SOURCE: “Mrs. Pankhurst,” in Eminent Edwardians, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1980, pp. 131-94.

In the following essay, Brendon offers a historical overview of Pankhurst's life and discusses the role of violence in her life and work.

I

Mrs Emmeline Pankhurst became the most famous and the most notorious woman of her day by means of violence. Violence, after all, was a male prerogative. Its employment by this new Joan of Arc and her Suffragette minions was at once a castrating threat to the lords of humankind and a vile outrage against all notions of feminine propriety. But Mrs Pankhurst's own violence was less striking as a form of political agitation than as a mode of personal dominance. With clenched fists and a fierce tilt of her chin she confessed to a group of intimates, ‘I love fighting!’ The moral force and the evangelistic power of her oratory stemmed from a...