20 - My Own Story by Emmeline Pankhurst

In My Own Story, Emmeline Pankhurst, the renowned British political activist and leader of the suffragette movement, shares her compelling journey in the fight for womens rights. Despite facing significant criticism for her militant approach, her relentless efforts played a pivotal role in securing womens suffrage in Britain. Written and published on the brink of the Great War, Pankhursts autobiography offers an intimate glimpse into her experiences and the challenges she faced along the way. (Summary by Petra)

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Book three, Chapter seven of My Own Story by Emmeline Pankhurst.
This LibriVox recording is in the public domain recording by
k Hand The Women's Revolution, Chapter seven. The two months
of the summer of nineteen thirteen which were spent with
my daughter in Paris, were almost the last days of
peace and rest I have been destined since to enjoy.

(00:21):
I spent the days or some hours of them, in
the initial preparation of this volume, because it seemed to
me that I had a duty to perform in giving
to the world my own plain statement of the events
which have led up to the Women's Revolution in England.
Other histories of the militant movement will undoubtedly be written
in time succumb when in all constitutional countries of the
world women's votes will be as universally accepted as men's

(00:41):
votes are now, When men and women occupy the world
of industry on equal terms as co workers rather than
as cutthroat competitors. When in a word, all the dreadful
and criminal discriminations which exist now between the sexes are abolished,
as they must one day be abolished, the historian will
be able to sit down in leisurely fashion and do
full justice to the strange story of how the women
of England took up arms against the blind and obstinate

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government of England and fought their way to political freedom.
I should like to live long enough to read such
a history calmly considered, carefully analyzed, conscientiously set forth. It
will be a better book to read than this one,
written as it were, in camp between battles. But perhaps
this one, hastily prepared as it has been, will give
the reader of the future a clearer impression of the
strenuousness and the desperation of the conflict, and also something

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of the heretofore undreamed of courage and fighting strength of
women who, having learned the joy of battle, lose all
sense of fear and continue their struggle up to and
pass the gates of death, never flinching at any step
of the way. Every step since that meeting in October
nineteen twelve, when we definitely declared war on the peace
of England, has been beset with danger and difficulty, often

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unexpected and undeclared. In October nineteen thirteen, I sailed in
the French liner La Provence for my third visit to
the United States. My intention was published in the public
press of England, France and America. Of concealment of my
purpose was made, and in fact my departure was witnessed
by two men from Scotland yard. Some hints had reached
my ear that an attempt would be made by immigration

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officers at the port of New York to exclude me
as an undesirable alien, but I gave little credit to
these reports. American friends wrote and cabled encouraging words, and
so I passed my time aboard ship quite peacefully, working
part of the time resting also against the fatigue, always
attendant on a lecture tour. When I came to Anchor
in the Harbor of New York on October twenty sixth, there,

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to my astonishment, the immigration authorities notified me that I
was ordered to Ellis Island to appear before a board
of special inquiry. The officers who served the order of
detention did so with all courtesy, even with a certain
air of reluctance. They allowed my American traveling companion, Missus
Rita Chilldoor, to accompany me to the island. But no one,
not even the solicitor sent by Missus O. H. P.

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Belmont to defend me was permitted to attend to me
before the Board of Special Inquiry. I went before these
three men quite alone, as many a poor friendless one
without any of my resources, has had to appear. The
moment of my entrance to the room, I knew that
extraordinary means had been employed against me. For on the
desk behind which the board sat I saw a complete
dossier of my case in English legal papers. These papers

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may have been supplied by Scotland Yard, or they may
have been supplied by the government. I cannot tell. Of course,
they sufficed to convince the Board of Special Inquiry that
I was a person of doubtful character, to say the
least of it, and that I was informed that I
should have to be detained until the higher authorities at
Washington examined my case. Everything was done to make me comfortable,
the rooms of the Commissioner of Immigration being turned over

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to me and my companion. The very men who found
me guilty of moral obloquy, something of which no British
jury has ever yet accused me, put themselves out in
a number of ways to make my detention agreeable. I
was escorted all over the island and through the quarters
assigned to detained immigrants whose right to land in the
United States is in question. The huge dining rooms, the
spotless kitchens, and the admirably varied bill of fare interested

