to deal with the revolutionaries of the Chartists' time; they were able to deal with the trades union agitation; they were able to deal with the revolutionaries later on when the Reform Acts of 1867 and 1884 were passed: but the ordinary law has not sufficed to curb insurgent women. So much for the industrial situation. The industrial workers of Great Britain have an average wage, mind you, not a minimum wage, an average wage, of less than two dollars a week. But this experience will show you that if you really want to get anything done, it is not so much a matter of whether you alienate sympathy; sympathy is a very unsatisfactory thing if it is not practical sympathy. I am always proud to think that Miss Lucy Burns and Miss Alice Paul served their suffrage apprenticeship in the militant ranks in England, and they were not slow about it either because one of them came, I believe it was, from Heidelberg, travelling all night, to take part in one of those little processions to Parliament with a petition. There may be doctors in this meeting: if so, they know it is one thing to treat an insane person, to feed by force an insane person, or a patient who has some form of illness which makes it necessary; but it is quite another thing to feed a sane, resisting human being who resists with every nerve and with every fiber of her body the indignity and the outrage of forcible feeding. They said: "As soon as the women get a taste of this they will give it up." The great thing is to see that no more damage is done than is absolutely necessary, that you do just as much as will arouse enough feeling to bring about peace, to bring about an honorable peace for the combatants, and that is what we have been doing. Have you heard loud condemnation from English newspapers echoed in your own papers? A distinguished lawyer, a distinguished statesman: he is an Irishman. Now, it would take too long to trace the course of militant methods as adopted by women, because it is about eight years since the word militant was first used to describe what we were doing; it is about eight years since the first militant action was taken by women. We have rejoiced wholeheartedly in your victories. Now, to those people who say that women are better treated than men when they break the laws, to those people who say that there is no need for women to take to methods of revolution, I want to draw this contrast; here is Sir Edward Carson, a man who presumably by his education and training, ought to be more respectful of the law than persons who are not either fit to understand the laws or to vote for those who make them. Well, we are showing them that government does not rest upon force at all: it rests upon consent. This collection brings together important articles written by Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughters during the Suffragette Campaign, 1903-14. Then we women determined to show the world, that women, handicapped as women are, can still fight and can still win, and now I want to show you how this plan of ours was carefully thought out, even our attacks on private property, which has been so much misunderstood. That is the only distinction between his speeches and mine, that he has advocated and justified the taking of life where I have always stopped short in my justification, at property, at inanimate objects. Well, that was the problem we had to face, and we faced it, a mere handful of women. Emmeline and Christabel were the founders of the Women's Social and Political Union, directing a campaign that included mass rallies, hunger strikes and physical . Some U.S. states allowed women to vote, but most did not. There hasn't been a victory the women of America have won that we have not rejoiced in. Men have done splendid things in this world; they have made great achievements in engineering; they have done splendid organization work; but they have failed, they have miserably failed, when it has come to dealing with the lives of human beings. You have two babies very hungry and wanting to be fed. Now that is the outcome of our civil war. Now even in China and Japan, in India, in Turkey, everywhere women are rising up and asking for these larger opportunities, which modern conditions demand that women should have: and we women think that we have helped. Tonight it is not to advocate a reform that I address a meeting in Hartford. you say. He decides absolutely the conditions in which that child is to live; he decides how it is to be educated; he can even decide what religion it is to profess, and the mother's consent is not obtained to any of these decisions. I could go on tonight pointing out to you how in my country small crimes against property, small thefts, small injuries to property are punished more severely than are any crimes committed against the physical and the moral integrity of members of my sex. Perhaps you now can understand why we women thought we must attack the thing that was of most value in modem life in order to make these people wake up and realize that women wanted the vote, and that things were going to be very uncomfortable until women got the vote, because it is not by making people comfortable you get things in practical life, it is by making them uncomfortable. To ask questions at political meetings is an acknowledged right of all people who attend public meetings; certainly in my country, men have always done it, and I hope they do it in America, because it seems to me that if you allow people to enter your legislatures without asking them any questions as to what they are going to do when they get there you are not exercising your citizen rights and your citizen duties as you ought. It is not at all difficult if revolutionaries come to you from Russia, if they come to you from China, or from any other part of the world, if they are men, to make you understand revolution in five minutes, every man and every woman to understand revolutionary methods when