The second person in People of the Century is Emmeline Pankhurst. I thought you might like some of the quotes from the chapter written by Marina Warner, a British writer.
Women were battered in demonstrations and, on hunger strikes, brutally force-fed in prison. When these measures risked taking lives, the famous Cat and Mouse Act was passed ...a dangerously weakened hunger striker would be released and the rearrested when strong enough to continue her sentence......Mrs Pankhurst, age 54 in 1912, went to prison 12 times that year. No wonder she railed, "The militancy of men, through all the centuries, has drenched the word with blood. The militancy of women has harmed no human life save the lives of those who fought the battle of righteousness.
Don't you love victorian rhetoric?
While she was bent on sweeping away the limits of gender, she envisioned society transformed by feminine energies........She wrote, "We want to help women...We want to gain them all the rights and protection that the 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 our time. But we cannot do that unless we have the vote and are recognized as citizens and voices to be listened to........we are here, not because we are lawbreakers; we are here in our efforts to become lawmakers." .........Joan of Arc was the suffragists' mascot. Boadicea their goddess, and Mrs Pankhurst the true inheritor of the armed maidens of heroic legend.
Alice Paul worked with the Pankhursts in 1909/10 and was also jailed and forced fed. She then, in 1910, brought that militancy back home and used those tactics of parades and demonstrations here in the U.S., also being arrested and forced fed, until the suffrage amendment was passed in 1920. She organized the first demonstrations ever held in front of the White House.