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and impressed me. Nothing like them exists in any English institution.
I remained at Ellis Island two and a half days,
long enough for the Commissioner of Emigration at Washington to
take my case to the President, who instantly ordered my release.
Whoever was responsible for my detention entirely overlooked the advertising
value of the incident. My lecture tour was made much
more successful for it, and I embarked for England late

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November with a very generous American contribution to our war chest,
a contribution alas that I was not permitted to deliver
in person. The night before the white star liner Majestic
reached Plymouth, a wireless message from headquarters informed me that
the government had decided to arrest me on my arrival.
The arrest was made under very dramatic conditions. The next day,
shortly before noon, the steamer came to anchor in the

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Outer Harbor, and we saw at once at the bay
usually so animated with passing vessels had been cleared of
all craft. Far in the distance the tender on which
other occasions had always met the steamer rested at anchor
between two huge gray warships. For a moment or two.
The scene halted, the passengers crowding to the deck rails
in speechless curiosity to see what was to happen next. Suddenly,

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a fisherman's dory, power driven, dashed across the harbor, directly
under the noses of the grim war vessels. Two women,
spray drenched, stood up in the boat, and as it
plowed swiftly past our steamer, the women called out to me,
the cats are here, missus Pankhurst. They're close on you.
Their voices trayed away into the mist, and we heard
no more. Within a minute or two, a frightened ship's
boy appeared on deck and delivered a message from the purser,

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asking me to step down to his office. I answered
that I would certainly do nothing of the kind, And
next the police swarmed out on deck, and I heard
for the fifth time that I was arrested under the
Cat and Mouse Act. They had sept five men from Scotland, yard,
two men from Plymouth, and a wardress from Holloway a
sufficient number it will be allowed to take one woman
from a ship anchor two miles out at sea. Following

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my firm resolve not to assist in any way the
enforcement of the infamous law, I refused to go with
men who thereupon picked me up and carried me to
the waiting police tender. We steamed some miles up the
Cornish coast, the police refusing absolutely to tell me whither
they were conveying me, and finally disembarked at bull Point,
a government landing state closed to the general public. Here
a motor car was waiting, and accompanied by my body

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guard from Scotland Yard in Holloway, I was driven across
Dortmoor to Exeter, where I had a not unendurable imprisonment
and hunger strike of four days. Everyone from the governor
of the prison to the wardresses were openly sympathetic and kind,
and I was told by one confidential official that they
kept me only because they had orders to do so
until after the Great Meeting at Empress Theater, Earl's Court, London,

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which had been arranged as a welcome home for me.
The meeting was held on the Sunday night following my arrest,
and the great sum of fifteen thousand pounds was poured
into the coffers of militancy. This included the four thousand,
five hundred pounds which had been collected during my American tour.
Several days after my release from Exeter, I went openly
to Paris to confer with my daughter on matters relating

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to the campaign about to open, returning to attend a
WSPU meeting on the day before my license expired. Nevertheless,
the boat trained carriage in which I traveled with my
doctor and nurse was invaded at Dovertown by two detectives
who told me to consider myself under arrest. We were
making tea when the men entered, but this way immediately
threw out of the window. Because a hunger strike always
began at the instant of arrest, we never compromised it

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all but resisted from the very first moment of attack.
The reason for this uncalled for arrest at Dover was
the fear of the part of the police of the
body guard of women just then organized for the express
purpose of resisting attempts to arrest me, that the police
as well as the government were afraid to resist encountering
women who were not afraid to fight. We had abundant testimony.