they are adopted by men. I ask American men in this meeting, what would you say if in your state you were faced with that alternative, that you must either kill them or give them their citizenship - women, many of whom you respect, women whom you know have lived useful lives, women whom you know, even If you do not know them personally, are animated with the highest motives, women who are in pursuit of liberty and the power to do useful public service? You may have sentimental articles in magazines by the chancellor of the exchequer who seems to be able to spare time from his ordinary avocations to write magazine articles telling you that militancy is a drag on the movement for woman suffrage. Their average income, taking the highly skilled woman teacher and averaging her wage with the unskilled home worker, the average income is less than two dollars a week. Then take her as a mother. 176 Copy quote One baby is a patient baby, and waits indefinitely until its mother is ready to feed it. Constant economies are being affected in government departments by the substitution of women's labor for men's, and there is always a reduction in wages whenever women are employed. Well then they felt they must do something else, and they began to legislate. Despite being academically gifted, she did not Sir Edward Carson has not been arrested; Sir Edward Carson has not been charged with conspiracy; Sir Edward Carson has not been sent to jail. It is a practical political means, the only means we consider open to voteless persons to bring about a political situation, which can only be solved by giving women the vote. Today we're celebrating one of the key leaders of the British women's suffrage movement: Emmeline Pankhurst. Now, if you say that, it shows you do not understand the meaning of our revolution at all, and I want to show you that when damage is done to property it is not done in order to convert people to woman suffrage at all. They put women in prison for long terms of imprisonment, for making a nuisance of themselves - that was the expression when they took petitions in their hands to the door of the House of Commons; and they thought that by sending them to prison, giving them a day's imprisonment, would cause them to all settle down again and there would be no further trouble. I have always said human life is sacred, and in a woman's revolution we respect human life, and we stop short of injury to human life. Freedom or Death Emmeline Pankhurst The Connecticut Women's Suffrage Association invited radical suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst to speak. Now, that went on so long that the government felt they had lost their power, and that they were unable to cope with the situation. Thousands upon thousands of these women - because there are over five million wage earners in my country - thousands of these women have dependents; they are women with children dependent upon them, deserted wives with children dependent on them, or wives with sick husbands; they are unmarried mothers, or they are unmarried women who have old parents or younger brothers and sisters, or sick relatives dependent upon them. Well then, the whole problem of people who want reform is, to bring enough political pressure to bear upon the government to lead them to initiate, to draft a bill, and introduce it in the first instance, into the House of Commons, force it through the House of Commons, press it through the House of Lords, and finally land it safely, having passed through the shoals and rapids of the parliamentary river, safely on the statute book as an Act of Parliament. We know what happened when your forefathers decided that they must have representation for taxation, many, many years ago. Well now, let me come to the situation as we find it. Emmeline Pankhurst Speech: Freedom or death - Hartford, Connecticut on November 13, 1913 Key Extracts "We women, in trying to make our case clear, always have to make as part of our argument, and urge upon men in our audience the fact - a very simple fact - that women are human beings." Emmeline Pankhurst. Well, ladies and gentlemen, I want to say that I am very thankful to you for listening to me here tonight; I am glad if I have been able even to a small extent to explain to you something of the English situation. We are going through all this to get the vote so that by means of the vote we can bring about better conditions not only for ourselves but for the community as a whole. Content This is a speech where Pankhurst is explaining the hypocrisy of men refusing to allow women to vote, while trying to explain why it is women want to vote. I do not care very much even whether you really understand, because when you are in a fighting movement, a movement which every fiber of your being has forced you to enter, it is not the approval of other human beings that you want; you are so concentrated on your object that you mean to achieve that object even if the whole world was up in arms against you. It doesn't matter whether you have practically every member of parliament on your side, you cannot get what you want unless the cabinet initiate legislation, a situation by which the private member has become almost of no account at all, the ordinary private member of parliament. In fact, every principle of liberty enunciated in any civilized country on earth, with very few exceptions, was intended entirely for men, and when women tried to force the putting into practice of these principles, for women, then they discovered they had come into a very, very unpleasant situation indeed. The whole argument with the anti-suffragists, or even the critical suffragist man, is this: that you can govern human beings without their consent. Women broke some windows as a protest: they broke a good many shopkeepers' windows: they broke the windows of shopkeepers where they spent most of their money when they bought their hats and their clothing. They had