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We certainly had it on this occasion. For knowing that
the bodyguard was waiting at Victoria Station, the authorities had
cut off all approaches to the arrival platform and the
place was guarded by a battalion of police. Not a
passenger was permitted to leave a carriage until I had
been carried across the arrival platform between a double line
of police and detectives and thrown into a forty horse
power motor car, guarded within by two plane clothesmen in

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a wardress, and without by three more policemen. Around this
motor car were twelve taxicabs filled with plainclothes men, four
to each vehicle and three guarding the outside, Not to
mention the driver, who was also in the eploy of
the police department. Detectives on motorcycles were on guard at
various points, ready to follow any rescuing taxicab arrived at Hollowai.
I was again lifted from the car and taken to

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the reception room and placed on the floor in a
state of great exhaustion. When the doctor came in and
told me curtly to stand up. I was obliged to
tell him that I could not stand. I utterly refused
to be examined, saying that I was resolved to make
the government assume full responsibility for my condition. I refused
to be examined by you or any other prison doctor,
I declared, and I do this as a protest against
my sentence and against my being here at all. I

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no longer recognize a prison doctor as a medical man
in the proper sense of the word. I have withdrawn my
cassette to be governed by the rules of prison. I
refuse to recognize the authority of any prison official, and
I therefore make it impossible for the government to carry
out the sentence they have imposed upon me. War dresses
were summoned. I was placed in an invalid chair and
so carried up three flights of stairs and put into
an unwarmed cell with a concrete floor. Refusing to leave

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the chair, I was lifted out and placed on the bed,
where I lay all night without removing my coat or
loosening my garments. It was on a Saturday that the
arrest had been made, and I was kept in prison
until the following Wednesday morning. During all that time, no
food or water passed my lips. And I added to
this the sleep strike, which means that as far as
was humanly possible, I refused all sleep and rest. For
two nights, I sat or lay on the concrete floor,

(09:15):
resolutely refusing the oft repeated offers of medical examination. You
are not a doctor, I told the man. You are
a government torturer, and all you want to do is
satisfy yourself that I am not quite ready to die.
The doctor and new man says my last imprisonment flushed
and looked extremely unhappy. I suppose you do think that,
he mumbled. On Tuesday morning, the governor came to look
at me, and no doubt I presented by that time

(09:36):
a fairly bad appearance. At least I gathered as much
from the alarmed expression of the wardress who accompanied him
to the governor. I made a simple announcement that I
was ready to leave prison, and that I intended to
leave very soon, dead or alive. I told him that
from that moment I should not even rest on the
concrete floor, but should walk my cell until I was
released or until I died from exhaustion. All day I
kept to this resolution. Pacing up and down the narrow cell,

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many times stumbling and falling, until the doctor came in
at evening to tell me I was ordered released on
the following morning. Then I loosened my gown and lay down,
absolutely spent, and fell almost instantly into a deathlike sleep.
The next morning a motor ambulance took me to the
King's Way headquarters, where a hospital room had been arranged
for my reception. The two imprisonments in less than ten
days had made terrible drafts on my strength, and the

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coldness of the holloway cell had brought on a painful neuralgia.
It was many days before I recovered even a tithe
of my usual health. These two arrests resulted exactly as
a government should have known that they would result in
a great outbreak of fresh militancy. As soon as the
news spread that I had been taken at Plymouth, a
huge fire broke out in the timber yards at Richmond Walk, Davenport,

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and an acre and a half of timber beside a
pleasant fare and a scenic railway adjacent to the value
of thousands of pounds was destroyed. No one ever discovered
the cause of the fire. The grays that ever occurred
in the neighborhood, but tied to one of the railings
was a copy of The Suffragette, and to another railing
two cards, on one of which was written a message
to the government, how dare you arrest missus Pankhurst and
allow Sir Edward Carson and mister bonar Law to go free?

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The second card board the rards are replied to the
torture Missus Pankhurst and her cowardly arrest at Plymouth. Besides
this fire, which wasted fiercely from midnight until dawn, a
large unoccupied house at Bristol was destroyed by fire. A
fine residence in Scotland also unoccupied, badly damaged by fire.
Saint Anne's Church in a suburb of Liverpool was partly destroyed,
and many pillar boxes in London, Edinburgh, Derby and other

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cities were fired. In churches all over the Kingdom are
women created consternation by interpolating into the services reverently spoken
prayers for prisoners who are suffering for conscience sake. The
reader has no doubt heard of these interruptions, and if so,
he has read a brawling, shrieking women breaking into the
sanctity of religious services and creating riot in the house
of God. I think the readers should know exactly what

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does happen when militants, who are usually religious women, interrupt
church services. On the Sunday when I was in Holloway
following my arrest at Dover, certain women attending the afternoon
service at Westminster Abbey chanted in concert the following prayer,
God save Emmeline pay cursed, Help us with thy love
and strength to guard her. Spare those who suffer for
conscience sake, hear us when we pray to thee. They

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had hardly finished this prayer when vergers fell upon them
and with great violence hustled them out of the abbey.
One kneeling man, who happened to be near one of
the women, forgot his Christian intercessions long enough to beat
her in the face with his fists before the vergers came.
Similar scenes have taken place in churches and cathedrals throughout
England and Scotland, and in many instances the women have
been most barbarously treated by vergers and members of the congregations.

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In other cases, the women not only have been left unmolested,
but have been allowed to finish their prayers amid deep
and sympathetic silence. Some clergymen have even been brave enough
to add irreverent amen to these prayers for women in prison,
and it has happened that clergymen have voluntarily offered prayers
for us. The Church as a whole, however, has undoubtedly
failed to live up to its obligation to demand justice
for women and to protect against the torture of forcible feeding.

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During the year just closing, we sent many deputations to
church authorities, the bishops, one after another. Having been vised
visited in this manner, some of the bishops, including the
reactionary Archbishop of Canterbury, refused to accord the desired interview,
and when that happened, the answer of the deputation was
to sit on the doorstep of the episcopal residence until
surrender followed, as it invariably did as Holloway Jail is

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within its diocese. The Bishop of London was visited by
the WSPU and the demand was made that the Bishop
himself should witness forcible feeding in order to realize the
horror of the preze heating. He did visit two of
the tortured women, but he did not see them forcibly fed,
and when he came out, he gave the public an
account of his interview with them, which was, in effect
the government's version of the facts. The WSPU was naturally indignant,

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while all the government's friends hailed the Bishop as a
supporter of the policy of torture. Only those who have
suffered the pain and agony, not to speak of the
moral humiliation of forcible feeding, can realize the depths of
the inquiry which the Bishop of London was maneuvered by
the government to whitewash. It may be true, as the
Bishop comforted himself by saying that the victims of forcible

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feeding suffered the more because they struggled under the process. But,
as Mary Richardson wrote in The Suffragette, to expect a
victim not to struggle was the same as telling her
that she would suffer less if she did not jump
on getting a cinder in her eye. The principle, declared
Missus Richardson, is the same. One struggles because the pain
is excruciating, and the nerves of the eyes and face
are so tortured that it would be impossible not to

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resist to the uttermost One struggles also because of another reason,
a moral reason for forcible feeding is an immoral assault
as well as a painful physical one, and to remain
passive under it would give one the feeling of sin,
the sin of a concurrence. One's whole nature is revolted.
Resistance is therefore inevitable. I think it proper here to

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explain also the policy upon which we embarked in nineteen
fourteen of taking our cause directly to the King. The
reader has perhaps heard of suffragette insults to King George
and Queen Mary, and it is but just that he
should hear a direct account of how these insults are offered.
Several isolated attempts had been made to present petitions to
the King, once when he was on his way to

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Westminster to open Parliament, and again on an occasion when
he paid a visit to Bristol. On the latter occasion,
the women who tried to present the petition was assaulted
by one of the King's equerries, who struck her with
the flat of his sword. We finally resolved on the
policy of direct petition to the King because we had
been forced to abandon all hope of successful petitioning to
his ministers tricked and betrayed at every turn by the

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Liberal government. We announced that we would not again put
even a pretense of confidence in them. We would carry
our demand for justice to the throne of the Monarch.
Late in December nineteen thirteen, while I was in prison
for the second time since my return to England, a
great gala performance was given at Covenant Garden, an opera
being the Jeen des Arc of Raymond Rose. The King

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and Queen in the entire court were present and the
scene was expected to be one of unusual brilliants. Our
women took advantage of the occasion to make one of
the most successful demonstrations of the year. A box was
secured directly opposite the Royal Box, and this was occupied
by three women beautifully gowned. On entering, they had managed
without attracting the slightest attention to Locke and barricade the door,

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and at the close of the first act, as soon
as the orchestra had disappeared, the woman stood up and
one of them, with the aid of a megaphote, addressed
the King, calling attention to the impressive scenes on the stage.
The speaker told the King that women were today fighting
as Joan of arc fought centuries ago for human liberty,
and that they, like the Maid of Orleans, were being
tortured and done to death in the name of the King,

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in the name of the Church, and with the full
knowledge and responsibility of established government. At this very hour,
the leader of these fighters in the army of liberty
was being held in prison and tortured by the King's authority.
The vast audience was thrown into a panic of excitement
and horror, and amid a perfect turmoil of cries and adjurations,
the door of the box was finally broken down, and
the women ejected. As soon as they had left the house.