to dip back into the middle ages to find a means of repressing the women in revolt, and the whole history shows how futile it is for men who have been considered able statesmen to deal with dissatisfied women who are determined to win their citizenship and who will not submit to government until their consent is obtained. Well, our women decided to terminate those unjust sentences at the earliest possible moment by the terrible means of the hunger strike. This book was written to convince everybody of the danger, to point out the plain facts of the situation, and to convince thoughtful people that only through the emancipation of women, only through the uplifting of women, can you ever effectively deal with the situation. That is to say, next June, a parliament is going to be set up in Dublin, an Irish parliament, for the management of Irish affairs quite distinct from the government in London. Freedom or Death is a speech by Emmeline Pankhurst delivered at Hartford, Connecticut - November 13, 1913. The law has already been broken, because there has been considerable riot in the streets of Belfast, and lives even have been lost, and I want to say to you in this meeting how much have you heard of all this in the American newspapers? However, we were called militant for doing that, and we were quite willing to accept the name, because militancy for us is time-honored; you have the church militant, and in the sense of spiritual militancy we were very militant indeed. But since I am a woman it is necessary in the twentieth century to explain why women have adopted revolutionary methods in order to win the rights of citizenship. So I make no apologies for coming, and I make no apologies, Mrs. Hepburn, for asking this audience if any of them feel inclined to help me to take back some money from America and put it with the money that I know our women are raising by desperate personal sacrifice at home, so that when we begin our next year's campaign, facing a general election, as probably we shall face next year, our anxieties on the money side will not be so heavy as they would have been if I had not found strength and health enough to come and carry out this somewhat arduous tour in the United States of America. As a political activist, Emmeline Pankhurst played a vocal role in organizing rallies and helping women earn the right to vote in England. That is the history of humanity right from the beginning. It was thirty years ago in England that a splendid woman named Josephine Butler fought to establish an equal moral code for both sexes. Now then, let me say something about what has brought it about because you must realize that only the very strongest of motives would lead women to do what we have done. I am not only here as a soldier temporarily absent from the field at battle; I am here - and that, I think, is the strangest part of my coming - I am here as a person who, according to the law courts of my country, it has been decided, is of no value to the community at all: and I am adjudged because of my life to be a dangerous person, under sentence of penal servitude in a convict prison. It is certain that in the course of the Irish rebellion women have taken a very prominent part; and it is rather a notable point to which I should like to call your attention, that when the imprisonments of Irishmen took place in the course of their political rebellion they were put almost invariably, after a certain amount of struggle, in the first division, and were treated as political offenders; but when women, helping the men, got into the coils of the law, all those women in Ireland who were helping the men to get home rule, were invariably treated as ordinary criminals and got ordinary criminals' treatment. Click here to read part 2 of the speech. Then came the legislation to which I have referred, the legislation which is known in England as the "Cat and Mouse Act". So you see there is some special interest in hearing so unusual a person address you. You must make women count as much as men; you must have an equal standard of morals; and the only way to enforce that is through giving women political power so that you can get that equal moral standard registered in the laws of the country. Well, we know perfectly well which baby is attended to first. It is the only way. In these speeches, Emmeline Pankhurst and other leading militant suffragists defend themselves against the charges of damaging city property in their attempt to publicize the issue of women's suffrage. It was valuable experience, and we were glad to get it. We have got in Ireland today a very serious situation. Well, then that morning I was rung up over and over again by excited gentlemen who begged that those golf links should be spared, saying: "I don't know whether your followers know that we are all suffragists, on our committee, we are entirely in favor of woman suffrage." You won your freedom in America when you had the revolution, by bloodshed, by sacrificing human life. That book was written, not for people of my age, not for people who if there are dangers to be faced have either escaped or suffered from them: that book was written for young people. We have done it; we are doing it every day; and I think when you take that fact into consideration you will realize why we have been attacking private property, why we have been attacking the property of men so absorbed in their business that they generally forget to vote in ordinary elections, why we have attacked the pleasures of men whose whole life is spent in a round of pleasure, and who think politics so dull and so beneath their distinguished ossification that they hardly know which party is in power. It is rather notable that not only men signed that declaration, but women signed it also; the women of Ulster were invited to sign the declaration along with the men. The three following speeches are among her best remembered. Emmeline Pankhurst made her most