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Others of our women, to the number of forty or more,
who had been sitting quietly in an upper gallery, rose
to their feet and reigned suffrage literature on the heads
of the audience below. It was fully three quarters of
an hour before the excitement subsided and the singers could
go on with the opera. The sensation caused by this
direct address to royalty in space wired us to make
a second attempt to arouse the King's conscience, and early

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in January, as soon as Parliament reassembled, we announced that
I would personally lead a deputation to Buckingham Palace. The
plan was welcomed with enthusiasm by our members, and a
very large number of women volunteered to join the deputation,
which was intended to make a protest against three things,
the continued disenfranchisement of women, the forcible feeding, and the
cat and mouse torture of those who were fighting against

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this injustice, in the scandalous manner in which the Government,
while coercing and torturing militant women, were allowing perfect freedom
to the men opponents of a home rule in Ireland,
men who openly announced that they were about to carry
out a policy not merely of attacking property, but of
destroying human life. I wrote a letter to the King
conveying to him the respectful and loyal request of the
Women's Social and Political Union that Your Majesty will give

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audience to a deputation of women. The letter went on
the deputation desire to submit to Your Majesty in person
their claim to the Parliamentary vote, which is the only
protection against the grievous industrial and social wrongs that women suffer,
is the symbol and guarantee of British citizenship and means
the recognition of women's equal dignity and worth as members
of our great empire. The demputation will further lay before

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Your Majesty a complaint of the medieval and barbarous methods
of torture, whereby Your Majesty's ministers are seeking to repress
women's revolt against the deprivation of citizen rights, a revolt
as noble and glorious in its spirit and purpose as
any of those past struggles for liberty which are the
pride of the British race. We have been told by
the unthinking, by those who are heedless of the constitutional
principles upon which is based our loyal request for an

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audience of Your Majesty in person, that our conversation should
be with Your Majesty's ministers. We repudiate this suggestion. In
the first place, it would not only be repugnant to
our womanly sense of dignity, but it would be absurd
and futile for us to interview the very men against
whom we bring the accusations of between the women's cause
and torturing those who fight for that cause. In the
second place, we will not be referred to, and we

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will not recognize the authority of men, who, in our
eyes have no legal or constitutional standing in the matter,
because we have not been consulted as to their election
to Parliament, nor as to their appointment as ministers of
the Crown. I then cited as a precedent in support
of our claim to be heard by the King in
person the case of the deputation of Irish Catholics, which
in the year seventeen ninety three was received by King

(19:11):
George the Third in person. I further said, our right
as women to be heard and to be aided by
your Majesty is far stronger than any such right possessed
by men, because it is based upon our lack of
every other constitutional means of securing the redress of our grievances.
We have no power to vote for members of Parliament,
and therefore for us there is no House of Commons.
We have no voice in the House of Lords. But
we have a king, and to him we make our appeal.

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Constitutionally speaking, we are as voteless women living in the
time when the power of the monarchy was unlimited, and
that old time which is passed for men though not
for women. Men who were oppressed had recourse to the King,
the source of power, of justice and of reform. Precisely
in the same way we now claim the right to
come to the foot of the throne and to make
of the King in person our demand for the redress
of the political grievance which we cannot and will not

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any longer tolerate because women are voteless. There are in
our midst today sweated workers, white slaves, outraged children, and
innocent mothers and their babies stricken by horrible disease. It
is for the sake and in the cause of these
unhappy members of our sex, that we ask of your
Majesty the audience that we are confident will be granted
to us. It was some days before we had the

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answer to this letter, and in the meantime some uncommonly
stirring and painful occurrences attracted the public attention. End of
Book three, Chapter seven,