famous speech on a fundraising tour of the US in autumn 1913. When they put us in prison at first, simply for taking petitions, we submitted; we allowed them to dress us in prison clothes; we allowed them to put us in solitary confinement; we allowed them to treat us as ordinary criminals, and put us amongst the most degraded of those criminals: and we were very glad of the experience, because out of that experience we learned of the need for prison reform; we learned of the fearful mistakes that men of all nations have made when it is a question of dealing with human beings; we learned of some of the appalling evils of our so-called civilization that we could not have learned in any other way except by going through the police courts of our country, in the prison vans that take you up to prison and right through that prison experience. No man was ever put out of a public meeting for asking a question until Votes for Women came onto the political horizon. Published: 7:08 PM . Your right to send to France and ask for help was never questioned. The marriage laws of our country are bringing hundreds and hundreds of women into the militant ranks because we cannot get reform, the kind of reform that women want, of our marriage laws. It does not matter to the practical suffragist whether she alienates sympathy that was never of any use to her. That war was fought ostensibly to get equal rights for all whites in South Africa. Then it was that, to the shame of the British government, they set the example to authorities all over the world of feeding sane, resisting human beings by force. Then, the latest manifestation, the latest cause of militancy has been the breaking of the great conspiracy of silence with regard to moral questions and the question of social disease that we have had during the last few years. Putting sentiment aside, people who really want reforms learn that lesson very quickly. It has always seemed to me an extraordinary thing that you did not follow it up by throwing the whiskey overboard; you sacrificed the women; and there is a good deal of warfare for which men take a great deal of glorification which has involved more practical sacrifice on women than it has on any man. Now, one woman was arrested on an occasion when a great many windows were broken in London, as a protest against a piece of trickery on the part of the government, which will be incredible in fifty years, when the history of the movement is read. I am glad to think that he is not in a position to give effect to his ideas any more; he now adorns the House of Lords: but he was still judge of the divorce court when he said, that in his opinion the wise wife was the woman who closed her eyes to the moral failings of her husband; and that was the man, women in this meeting, who had for years decided what was legal cruelty and what women were to endure or what they were not to endure in that relationship of husband and wife. I would like to suggest that if later on, while I am explaining these matters to you, there comes into the mind of any man or woman in the audience some better plan for getting what we want out of an obstinate government, I would be thankful and grateful if that person, man or woman, would tell me of some better plan than ours for dealing with the situation. We have, first of all to convince you we are human beings, and I hope to be able to do that in the course of the evening before I sit down, but before doing that, I want to put a few political arguments before you - not arguments for the suffrage, because I said when I opened, I didn't mean to do that - but arguments for the adoption of militant methods in order to win political rights. On November 13, 1913, British suffragist Emmeline Pankhurst (1858-1928) addressed an audience of Americans at a meeting of the Connecticut Woman Suffrage Association in Hartford, Connecticut. Then there is the legal situation. He may introduce bills, but he knows himself that he is only registering a pious opinion of a certain number of electors in his constituency; it may be his own; but that pious opinion will never find its way onto the statute book of his country until the government in power, the prime minister and his colleagues, introduces a government measure to carry that reform. This is Emmeline Pankhurst. Human life for us is sacred, but we say if any life is to be sacrificed it shall be ours; we won't do it ourselves, but we will put the enemy in the position where they will have to choose between giving us freedom or giving us death. They would say, "We would be with you if you could succeed but it is absurd for women who are the weaker sex, for women who have not got the control of any large interests, for women who have got very little money, who have peculiar duties as women, which handicaps them extremely - for example, the duty of caring for children - it is absurd for women to think they can ever win their rights by fighting; you had far better give it up and submit because there it is, you have always been subject and you always will be." The first people who were put out of a political meeting for asking questions, were women; they were brutally ill-used; they found themselves in jail before twenty-four hours had expired. Now, I want to say to you who think women cannot succeed, we have brought the government of England to this position, that it has to face this alternative: either women are to be killed or women are to have the vote. Well now, that really became the testing time. All that is changed. At any rate in Great Britain it is a custom, a time-honored one, to ask questions of candidates for parliament and ask questions of members of the government. For racial reasons, for religious reasons, for economic reasons, the majority of the people there do not want home rule at all.
Holbox To Playa Del Carmen,
2436 Oakbrook Ct, Janesville, Wi,
Palisades Tahoe Reggae Festival,
Royal Canin Labrador Senior,
Articles E